This week's article summary is Grit Has Been Called the Secret of Success: New Science Suggests It Isn't and it's a complement to the previous summary.
Angela Duckworth is the guru of the importance of grit in school (and life) in success. New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick even hired her a number of years ago to develop a grit assessment for potential draft selections to identify college football players with high levels of mental toughness and fortitude.
But just as the Patriots have had a pretty spotty track record with their draft picks, Duckworth’s work and research on grit are being questioned more and more.
One of the biggest criticisms is that while grit, resilience, and effort are important to success, ability and intelligence play important roles as well. No matter how hard I try, I’ll never throw a baseball 90 MPH or understand the writings of Stephen Hawking—trust me on this, as I’ve tried to do both many times.
What does this mean for schools?
We need to be careful not to over promise students that they can do and be anything with effort and perseverance alone. Succeeding involves many factors, including self-reflection, re-strategizing, guidance from mentors, and support from others.
Like much research, educators excitedly grabbed onto Duckworth’s research, hoping emphasis on grit would be the magic answer to success for every student.
But as we all know, it takes a lot more than persistence to thrive and flourish.
Joe
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University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth earned more than 23 million views as a TED speaker and glowing headlines by touting grit. This concept, she insisted, helped predict who would get ahead in life and can be cultivated if you want to increase your odds of success.
No wonder the media went wild. There are few things the public wants to hear about more than shortcuts to success. But according to writer Jesse Singal, author of the new book, The Quick Fix, there's a big problem with Duckworth's ideas about grit -- they don't actually appear to be true.
"Psychologists have spent decades searching for the secret of success but Duckworth is the one who found it," raved Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert's in his blurb for Duckworth's book, Grit. With hype like that, how could Singal resist investigating? But as he dug into the research, Singal realized the evidence for grit doesn't match the enthusiasm.
In fact, he uncovered three major problems with Duckworth's claims.
First, grit seems to overlap significantly with conscientiousness, one of the Big Five Personality traits that measures how likely people are to do the things they commit to doing. Duckworth says that grit differs subtly from conscientiousness, but research hasn't backed that up. Which makes grit look a lot like a shiny new name for a well-known idea.
Second, even if you accept grit is somehow distinct from conscientiousness, it doesn't seem to be all that powerful a predictor of success. A 2020 study found that "intelligence contributes 48-90 times more than grit to educational success and 13 times more to job-market success,"
And finally, even if grit were a real thing and it did matter a lot for success, there is basically no evidence that we know how to intervene to change how much a person has.
Both Singal's article and his book offer a deeper dive into the topic, but the basic takeaway of his work is clear-- be skeptical of anyone, offering shortcuts to success.
People have been chewing over life's biggest, gnarliest challenges for millennia and haven't found any magic bullets yet. No blogger or professor is likely to suddenly uncover a way to avoid the hard work of achieving great things or becoming a better person anytime soon.
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