In aristocracy sport, what distinguishes the best from the likewise rans? A new meta-assay inPerspectives on Psychological Sciencelooks at all the relevant data to see whether the most important factor is an athlete's corporeality of accumulated "deliberate practice" – that is, practise that's designed, through feedback and other methods, to meliorate performance. In fact, the new assay shows that differences in amount of do practise not explain performance levels among elite athletes. At sub-elite levels, it's a relevant factor, but by no means the nigh important.

The importance of deliberate practice for top level performance in sport and other domains, such as music and chess, was famously put forwards by Anders Ericsson, the psychologist whose research has been distorted into the mythical thought that achieving greatness depends on completing at least x,000 hours of practice. Ericsson has actually never claimed that elite performance tin can be accomplished by anyone who puts in plenty do, as suggested past some popular psychology writers. Merely he and his colleagues have claimed, based on their findings, that "individual differences in ultimate [top flight] performance tin can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of do." In other words, they proposed that at elite standards, it is the competitors who spend more time honing their skills who will commonly perform at the highest levels.

To test this claim in the context of sport, Brooke Macnamara and her colleagues scoured the literature bachelor up to 2014, and they establish relevant findings from 34 published and unpublished studies, involving the do habits and performance levels of 2765 athletes across various sports including football, volleyball, hockey, swimming and running.

They plant that at the aristocracy level, amount of exercise was not related to performance (in statistical terms it explained less than one per cent of variance in performance). This makes intuitive sense – about professional athletes in the summit echelons of their sport practice exhaustively through their careers. Instead of amount of practice fourth dimension, what likely separates them are physiological differences influenced by their genetic makeup, as well as circuitous psychological factors, such equally their personality and confidence. Also, competition experience and time spent in play activities might as well be relevant, the researchers suggested.

At sub-elite levels, amount of past and nowadays deliberate practice was relevant to operation, accounting for 19 per cent of the variance in sports operation – an of import factor, then, but past no means the only or virtually important factor. This basic finding applied regardless of whether the researchers focused on team or individual sports, or ball vs. not-ball sports. Another related finding was that more good sport performers did non tend to have started their sport at an earlier historic period.

The researchers said their results propose that "deliberate practice is ane gene that contributes to performance differences beyond a wide range of skills [but] it may not contribute to performance differences at the highest levels of skill."

The new findings add together to earlier research into chess players and musicians, that also called into question the importance of deliberate practice. However, in a rejoinder to the new meta-assay, published in the same periodical issue, Ericsson argues that Macnamara and her colleagues used too broad a definition of "deliberate practice" to include "virtually any type of sport-specific activity, such as group activities, watching games on television, and even play and competitions". He says that his claims about the importance of deliberate do to elite performance refer to a much more than specific subset of activities: "individualized practice with grooming tasks (selected by a supervising instructor) with a clear performance goal and immediate informative feedback."

As the fence rumbles on, i message that comes through from this new meta-assay is how so much speculation and argument is based on then lilliputian actual concrete evidence. To put things in perspective, the combined inquiry into the office of deliberate practice in elite sport amounts to data from just 228 athletes, and that's using the definition of deliberate practise that Ericsson claims is besides broad.

Macnamara and her colleagues end with a call for more inquiry, including studies that expect beyond the relevance of deliberate practice to consider other factors: "scientists must depict not only from research on skill acquisition and expertise but likewise from research on cognitive ability, personality, learning, behavioural genetics, and research inside the operation domain (east.chiliad. sports science). This try will shed new light on the origins of expertise."

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 Macnamara, B., Moreau, D., & Hambrick, D. (2016). The Relationship Between Deliberate Do and Functioning in Sports: A Meta-Analysis Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11 (3), 333-350 DOI: 10.1177/1745691616635591

—further reading—
Exploding the x,000 hours myth – information technology's no guarantee for greatness
Musical ability – is it all just practise?

Mail written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Assimilate.

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