I went to a career workshop recently. The theme was that we should identify our strengths through some paid questionnaire service and structure our careers around them in some way (we didn’t get to the career part). In general, I’m not a big fan of this sort of career testing because I don’t think the validation procedures typically used to establish these tests are capable of detecting whether the thing being tested does not exist. That is, an extensively validated test can tell me whether I’m type A or type B or a little bit of both, whether my score pattern is consistent across time, and whether I share certain similarities with other people who share my score pattern, but it usually cannot tell me whether “type A” and “type B” are just wrong ways of thinking about what’s going on. One of my dissertation chapters is on this.
Nevertheless, I do think that personality testing has a lot of positive effects even if they may not be valid. In particular, personality tests make people think more about themselves, give them a vocabulary to describe their experiences, and teach them that not everyone thinks alike. These are important things.
What I really do not like is one narrative that often accompanies these personality/ career/ potential testings — the narrative of “talent”. It is the idea that people have innate “talents” that make them better at certain things and worse at others. They should “identify” these talents and strengthen them rather than trying to develop new ones, because, again, talents are innate, and therefore unchangeable. You either have them or you don’t. This narrative is, I think, not only harmful but also false. This post is about why they are false.
It’s a hard-to-test hypothesis
…which isn’t to say that it’s not testable, just that it requires very careful screening and controlling and non-trivial choices in operational definitions. I give some examples.
First, there is a problem of self-fulfilling prophecy, which is the idea that believing in something makes it true. If a child is believed to have a talent in X, either by themself or by their parents, this may lead to their having more confidence in X, more interest in X, more motivation, support, and opportunity to train in X, etc. thus becoming better in X through practice.
Second, there is recall bias. Adults who are good at skill X may differentially recall and reinterpret certain childhood experiences as signs of talents. For example, a mathematician who was bad at math in elementary school may cite their superior counting skill as a toddler as a sign for numeric talent. This works in the opposite direction, too, where people who are bad at something tend to recall and reinterpret prior experiences as signs of lacking talent.
Third, even if there exist talents that make it easy for some people to acquire certain skills, this does not entail that others without such talents would not be able to achieve the same levels of skills with slightly more practice. Since people’s lives tend to be very different, there is no reason to believe that, at any particular point in time, we have good reasons to believe that an adult with talent in X tends to have a higher skill level in X than an adult without talent in X.
Finally, the concept of “talent” is difficult to define. I have been, and will continue, using “talent” to mean something like “signs of promising potentials in certain skills that are observable in childhood and considered to be unchangeable”. Kinda like “this child will grow to be tall because they have long legs”. But, of course, childhood behaviours and achievements can be interpreted in multiple ways. Observers are likely to disagree over whether a certain behaviour counts as a sign for a certain talent, as well as how one should balance multiple inconsistent signs. These subtleties are probably harmless in everyday discourses, but should be specified in research settings.
Given these complexities (and others not mentioned here), I tend to be skeptical of studies claiming to discuss talents as distinct from skill levels or strengths.
Some personal perspective
Science is hard, so I’ll tell stories.
I have always been quite sensitive to the topic of talents. My mom, as wonderful as she is, used to have the habit of saying “I always knew you had a talent in X” whenever I exhibit skill in X. (I say “used to” because she has since changed in response to my protest.) Sometimes she catches me off guard when the reason I shared my achievement in X was that I never thought I could do X. Because of this, I developed a habit of periodically (re)assessing my skill levels in various areas and committing them to memory, so that I can get slightly less biased comparisons when I think back about my trajectory. I share some of these observations below.
In full honesty, I was very talented in mathematics. I excelled in mental arithmetic. In elementary school and middle school, I always finished math exams in the least time with very high grades even though I seldom paid attention in classes. Some people might say that elementary school math “isn’t real math” and so doesn’t show anything, which I would agree. But according to the working definition of “talent” I sketched above, I had talent in math. Everyone said I had talent in math, including teachers who didn’t like me very much. In fact, my talent in math carried me through high school.
I say “carried me through”, because I really had no interest in math. I thought it was boring, and that I was lucky to not have to work on it to get good grades. I stopped doing math as soon as I went to university. I have done some work in logic during my graduate career, and I’ve come to appreciate statistics more and more. But because I haven’t done math in a long time and don’t really enjoy working through difficult math problems, I would not describe myself as someone who’s “good at math” now. I was “good at math” as a child. I no longer am.
What I did enjoy, though, was philosophy, in the sense of thinking through complex ideas and coming up with fresh viewpoints. Now, despite what my mom would say, I did not have a talent in this. I did like reading, and read indiscriminately. That is, I read terribly written books and saw nothing wrong with them. I think part of the reason I was so fascinated by philosophy during my undergraduate years was that I found every single viewpoint unique and refreshing and convincing — because I had never thought of any of them. The fact that I do not have a talent in philosophy was a conclusion I reached around my 3rd year of undergraduate. I had terrible grades in my philosophy classes then, despite trying very hard.
