New research from Angela
Duckworth and colleagues finds that characteristics beyond intelligence
influence long-term achievement.
By Michele W. Berger
November 4, 2019 -- People often ask University
of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth what predicts success.
It’s an understandable question, given
the pioneering work Duckworth has done in the area of grit, a characteristic often
described as putting passion and perseverance toward important long-term
personal goals. But new research from Duckworth and colleagues at Duke
University and the United States Military Academy reveals that the answer may
not be so straightforward.
In a prospective, longitudinal study of
more than 11,000 West Point cadets, the research team discovered that both
cognitive and noncognitive factors can predict long-term achievement, with
characteristics like intelligence, grit, and physical capacity each influencing
a person’s ability to succeed in different ways. The researchers published
their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Duckworth started studying West Point
attendees as a doctoral student at Penn. “I was looking for a context in which
people might be quitting too early,” she says. “There’s such a thing as
quitting at the right time. But there’s also such a thing as quitting on a bad
day when you’re discouraged and maybe shouldn’t be making such a big decision.”
Each cadet who enters West Point, after
an extensive, two-year process, must complete a six-week initiation nicknamed
Beast Barracks during the summer preceding classes. On average, three out of
every 100 cadets drop out during this training. That they retreat so quickly
after such an arduous admissions process drew Duckworth to study this group.
In 2007, she published a paper about
this in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showing for the
first time that grit was an important predictor of accomplishment. In the 12
years since, she has continued collaborating with West Point, eventually
collecting data on 11,258 cadets who were part of nine separate classes that
entered the military academy over the course of a decade.
For each student, the researchers looked
at grit score as measured by the 12-item Grit Scale created by Duckworth,
entrance exams as delineated by either SAT or ACT scores, and results from a
battery of fitness tests each West Point hopeful must take before being
admitted, which includes a one-mile run, pull-ups, and sit-ups. West Point also
provided data on whether cadets completed the Beast Barracks training and
graduated from the academy, as well as their GPAs for academic, military, and
physical performance. Duckworth and colleagues then conducted a mega-analysis
incorporating all these data.
“This is a sign of where science is
going, toward big samples. They offer much more precision,” says Duckworth, the
Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology in Penn’s School of
Arts and Sciences. “We accumulated all this data in part so we could answer
more definitively the question of whether grit predicted success outcomes. We
now have more confidence in our original conclusions. At the same time, we
wanted to explore where, perhaps, grit wasn’t the most important factor.”
Specifically, Duckworth and her team
discovered that different personal characteristics predict different
outcomes.
During Beast Barracks, for example, grit
is crucial. “The grittier you are, the less likely you are to drop out during
that very discouraging time,” Duckworth explains. But during the four years of
combined classroom time and physical training that follow, cognitive ability is
the strongest predictor of academic grades. Finally, grit and physical ability
play a greater role than cognitive ability in determining who will graduate
from West Point in four years versus who might leave before then.
“This work shows us that grit is not the
only determinant of success,” Duckworth says. “Yes, it’s very important,
helping people stick with things when they’re hard, but it’s not the best
predictor of every aspect of success.”
What are the practical implications,
particularly for fields like human resources or university admissions?
Employers and schools tend to emphasize cognitive abilities in their search
process because objective tests like the SATs let them easily measure one
candidate against another. But for noncognitive attributes, objective tests are
lacking.
This line of research is the next
frontier for Duckworth, who is working with Adam Grant of Penn’s Wharton School
to invent new approaches to assessing grit and other noncognitive attributes.
Grant and Duckworth are faculty co-directors of Wharton People Analytics, which
centers around data-driven decision making.
The findings add to the canon of overall
knowledge about what factors predict success. They also strengthen Duckworth’s
original theories about grit and, at the same time, highlight other attributes
that are key to long-term achievement. “If you want to lead a happy, healthy,
helpful life,” she says, “you want to cultivate many aspects of your character,
like honesty, kindness, generosity, curiosity”—and, of course, grit.
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