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Overstating the Role of Environmental Factors in Success: A Cautionary Note
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Abstract
Several currently popular areas of research—brain training, mindset, grit, deliberate practice, and the bilingual advantage—are premised on the idea that environmental factors are the overwhelming determinants of success in real-world pursuits. Here, we describe the major claims from each of these areas of research, before discussing evidence for these claims, with a particular focus on meta-analyses. We then suggest that overemphasizing the malleability of abilities and other traits can have negative consequences for individuals, science, and society. We conclude with a call for balanced appraisals of the available evidence concerning this issue, to reflect current scientific discrepancies, and thereby enable informed individual decisions and collective policies.
Although growing up in stressful conditions can undermine mental abilities, people in harsh environments may develop intact, or even enhanced, social and cognitive abilities for solving problems in high‐adversity contexts (i.e., ‘hidden talents’). We examine whether childhood and current exposure to violence are associated with memory (number of learning rounds needed to memorize relations between items) and reasoning performance (accuracy in deducing a novel relation) on transitive inference tasks involving both violence‐relevant and violence‐neutral social information (social dominance vs. chronological age). We hypothesized that individuals who had more exposure to violence would perform better than individuals with less exposure on the social dominance task. We tested this hypothesis in a preregistered study in 100 Dutch college students and 99 Dutch community participants. We found that more exposure to violence was associated with lower overall memory performance, but not with reasoning performance. However, the main effects of current (but not childhood) exposure to violence on memory were qualified by significant interaction effects. More current exposure to neighborhood violence was associated with worse memory for age relations, but not with memory for dominance relations. By contrast, more current personal involvement in violence was associated with better memory for dominance relations, but not with memory for age relations. These results suggest incomplete transfer of learning and memory abilities across contents. This pattern of results, which supports a combination of deficits and “hidden talents,” is striking in relation to the broader developmental literature, which has nearly exclusively reported deficits in people from harsh conditions.
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Because of enduring experience of managing two languages, bilinguals have been argued to develop superior executive functioning compared with monolinguals. Despite extensive investigation, there is, however, no consensus regarding the existence of such a bilingual advantage. Here we synthesized comparisons of bilinguals’ and monolinguals’ performance in six executive domains using 891 effect sizes from 152 studies on adults. We also included unpublished data, and considered the potential influence of a number of study-, task-, and participant-related variables. Before correcting estimates for observed publication bias, our analyses revealed a very small bilingual advantage for inhibition, shifting, and working memory, but not for monitoring or attention. No evidence for a bilingual advantage remained after correcting for bias. For verbal fluency, our analyses indicated a small bilingual disadvantage, possibly reflecting less exposure for each individual language when using two languages in a balanced manner. Moreover, moderator analyses did not support theoretical presuppositions concerning the bilingual advantage. We conclude that the available evidence does not provide systematic support for the widely held notion that bilingualism is associated with benefits in cognitive control functions in adults.
As a result of considerable potential scientific and societal implications, the possibility of enhancing
cognitive ability by training has been one of the most influential topics of cognitive psychology in the
last two decades. However, substantial research into the psychology of expertise and a recent series of
meta-analytic reviews have suggested that various types of cognitive training (e.g., working memory
training) benefit performance only in the trained tasks. The lack of skill generalization from one domain
to different ones—that is, far transfer— has been documented in various fields of research such as
working memory training, music, brain training, and chess. Video game training is another activity that
has been claimed by many researchers to foster a broad range of cognitive abilities such as visual
processing, attention, spatial ability, and cognitive control. We tested these claims with three randomeffects
meta-analytic models. The first meta-analysis (k � 310) examined the correlation between video
game skill and cognitive ability. The second meta-analysis (k � 315) dealt with the differences between
video game players and nonplayers in cognitive ability. The third meta-analysis (k � 359) investigated
the effects of video game training on participants’ cognitive ability. Small or null overall effect sizes were
found in all three models. These outcomes show that overall cognitive ability and video game skill are
only weakly related. Importantly, we found no evidence of a causal relationship between playing video
games and enhanced cognitive ability. Video game training thus represents no exception to the general
difficulty of obtaining far transfer.
In 2014, two groups of scientists published open letters on the efficacy of brain-training interventions, or “brain games,” for improving cognition. The first letter, a consensus statement from an international group of more than 70 scientists, claimed that brain games do not provide a scientifically grounded way to improve cognitive functioning or to stave off cognitive decline. Several months later, an international group of 133 scientists and practitioners countered that the literature is replete with demonstrations of the benefits of brain training for a wide variety of cognitive and everyday activities. How could two teams of scientists examine the same literature and come to conflicting “consensus” views about the effectiveness of brain training?
