The Secret of Expertise: Talent or Deliberate Practice?

The main purpose of expertise studies is try to understand and explain the characteristics that distinguish people with exceptional or superior skills from other people in a particular domain (Ericsson and Smith 1991: 2). According to theory of deliberate practice, one of the theories put forward to explain expert performance, expert performance is the result of long term efforts by individuals to improve their performance (Ericsson et al 1993: 400). According to this, the individual differences observed in performance between different levels of expertise (eg, novices and masters) or the same group of experts (eg, elite artists) are closely related to the amount of deliberate practice by individuals. So far, the relationship between deliberate practice and expert performance has been studied in many different domains. The main aim of this study is to examine the role of deliberate practice in expertise, by examinig the relationship between deliberate practice and expert performance in the professional domains of expertise such as music, chess and sport