Popular estimates of the prevalence of giftedness and talent

People's conceptions of giftedness and talent have many components, among them estimates of the percentage of gifted and talented persons in the population. To explore these popular perceptions of prevalence, a large heterogeneous sample of adults were asked their estimates; for half of them the target concept was “gifted” persons, while the other half were questioned about “talented” persons. All subjects also indicated if they perceived a difference between being gifted and being talented, and if so what was the nature of that difference. The major results were: the estimates varied enormously between respondents for both concepts; the average estimate was almost twice as large for talented persons (36%) as for gifted persons (17%); the perceived discrepancy was the same even for those respondents (20% of the sample) who judged the two concepts to be synonymous. Most arguments used by the majority who differentiated the two concepts were quite congruent with the direction and intensity of their differential estimates.