Introduction to the intelligence special issue on the development of expertise: is ability necessary?

The question asked in this special issue is if abilities are necessary to explain the development of expert performance. The issue consists of eight papers written by experts on expertise. A brief but incomplete summary of these papers is presented in this introduction. Ericsson presents his rebuttal to these eight papers. He argues that much of what has been presented is not relevant to expertise when it is defined as repeatable, high level performance by an adult. The eight authors then briefly respond to Ericsson's rebuttal. This issue is of major importance to intelligence researchers since it was Binet's original goal to find interventions that would undo the correlation between IQ and educational outcome. An example of height and National Basketball Association (NBA) players is used to demonstrate some of the methodological difficulties of expertise research when study samples are selected from experts. Height is largely uncorrelated with either points scored or salary of NBA players nonsensically suggesting that height is not important in basketball. The evidence presented here suggests that intelligence is important in the development of expertise and the lack of correlation with IQ sometimes found is probably due to methodological problems. Despite these problems, research on expertise has the potential of identifying factors that could be important in achieving Binet's goal of undoing the correlation between IQ and educational outcomes in the future.