ABSTRACT
Imagine that you are about to undergo hospital treatment and, much to your surprise, you are given a choice: You can be operated on either by a doctor with an IQ of 120, and 10 years of surgical experience, or by a doctor with an IQ of 150, who has just quali®ed from medical school. Most people would question the sanity of the person who offered them such a choice. However, this precisely re¯ects the ``straw-man'' theory of the relationship between intelligence and problem solving that some advocates of extreme domain speci®city have sought to disprove. For this, intelligence is the only predictor of performance, an absolute talent model. Any believers in this model would have to choose the high-IQ doctor. Such a view is implicated by Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-RoÈmer (1993, p. 392): ``the popular `talent' view that asserts that differences in practice and experience cannot account for differences in expert performance''. Disproving such a model underlies Simon's (1990, p. 15) assertion that:
In all domains, differences in knowledge (which must include learned skills as well as factual knowledge) prove to be a dominant source of differences in performance . . . Of course, this ®nding should not be taken to deny the existence of ``innate differences'', but rather to account for their relative (quantitative) insigni®cance in explaining differences in adult skilled performance.