In part, the disagreement might result from different standards used when evaluating the evidence. To date, the field has lacked a comprehensive review of the brain-training literature, one that examines both the quantity and the quality of the evidence according to a well-defined set of best practices. This article provides such a review, focusing exclusively on the use of cognitive tasks or games as a means to enhance performance on other tasks. We specify and justify a set of best practices for such brain-training interventions and then use those standards to evaluate all of the published peer-reviewed intervention studies cited on the websites of leading brain-training companies listed on Cognitive Training Data ( www.cognitivetrainingdata.org ), the site hosting the open letter from brain-training proponents. These citations presumably represent the evidence that best supports the claims of effectiveness.
Based on this examination, we find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance. We also find that many of the published intervention studies had major shortcomings in design or analysis that preclude definitive conclusions about the efficacy of training, and that none of the cited studies conformed to all of the best practices we identify as essential to drawing clear conclusions about the benefits of brain training for everyday activities. We conclude with detailed recommendations for scientists, funding agencies, and policymakers that, if adopted, would lead to better evidence regarding the efficacy of brain-training interventions.
Grit has been presented as a higher order personality trait that is highly predictive of both success and performance and distinct from other traits such as conscientiousness. This paper provides a meta-analytic review of the grit literature with a particular focus on the structure of grit and the relation between grit and performance, retention, conscientiousness, cognitive ability, and demographic variables. Our results based on 584 effect sizes from 88 independent samples representing 66,807 individuals indicate that the higher order structure of grit is not confirmed, that grit is only moderately correlated with performance and retention, and that grit is very strongly correlated with conscientiousness. We also find that the perseverance of effort facet has significantly stronger criterion validities than the consistency of interest facet and that perseverance of effort explains variance in academic performance even after controlling for conscientiousness. In aggregate our results suggest that interventions designed to enhance grit may only have weak effects on performance and success, that the construct validity of grit is in question, and that the primary utility of the grit construct may lie in the perseverance facet.
Grit-perseverance and passion for long-term goals-has been shown to be a significant predictor of academic success, even after controlling for other personality factors. Here, for the first time, we use a U.K.-representative sample and a genetically sensitive design to unpack the etiology of Grit and its prediction of academic achievement in comparison to well-established personality traits. For 4,642 16-year-olds (2,321 twin pairs), we used the Grit-S scale (perseverance of effort and consistency of interest), along with the Big Five personality traits, to predict grades on the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) exams, which are administered U.K.-wide at the end of compulsory education. Twin analyses of Grit perseverance yielded a heritability estimate of 37% (20% for consistency of interest) and no evidence for shared environmental influence. Personality, primarily conscientiousness, predicts about 6% of the variance in GCSE grades, but Grit adds little to this prediction. Moreover, multivariate twin analyses showed that roughly two-thirds of the GCSE prediction is mediated genetically. Grit perseverance of effort and Big Five conscientiousness are to a large extent the same trait both phenotypically (r = 0.53) and genetically (genetic correlation = 0.86). We conclude that the etiology of Grit is highly similar to other personality traits, not only in showing substantial genetic influence but also in showing no influence of shared environmental factors. Personality significantly predicts academic achievement, but Grit adds little phenotypically or genetically to the prediction of academic achievement beyond traditional personality factors, especially conscientiousness. (PsycINFO Database Record
Other than talent and opportunity, what makes some people more successful than others? One important determinant of success is self-control—the capacity to regulate attention, emotion, and behavior in the presence of temptation. A second important determinant of success is grit—the tenacious pursuit of a dominant superordinate goal despite setbacks. Self-control and grit are strongly correlated, but not perfectly so. This means that some people with high levels of self-control capably handle temptations but do not consistently pursue a dominant goal. Likewise, some exceptional achievers are prodigiously gritty but succumb to temptations in domains other than their chosen life passion. Understanding how goals are hierarchically organized clarifies how self-control and grit are related but distinct: Self-control entails aligning actions with any valued goal despite momentarily more-alluring alternatives; grit, in contrast, entails having and working assiduously toward a single challenging superordinate goal through thick and thin, on a timescale of years or even decades. Although both self-control and grit entail aligning actions with intentions, they operate in different ways and over different timescales. This hierarchical goal framework suggests novel directions for basic and applied research on success.
