As a leisure-oriented student, you recognize early on that talent and diligence can be strategically played off against each other. Then the teacher grumbles that you shouldn’t just spend the afternoons with the group, but also with your homework. How do you evade these probably legitimate accusations? One points to a lack of talent – all learning would be in vain anyway: math and I, unfortunately, we just don’t want to find each other.
It’s the same the other way around: where you suddenly succeed, to your great astonishment, you’re well advised to quickly sweep your efforts under the carpet in order to appear as a natural talent from now on, hitherto misjudged, but now finally discovered. After all, the admiration for the gifted is always a touch purer. In any case, in a modern meritocracy, diligence and talent have a tense relationship.
A study these days in the prestigious Journal of Experimental Social Psychology appears and the SZ was available in advance shows how much this distinction can also cement social inequalities. The authors around the social psychologist Christina Bauer from the University of Vienna wanted to know why children from non-academic families often find it difficult to study at universities and had hundreds of students fill out an online questionnaire. First-time academics questioned their talent more often than academic children – even with the same grades. They were more likely than their fellow students from academic families to attribute failures at university to a lack of talent: I just couldn’t do it any better. The self-image as talented therefore depends on the social background, whereas there are no differences between academic children and educational climbers in terms of the assessment of their own diligence. Both claim diligence for themselves, and for the climbers it has always been the reinsurance – which the old established then like to slander as effort. In 1912, the philosopher Max Scheler attested that the strivers lacked distinction, according to the motto: only those who are not gifted with enough talent by nature cling doggedly.
“Thinking about talent can hold people back,” says Bauer. One prefers to choose the supposed subjects and avoids those in which supposedly genius counts above all. This was indicated when Bauer and her colleagues presented some of the respondents with a description of a fictitious course of study. In one case, the test subjects read that professors described the ideal student in their subject as talented, clever, intelligent and talented – which had a deterrent effect on those who were climbing the ladder. In another variant, the dream candidate was characterized as committed, motivated, industrious, diligent – which non-academic children immediately found more inviting. Study author Bauer concludes: “It can make society more permeable if we emphasize effort more and less talent.” After all, no master has fallen from the sky. And the supposed geniuses usually don’t just tumble out of the clouds either.