The Science of Experience

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While 10 years is a necessary minimum to achieve expertise in most fields, it doesn't guarantee success. As Anders Ericsson writes in the introduction to the 901-page Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (2006), "The number of years of experience in a domain is a poor predictor of attained performance." Ericsson, 60, is a professor at Florida State who moved to the U.S. from his native Sweden in 1976 to study with Simon, co-author of the seminal chess paper. (Simon went on to win a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making.) Today Ericsson runs Florida State's Human Performance Laboratory, where Thomas and Monica participated in the robot simulations.

Ericsson, a large, gentle man with unkempt salt-and-pepper hair and a button on his jacket missing, has become the world's leading expert on experts, a term he distinguishes from "expert performers" — those individuals, possessing both experience and superior skill, who tend to win Nobel Prizes or international chess competitions or Olympic medals. Ericsson notes that some entire classes of experts — for instance, those who pick stocks for a living — are barely better than novices. (Experienced investors do perform a little ahead of chance, his studies show, but not enough to outweigh transaction costs.)

Experts tend to be good at their particular talent, but when something unpredictable happens — something that changes the rules of the game they usually play — they're little better than the rest of us. Chess grand masters can recall almost entire chessboard layouts from their games (approximately 25 pieces, compared with an average of four for novices), but when chessmen are randomly arranged on a board, those grand masters can recall the placement of only about six pieces. Similarly, experienced actors remember script lines much better than novices do, but they are no better at remembering material other than scripts.

Ericsson's primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving. Ericsson calls this exertion "deliberate practice," by which he means the kind of practice we hate, the kind that leads to failure and hair-pulling and fist-pounding. You like the Tuesday New York Times crossword? You have to tackle the Saturday one to be really good.

Take figure-skating. For the 2003 book Expert Performance in Sports, researchers Janice Deakin and Stephen Cobley observed 24 figure skaters as they practiced. Deakin and Cobley asked the skaters to complete diaries about their practice habits. The researchers found that élite skaters spent 68% of their sessions practicing jumps — one of the riskiest and most demanding parts of figure-skating routines. Skaters in a second tier, who were just as experienced in terms of years, spent only 48% of their time on jumps, and they rested more often. As Deakin and her colleagues write in the Cambridge Handbook, "All skaters spent considerably more time practicing jumps that already existed in their repertoire and less time on jumps they were attempting to learn." In other words, we like to practice what we know, stretching out in the warm bath of familiarity rather than stretching our skills. Those who overcome that tendency are the real high performers.

Experience is not only insufficient for expert performance; in some cases, it can hurt. Highly experienced people tend to execute routine tasks almost unconsciously — think of Monica immediately glancing up to see Ardman's dopamine drip — and they retrieve the information they need quickly, rarely pausing to apply rules. Driving is a good example. In a 1991 paper in the journal Ergonomics, a team of researchers found that while new drivers and truly expert drivers (members of Britain's Institute of Advanced Motorists) checked their mirrors often and applied their brakes early, regular drivers with 20 years' experience rarely checked their mirrors and braked much later. Experience in a particular task frees space in your mind for other cognitive pursuits — wondering what's for dinner, answering your cell, singing along with Justin Timberlake — but those things can distract you from the accident you're about to have. Experience can also lead to overconfidence: a study in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention found that licensed race-car drivers had more on-the-road accidents than controls did.

Which is not to say that, if elected, Clinton or John McCain would drive the country off a cliff — or that Obama, as a comparative novice, would be more cautious and less burdened by his habits. But the study of experience does indicate that the more seasoned candidates wouldn't automatically outperform Obama as President. On the other hand, Ericsson's conclusion that deliberate practice leads to better performance might favor the punctilious, famously diligent Clinton.

The Cambridge Handbook concludes that great performance comes mostly from deliberate practice but also from another activity: regularly obtaining accurate feedback. In a 1997 study published in the journal Medical Decision Making, researchers found that only 4% of interns had known a group of elderly patients for more than a week; by comparison, nearly half the highly experienced attending physicians had known the patients for more than six months. But even with the advantages of years of medical experience and months of knowing the patients, the attending physicians were no more accurate than the interns at predicting the patients' end-of-life preferences, a crucial factor in determining whether a patient has a good death. It was attention to the patients' feelings and values that mattered, not having more knowledge of their diseases. And in the end, determining which of the presidential candidates pays more attention to your concerns requires not adding up their years of experience but a far more complex calculation: deciding what their experiences have led them to truly value.

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