In France and in Armenia, large regions once handed their schools over to chess. Nobody was trying to breed grandmasters. The plan was to build general ability, a sharpness that would follow a child out of the chess club and into every other subject.
Vladimir Spiridonov knows both cases. He is a Doctor of Psychological Sciences, a professor at RANEPA, and the head of a cognitive research lab that studies how people solve problems. The chess part, he says, went splendidly. Children played, and the level of play rose. The rest did not follow.
If you ever hoped that one demanding hobby would sharpen a whole mind, the measurements are cold on this. It sharpened the hobby.
As far as the level of play in those regions goes, all is wonderful. Chess players appeared in large numbers. But the general abilities, which we can measure quite decently, did not develop at all.
С точки зрения уровня игры в этих областях все замечательно. Шахматисты появились в больших количествах. Но к развитию общих способностей, которые мы умеем прилично измерять, это не привело вовсе.
— Vladimir Spiridonov, Think Like a Scientist, 31:58
French colleagues and Armenian colleagues each measured it carefully. Both got the same answer: no. "Alas," he adds.
A study by John Jerrim in the Journal of Human Resources in 2018 points the same way. Looking at chess instruction and children's test scores, it found no sign of an effect on mathematics, reading or science.
Spiridonov did not always think this way. When he was young, he believed that problem-solving strategies were universal and could be used everywhere. The years calmed him down. People have been hunting for a master method since at least Descartes, who wrote a whole Discourse on Method. They were clever people, and they did not succeed. The more psychologists study thinking in its many forms, the clearer it gets that no universal thinking exists. A single trick that builds abilities which then pay off in chess, in ballet and in nuclear physics alike is not going to turn up.
Working with real experts teaches him modesty. Outstanding managers, doctors, scientists and chess players are so good in their own field that you "stand off to one side and admire" them handling a hard situation. And they are very different from one another. Spiridonov's verdict on the search for simple, portable tricks is blunt: "a naive idea". It would make life much easier if it worked.
So is chess a bad subject to learn? No, and here the story turns. Chess is quite good for a mind, he agrees. The trouble is the hope of transfer. Thinking does not develop on its own. It needs a large, complicated subject that grips you, and then there is a chance you will develop it a good deal.
History has run that experiment many times. Gymnasiums in the Russian Empire taught Latin and ancient Greek, and nobody pretended this was for running the state. In the Soviet Union, mathematics and physics did the same job. Plenty of people from that generation never became mathematicians or physicists, yet came out with solid intellectual skills because they had "wrestled with complex formal systems" until they could use them.
His own students get the same treatment. They must run a real, if small, piece of research from the first reading of the literature to the empirical study, every step. Some try to fool their teachers, which he calls regular practice. The effects arrive anyway. They start to see the whole, and to see how each small step ties to a wider context. One error in one place spoils the entire result, and falsified data goes straight in the bin.