The hypothesis that managing two languages enhances general executive functioning is examined. More than 80% of the tests for bilingual advantages conducted after 2011 yield null results and those resulting in significant bilingual advantages tend to have small sample sizes. Some published studies reporting significant bilingual advantages arguably produce no group differences if more appropriate tests of the critical interaction or more appropriate baselines are used. Some positive findings are likely to have been caused by failures to match on demographic factors and others have yielded significant differences only with a questionable use of the analysis-of-covariance to "control" for these factors. Although direct replications are under-utilized, when they are, the results of seminal studies cannot be reproduced. Furthermore, most studies testing for bilingual advantages use measures and tasks that do not have demonstrated convergent validity and any significant differences in performance may reflect task-specific mechanism and not domain-free executive functions (EF) abilities. Brain imaging studies have made only a modest contribution to evaluating the bilingual-advantage hypothesis, principally because the neural differences do not align with the behavioral differences and also because the neural measures are often ambiguous with respect to whether greater magnitudes should cause increases or decreases in performance. The cumulative effect of confirmation biases and common research practices has either created a belief in a phenomenon that does not exist or has inflated the frequency and effect size of a genuine phenomenon that is likely to emerge only infrequently and in restricted and undetermined circumstances.
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Deliberate practice (DP) is a task-specific structured training activity that plays a key role in understanding skill acquisition and explaining individual differences in expert performance. Relevant activities that qualify as DP have to be identified in every domain. For example, for training in classical music, solitary practice is a typical training activity during skill acquisition. To date, no meta-analysis on the quantifiable effect size of deliberate practice on attained performance in music has been conducted. Yet the identification of a quantifiable effect size could be relevant for the current discussion on the role of various factors on individual difference in musical achievement. Furthermore, a research synthesis might enable new computational approaches to musical development. Here we present the first meta-analysis on the role of deliberate practice in the domain of musical performance. A final sample size of 13 studies (total N = 788) was carefully extracted to satisfy the following criteria: reported durations of task-specific accumulated practice as predictor variables and objectively assessed musical achievement as the target variable. We identified an aggregated effect size of rc = 0.61; 95% CI [0.54, 0.67] for the relationship between task-relevant practice (which by definition includes DP) and musical achievement. Our results corroborate the central role of long-term (deliberate) practice for explaining expert performance in music.
More than 20 years ago, researchers proposed that individual differences in performance in such domains as music, sports, and games largely reflect individual differences in amount of deliberate practice, which was defined as engagement in structured activities created specifically to improve performance in a domain. This view is a frequent topic of popular-science writing-but is it supported by empirical evidence? To answer this question, we conducted a meta-analysis covering all major domains in which deliberate practice has been investigated. We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.
Recent randomized experiments have found that seemingly “small” social-psychological interventions in education—that is, brief exercises that target students’ thoughts, feelings, and beliefs in and about school—can lead to large gains in student achievement and sharply reduce achievement gaps even months and years later. These interventions do not teach students academic content but instead target students’ psychology, such as their beliefs that they have the potential to improve their intelligence or that they belong and are valued in school. When social-psychological interventions have lasting effects, it can seem surprising and even “magical,” leading people either to think of them as quick fixes to complicated problems or to consider them unworthy of serious consideration. The present article discourages both responses. It reviews the theoretical basis of several prominent social-psychological interventions and emphasizes that they have lasting effects because they target students’ subjective experiences in school, because they use persuasive yet stealthy methods for conveying psychological ideas, and because they tap into recursive processes present in educational environments. By understanding psychological interventions as powerful but context-dependent tools, educational researchers will be better equipped to take them to scale. This review concludes by discussing challenges to scaling psychological interventions and how these challenges may be overcome.
