K. Anders Ericsson (23 October 1947[1] – 17 June 2020)[2] was a Swedish psychologist and Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University who was internationally recognized as a researcher in the psychological nature of expertise and human performance.
In a highly cited 1993 paper, Ericsson and colleagues conducted studies in which they concluded that expert violinists derived their talent not from innate abilities but rather from large amounts of deliberate practice over a period of 10 years or more.
[5] Malcolm Gladwell drew upon Ericsson's research to establish his so-called 10,000 hour rule in the book Outliers.
(Ericsson & Kintsch 1995) In the domain of deliberate practice, Ericsson published an edited book with Jacqui Smith Toward a General Theory of Expertise in 1991 and edited a book The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games that appeared in 1996, as well as a collection edited with Janet Starkes Expert Performance in Sports: Recent Advances in Research on Sport Expertise in 2003.
Ericsson was the co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, a volume released in 2006.