Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Denrell J
PROVIDER: S-EPMC3386112 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Jun
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Denrell Jerker J Liu Chengwei C
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20120529 24
The relationship between performance and ability is a central concern in the social sciences: Are the most successful much more able than others, and are failures unskilled? Prior research has shown that noise and self-reinforcing dynamics make performance unpredictable and lead to a weak association between ability and performance. Here we show that the same mechanisms that generate unpredictability imply that extreme performances can be relatively uninformative about ability. As a result, the ...[more]