Nevertheless, I pressed on. I was a double major with the intention of pursuing psychology, so I wasn’t very worried. I still enjoyed philosophy. The low grades were a little discouraging, but not discouraging enough. My grades got better in my last two years and I ended up pursuing a terminal Master’s in philosophy.
Something started clicking during my Master’s. I was still pretty bad during my first year but started to get better in my second year. By the time I got to my PhD program, I started to receive compliments on my insights. If I read something now, I can almost always immediately offer a critical (not in the negative sense but in the critical thinking sense) viewpoint that many people will think “makes sense”. I would certainly list “engaging with complex thought” as a strength now, even though it was never a talent.
Finally, let’s talk about language. I am Chinese/English bilingual, and I would classify both as at native levels. In particular, I don’t have a discernible EAL accent and I write well academically. This has led many people to ascribe a “language talent” to me. Now, I do not have a language talent.
To be clear, “language talent” can mean many different things: grammar, vocabulary, sound reproduction, etc. I am mediocre at some of these, and terrible at others. I struggled with Chinese grammar and vocabulary when I was in China; I struggled with English grammar and vocabulary when I was in Canada. I have a hard time remembering sounds I haven’t heard of before which, coincidentally, makes remembering unusual names very difficult. The reason I speak English with no EAL accent is because I have lived in Canada since the age of 15 — barely but still part of the critical period. If I stay in Canada/US for an extended period of time, I begin to lose my Chinese fluency. If I stay in China for an extended period of time, I stop being able to produce coherent English sentences. If I count as having language talent, everybody does.
Against talents
When I talk about my lack of talents in language or in philosophy, people tend to feel an urge to comfort me. “You only say this because you don’t know how much worse others are”, they say. I appreciate the thought. But, honestly, I don’t see this as a negative self-judgment or even humility. I happen to not be very tall; I happen to not be very good at language or philosophy when I was a child.
The problem is that “not having a talent in X” is often taken to entail “never going to be as good as others in X”. This is false.
It’s easy to see how this account of talent is harmful. I will briefly mention three things without elaboration: 1) it discourages people from pursuing their interests and limits their options; 2) it perpetuates unjust socially forced practices, as in “girls should do more cleaning because they have talents in it”; 3) it discredits the hard work a person might have put into the practicing of a skill, instead attributing the achievement to innate abilities.
I’m not saying that everyone learns everything with the same speed. That’s also clearly false. There are many factors that can affect the speed with which someone gains a skill: interest, learning style, teaching quality, practice time, practice condition, intrinsic/extrinsic motivations, etc. It is possible that, after controlling for all these, people still differ in the acquisition speed of skills. But because people differ so vastly in these other aspects, the difference in this residual speed hardly matters in the grand scheme of things.
Is it possible that, despite all efforts, there are things that certain people just cannot possibly master? Again, I wouldn’t say that’s impossible, but the level of idealization that goes into the “despite all efforts” makes this claim hardly relevant, if not utterly vacuous. If I study very hard, I can probably get into law school, but I really don’t think I have the mental health to withstand certain careers in law. If I practice very hard, I can probably master the art of political speech in the sense of simultaneously producing sentences that are identical to those of the most charismatic speeches with the perfect bodily gestures and tones, but I will never be as convincing as a tall white man. Do these limitations both count as lacks of talents? If not, are they not more imminent and relevant to my personal development and career choices than a lack of some abstract entity, “the talent”?
- It might happen after all - May 14, 2023
- Another job market data point - December 17, 2022
- Our place in the fediverse - November 30, 2022
Thanks, Kino.
In life, I am usually the one who is slow in thinking. On the other hand, I wish to express my own opinions on a particular topic and welcome comments from others, but as I have said I am slow in a way that prevents effective talks.
I did not realize to pursue my interest until I have almost finished my engineering graduate study which is not interesting to me at all. The reason maybe I myself even do not know what I am interested in over my entire student times. However, to really find the interest is hard especially for a person who is not independent and critical thinking. In a sense, it is a circle.
I like reading and thinking, though thinking for me is not easy. However, what the hell is the job so nice that what a person needs to do is just read and think? If it exists, I guess it will not be my turn until thousands of years. For me, to totally give up what I have learned in graduate study is too much. To totally do what I learned is so inadequate and struggling in particular after I have developed interest in other things. Finally, I tell myself, well, maybe I should try to do something in between…It seems a nice suggestion, but it turns nothing actually. What do I mean ‘something in between’? I do not know.
I want to be engaged in a scholarship (做学问）. The question is what kind of scholarship? Is it too late for an almost thirty years of age to start a scholarship from stretch? A person with the knowledge of the scholarship for 20 years, and a person who just started at 30, who is more competitive? Let alone the kind of scholarship in need of a large amount of basic knowledge, for example, literature, psychology, history. I was told to study a scholarship is not equivalent to opening a shop. There is a timeline when is already too late..
Without an outstanding talent, but only interest, what is left for being good is only accumulation. Without accumulation and years’s of learning, what is left then? This is scary. Thinking of this, I feel the suggestion to do something in between is not that bad..See, == life is a circle..