Using wise interventions to motivate deliberate practice.

PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Using Wise Interventions to Motivate Deliberate Practice

Deliberate practice leads to world-class excellence across domains. In the current investigation, we examined whether psychologically “wise” interventions targeting expectancies and values—stock antecedents of ordinary effortful behaviors—could motivate nonexperts to engage in deliberate practice and improve their achievement. As a preliminary, we developed and validated a novel task measure of...

Facing facts about deliberate practice

More than 20 years ago, Ericsson and colleagues proposed that “individual differences in ultimate performance can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice” (Ericsson et al., 1993, p. 392). We empirically tested this claim through a metaanalysis of studies of music and chess (Hambrick et al., 2014). The claim was not supported. Deliberate practice a...

The Efficacy of Deliberate Practice Delivered Using Asynchronous Training Technology

Employee productivity is key to survival in business. Senior employees require access to advanced training that does not necessitate extended periods away from their work. Once performance begins to plateau, it can be difficult to reach experienced employees with cost-effective, timely, and relevant training opportunities. Organizations must find ways to enhance employee performance; however, r...

Using Rewards to Motivate Present-Biased Agents

Theoretical and empirical work in behavioral economics has shown that time inconsistency may lead to irrational and sub-optimal behavior, such as procrastination, abandonment of tasks, or inefficient changing of plans mid-task. These phenomena can be modeled as a planning problem on a task graph whose vertices represent states and whose weighted edges represent actions with costs. Without prope...

Using reciprocity to motivate organ donations.