Competence Versus Performance

The Separation of Competence and Performance

The competence versus performance distinction is an inherently appealing model for understanding human behavior. Observation of human behavior clearly illustrates that abilities are not manifest identically across situations. Self-understanding develops in part from similar observation and from reflection that behavior results from deeper, unobserved aspects of oneself. It seems relatively easy, then, to infer that overt behavior is caused by internal traits or attributes that are hidden, but central to one’s being. This distinction is heightened in evaluative settings, such as academics, athletics, or business, where judgments are made between what one is capable of doing and what one actually does.

Debate about the meaning of competence and performance was often linked to theoretical and empirical work in linguistics and cognitive development during the 1960s and 1970s. A well-known scholar of language acquisition, Noam Chomsky, proposed that language required innate structures that represented idealized knowing of language rules and operations, or competence. These mental representations were believed to be innate because individuals did not require explicit training to apply them across situations. Language performance was the production of actual utterances.

This competence–performance model distinguished knowing and doing. Chomsky explained that experience is not sufficient to account for competence and concluded that something else, something innate, determines language development. Critics of this nativist view argued that language knowledge and production are interlinked, noting that knowledge is derived in part from use, can never be idealized, and is contextualized such that language use in dialogue varies widely as a result of outside factors.

Concurrently, a similar debate was evolving with regard to Piagetian models of cognitive development. Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, presented a model that included a broadly integrated structural and systems approach to development. In the United States, this model was interpreted through a lens of functionalism, which emphasized the structural elements and reduced these elements to antecedents of some behavioral consequence. Piaget’s descriptions of cognitive structures were reified and described as competencies that resided within the person and were accessible in any situation. An emphasis on the stages of Piaget’s model also contributed to the view of cognitive structures as static.

Given observed variability in age-related cognitive competencies within populations and also [Page 418]within a given person across situations, many scientists focused attention on the asynchrony of the expression of competence—that is, performance—and on studying intervening factors that might impede expressing one’s inherent internal capacities. Often, these factors included things such as memory, attention, or emotion, but researchers have also argued that those variables could just as easily be characterized as competence.

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