It has been suggested that working memory training programs are effective both as treatments for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other cognitive disorders in children and as a tool to improve cognitive ability and scholastic attainment in typically developing children and adults. However, effects across studies appear to be variable, and a systematic meta-analytic review was undertaken. To be included in the review, studies had to be randomized controlled trials or quasi-experiments without randomization, have a treatment, and have either a treated group or an untreated control group. Twenty-three studies with 30 group comparisons met the criteria for inclusion. The studies included involved clinical samples and samples of typically developing children and adults. Meta-analyses indicated that the programs produced reliable short-term improvements in working memory skills. For verbal working memory, these near-transfer effects were not sustained at follow-up, whereas for visuospatial working memory, limited evidence suggested that such effects might be maintained. More importantly, there was no convincing evidence of the generalization of working memory training to other skills (nonverbal and verbal ability, inhibitory processes in attention, word decoding, and arithmetic). The authors conclude that memory training programs appear to produce short-term, specific training effects that do not generalize. Possible limitations of the review (including age differences in the samples and the variety of different clinical conditions included) are noted. However, current findings cast doubt on both the clinical relevance of working memory training programs and their utility as methods of enhancing cognitive functioning in typically developing children and healthy adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
The theoretical framework presented in this article explains expert performance as the end result of individuals' prolonged efforts to improve performance while negotiating motivational and external constraints. In most domains of expertise, individuals begin in their childhood a regimen of effortful activities (deliberate practice) designed to optimize improvement. Individual differences, even among elite performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice. Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 yrs. Analysis of expert performance provides unique evidence on the potential and limits of extreme environmental adaptation and learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The importance of intellectual talent to achievement in all professional domains is well established, but less is known about other individual differences that predict success. The authors tested the importance of 1 noncognitive trait: grit. Defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals, grit accounted for an average of 4% of the variance in success outcomes, including educational attainment among 2 samples of adults (N = 1,545 and N = 690), grade point average among Ivy League undergraduates (N = 138), retention in 2 classes of United States Military Academy, West Point, cadets (N = 1,218 and N = 1,308), and ranking in the National Spelling Bee (N = 175). Grit did not relate positively to IQ but was highly correlated with Big Five Conscientiousness. Grit nonetheless demonstrated incremental predictive validity of success measures over and beyond IQ and conscientiousness. Collectively, these findings suggest that the achievement of difficult goals entails not only talent but also the sustained and focused application of talent over time.
Fluid intelligence (Gf) refers to the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge. Gf is critical for a wide variety of cognitive tasks, and it is considered one of the most important factors in learning. Moreover, Gf is closely related to professional and educational success, especially in complex and demanding environments. Although performance on tests of Gf can be improved through direct practice on the tests themselves, there is no evidence that training on any other regimen yields increased Gf in adults. Furthermore, there is a long history of research into cognitive training showing that, although performance on trained tasks can increase dramatically, transfer of this learning to other tasks remains poor. Here, we present evidence for transfer from training on a demanding working memory task to measures of Gf. This transfer results even though the trained task is entirely different from the intelligence test itself. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the extent of gain in intelligence critically depends on the amount of training: the more training, the more improvement in Gf. That is, the training effect is dosage-dependent. Thus, in contrast to many previous studies, we conclude that it is possible to improve Gf without practicing the testing tasks themselves, opening a wide range of applications.
• cognitive training
• transfer
• individual differences
• executive processes
• control processes
Mind-sets (aka implicit theories) are beliefs about the nature of human attributes (e.g., intelligence). The theory holds that individuals with growth mind-sets (beliefs that attributes are malleable with effort) enjoy many positive outcomes—including higher academic achievement—while their peers who have fixed mind-sets experience negative outcomes. Given this relationship, interventions designed to increase students’ growth mind-sets—thereby increasing their academic achievement—have been implemented in schools around the world. In our first meta-analysis (k = 273, N = 365,915), we examined the strength of the relationship between mind-set and academic achievement and potential moderating factors. In our second meta-analysis (k = 43, N = 57,155), we examined the effectiveness of mind-set interventions on academic achievement and potential moderating factors. Overall effects were weak for both meta-analyses. However, some results supported specific tenets of the theory, namely, that students with low socioeconomic status or who are academically at risk might benefit from mind-set interventions.
Why are some people more skilled in complex domains than other people? According to one prominent view, individual differences in performance largely reflect individual differences in accumulated amount of deliberate practice. Here, we investigated the relationship between deliberate practice and performance in sports. Overall, deliberate practice accounted for 18% of the variance in sports performance. However, the contribution differed depending on skill level. Most important, deliberate practice accounted for only 1% of the variance in performance among elite-level performers. This finding is inconsistent with the claim that deliberate practice accounts for performance differences even among elite performers. Another major finding was that athletes who reached a high level of skill did not begin their sport earlier in childhood than lower skill athletes. This finding challenges the notion that higher skill performers tend to start in a sport at a younger age than lower skill performers. We conclude that to understand the underpinnings of expertise, researchers must investigate contributions of a broad range of factors, taking into account findings from diverse subdisciplines of psychology (e.g., cognitive psychology, personality psychology) and interdisciplinary areas of research (e.g., sports science).
