'The evidence is quite clear — a high level of intellectual ability puts a person at a measurable advantage, and the higher the better'
By Pat Kelly. A new row has broken out between scientists on the vexatious issue of how far intelligence actually contributes to an individual’s greatness.
Many’s the tutor has repeatedly drilled into their students the conventional wisdom that ‘Greatness is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration’. However new research has challenged that long-established viewpoint and the authors say their results prove that intelligence is indeed the deciding factor.
David Brooks of the New York Times and Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker were two of the main proponents of the concept that intelligence matters little when compared with determination, single-mindedness and good old-fashioned hard graft.
Stung into action by this widely-accepted view, Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University Prof Zach Hambrick and co-author Elizabeth J Meinz have produced a controversial new paper which purports that working memory capacity is the key factor in an individual’s ‘greatness’.
The paper, ‘Limits on the Predictive Power of Domain-Specific Experience and Knowledge in Skilled Performance’, was reported on in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. In the study, Hambrick et al studied several groups of volunteers and found that those with a superior level of working memory capacity out-performed those with lower levels across a range of tasks — regardless of how much experience and knowledge the latter group had.
“David Brooks and Malcolm Gladwell are simply wrong,” said Hambrick. “The evidence is quite clear — a high level of intellectual ability puts a person at a measurable advantage, and the higher the better.”
The tasks put to the volunteers included challenging and complex functions, such as piano sight-reading, explained Hambrick. “While the specialised knowledge that accumulates through practice is the most important ingredient to reach a high level of skill, it is not always sufficient,” he said. “Working memory capacity can still predict performance in complex domains such as music, chess, science, and maybe even in sports that have a substantial mental component, such as golf.
“The jury is still out on whether you can improve your general intelligence,” he concluded. “We hold out hope that cognitive training of some sort may produce these benefits but we have yet to find the ‘magic bullet’.”
The full study can be downloaded via http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/20/5/275.full.
pat.kelly@imt.ie
About Pat Kelly
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