Macnamara, Brooke N.Hambrick, David Z.Oswald, Frederick L.2014-07-232014-07-232014Macnamara, Brooke N., Hambrick, David Z. and Oswald, Frederick L.. "Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis." <i>Psychological Science,</i> (2014) Sage: 1608-1618. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797614535810.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/76260More 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.engThis is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by Sage.Journal articledeliberate practicetalent developmentmeta-analysishuman performanceskill acquisitionexpertiseopen datahttp://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797614535810