How Important Is Deliberate Practice? Reply to Ericsson (2016).

Ericsson and colleagues' view that individual differences in expertise can largely be accounted for by accumulated deliberate practice is not supported by the available empirical evidence. Extending earlier work (Macnamara, Hambrick, & Oswald, 2014), we found that deliberate practice accounted for a sizeable amount of variance in sports performance (18%), but it left a much larger amount unexplained. Ericsson's (2016, this issue) evaluation of our research is undercut by contradictions, omissions, and errors. We agree with Ericsson that future longitudinal research will deepen understanding of expertise, but our goal was to evaluate the importance of deliberate practice based on existing evidence.