How to Cite

Hambrick, David Z.: Expertise, in Sternberg, Robert J. and Funke, Joachim (Eds.): The Psychology of Human Thought: An Introduction, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2019, p. 235–253. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.470.c6676

License (Chapter)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Identifiers (Book)

ISBN 978-3-947732-33-3 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-947732-34-0 (Softcover)
ISBN 978-3-947732-35-7 (Hardcover)

Published

07/31/2019

Authors

David Z. Hambrick

Expertise

Scientific research on human expertise focuses on the nature and origins of complex skill in domains such as music, sports, and games. A central question in this area of research is why some people reach a higher level of ultimate performance than do other people in these domains. Research reveals that training history cannot account for all, or even most, of the differences across people in expertise. The practical implication of this finding is that people may require vastly different amounts of training to reach a given level of skill. This chapter describes a multifactorial perspective on expertise, which seeks to identify all factors contributing to individual differences in expertise, including both experiential factors (“nurture”) and basic abilities and capacities (“nature”).