Some researchers in sports attribute elite performance to genetic talent. However, they do not offer complete genetic accounts that specify the causal processes involved in the activation and expression of the dormant genes in DNA during practice in the athletes' development that lead to the emergence of the distinctive physiological and anatomical attributes (innate talent). This article argues that it is possible to account for the development of elite performance among healthy children without recourse to unique talent (genetic endowment)-excepting the innate determinants of body size. This account based on the expert-performance approach shows that the distinctive characteristics of elite performers are adaptations to extended and intense practice activities that selectively activate dormant genes that all healthy children's DNA contain. The expert-performance approach has provided accounts for elite performance in several domains of expertise, such as music, ballet, chess, and medicine. This article shows how the superior performance of athletes can be captured and reproduced under laboratory conditions to discover the mechanisms mediating superior performance. The discovered mechanisms have, so far, been shown to reflect predominantly complex skills and physiological adaptations acquired over years and decades as a result of high daily levels of activities, which were specially designed to improve performance (deliberate practice). The second part of this article describes the development of expert performance in sports as an extended series of stable states of adaptation with associated physiological mechanisms that mediate performance. One section describes how frequent intense engagement in certain types of practice activities is shown to induce physiological strain which cause biochemical changes that stimulate growth and transformation of cells, which in turn leads to associated improved adaptations of physiological systems and the brain. A careful review of the published evidence on the heritability of acquisition of elite sports achievement failed to reveal reproducible evidence for any genetic constraints for attaining elite levels by healthy individuals (excluding, of course, the evidence on body size). The theoretical framework of expert performance explains individual differences in attained performance by the factors that influence the engagement in sustained extended deliberate practice, such as motivation, parental support, and access to the best training environments and teachers. Consequently, the development of expert performance will be primarily constrained by individuals' engagement in deliberate practice and the quality of the available training resources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The present paper summarizes research showing that bilingualism affects linguistic and cognitive performance across the lifespan. The effect on linguistic performance is generally seen as a deficit in which bilingual children control a smaller vocabulary than their monolingual peers and bilingual adults perform more poorly on rapid lexical retrieval tasks. The effect on cognitive performance is to enhance executive functioning and to protect against the decline of executive control in aging. These effects interact to produce a complex pattern regarding the effect of bilingualism on memory performance. Memory tasks based primarily on verbal recall are performed more poorly by bilinguals but memory tasks based primarily on executive control are performed better by bilinguals. Speculations regarding the mechanism responsible for these effects are described.
In the analysis and control framework, Bialystok identifies analysis (representation) and control (selective attention) as components of language processing and has shown that one of these, control, develops earlier in bilingual children than in comparable monolinguals. In the theory of cognitive complexity and control (CCC), Zelazo and Frye argue that preschool children lack the conscious representation and executive functioning needed to solve problems based on conflicting rules. The present study investigates whether the bilingual advantage in control can be found in a nonverbal task, the dimensional change card sort, used by Zelazo and Frye to assess CCC. This problem contains misleading information characteristic of high-control tasks but minimal demands for analysis. Sixty preschool children, half of whom were bilingual, were divided into a group of younger (M = 4,2) and older (M = 5,5) children. All the children were given a test of English proficiency (PPVT-R) and working memory (Visually-Cued Recall Task) to assure comparability of the groups and then administered the dimensional change card sort task and the moving word task. The bilingual children were more advanced than the monolinguals in the solving of experimental problems requiring high levels of control. These results demonstrate the role of attentional control in both these tasks, extends our knowledge about the cognitive development of bilingual children, and provides a means of relating developmental proposals articulated in two different theoretical frameworks, namely, CCC and analysis-control.
As video-game playing has become a ubiquitous activity in today's society, it is worth considering its potential consequences on perceptual and motor skills. It is well known that exposing an organism to an altered visual environment often results in modification of the visual system of the organism. The field of perceptual learning provides many examples of training-induced increases in performance. But perceptual learning, when it occurs, tends to be specific to the trained task; that is, generalization to new tasks is rarely found. Here we show, by contrast, that action-video-game playing is capable of altering a range of visual skills. Four experiments establish changes in different aspects of visual attention in habitual video-game players as compared with non-video-game players. In a fifth experiment, non-players trained on an action video game show marked improvement from their pre-training abilities, thereby establishing the role of playing in this effect.
Cognitive Advantage in Bilingualism
- A De Bruin
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de Bruin, A., Treccani, B., & Della Sala, S. (2015). Cognitive Advantage in Bilingualism.
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Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
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Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
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Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power
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Does growth mindset improve children's IQ, educational attainment or response to setbacks? Active-control interventions and data on children's own mindsets
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Li, Y., & Bates, T. (2017). Does growth mindset improve children's IQ, educational attainment
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