Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: part of the best of series, where we highlight some
Speaker 1: of the most exciting and enthralling and enlightening episodes from
Speaker 1: the archives of the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 2: Enjoy. I'm very excited to have Angela Duckworth on the podcast.
Speaker 2: Angel is a professor of psychology at the University of
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania and the founder and scientific director of The Character Lab,
Speaker 2: a nonprofit whose mission is to develop, disseminate, and support
Speaker 2: research based practices that improve student achievement and well being.
Speaker 2: Angel studies grit and self control, as well as other
Speaker 2: attributes that predict success in life. A twenty thirteen MacArthur
Speaker 2: Genius Fellow, Angel has advised the White House, the World Bank,
Speaker 2: NBA and NFL teams, and Fortune five hundred CEOs. Angela
Speaker 2: has received numerous awards for her contributions to K twelve education,
Speaker 2: including a Beyond Z Award from the Kit Foundation. Her
Speaker 2: first book, Grit, The Power of Passion and Perseverance, will
Speaker 2: be published May third, and I can honestly say that
Speaker 2: it is wonderful. Thank you for being on the podcast, Angla.
Speaker 3: Thanks Scott, it's great to be here.
Speaker 2: S Angela. Prior to your career research, you actually done
Speaker 2: quite a few things in your life. You're involved in
Speaker 2: educational initiatives, you studied neuroscience. How would you say some
Speaker 2: of those things contributed to your interest in psychology and
Speaker 2: great in particular, I had.
Speaker 3: Always been interested, I think, in doing something that would
Speaker 3: be useful since I was very young, and I think
Speaker 3: I found my way from running, you know, Red Cross
Speaker 3: blood drives and selling daffodils for the American Cancer Society
Speaker 3: to education. By the time I was in college, I
Speaker 3: think I realized two things. Like one is just I
Speaker 3: really liked kids. I mean I just I enjoyed being
Speaker 3: with kids and tutoring them, and I was a big sister.
Speaker 3: And the second thing I realized, maybe a little more
Speaker 3: at an intellectual level, was that if you're really going
Speaker 3: to try to help people in a meaningful way, kids
Speaker 3: are great because they are at the beginning of their
Speaker 3: life with just the math of it right like that,
Speaker 3: you could potentially have a greater impact on kids' lives.
Speaker 3: And by the time that I was ready to graduate
Speaker 3: from college, I knew that I wanted to start a
Speaker 3: summer school for kids who wouldn't be able to Afford
Speaker 3: Academic and Richmond otherwise. And I modeled the program after
Speaker 3: a program that used to be called summer Bridge and
Speaker 3: is now called Breakthrough Collaborative. There's now many of these
Speaker 3: programs throughout the world. I think, actually I was going
Speaker 3: to say the United States, but I think it's international now.
Speaker 3: So I did that, and I, as you mentioned, you know,
Speaker 3: did a bunch of other things. I think at the
Speaker 3: time that most people go to graduate school, it's around
Speaker 3: twenty two to twenty four. But for me, I spent
Speaker 3: those years in my twenties teaching, I was management consultant.
Speaker 3: I did a degree in neuroscience at Oxford. I mean,
Speaker 3: I don't know that this was all planned. In fact,
Speaker 3: I know that it wasn't planned. But through those experiences
Speaker 3: I came to the realization by the time I was
Speaker 3: thirty two, which is when I did enter a PhD
Speaker 3: in psychology, that there was a problem that needed to
Speaker 3: be solved with kids and education that I didn't think
Speaker 3: would be solved without actually a benefit of psychological science,
Speaker 3: and that is to understand why it is that children
Speaker 3: are sometimes able to bring forth great effort and concentration
Speaker 3: to learning and to doing well. You know, when I
Speaker 3: say learning, I mean, you know, both inside and outside
Speaker 3: the classroom, right, Learning is also something that happens when
Speaker 3: you're you know, doing a sport, or learning to get
Speaker 3: along with people in your family, or you know, really
Speaker 3: learning broadly construed that we needed to understand the origins
Speaker 3: of effort toward learning, and that if we could understand that,
Speaker 3: we would be able to make a huge difference in kids' lives.
Speaker 3: And I felt that by going into psychology as an
Speaker 3: academic as you are as well, that we would be
Speaker 3: able to make greater strides than the kind of you know,
Speaker 3: the wisdom that got handed down to us from generation
Speaker 3: to general. We should work hard, you know, discipline is
Speaker 3: really important, but I felt like we need to go
Speaker 3: beyond that.
Speaker 2: Sure, and what resonated with Martin Seligman when you were
Speaker 2: looking at psychology website at University of Pennsylvania.
Speaker 3: Well, to be completely honest, when I was thirty two,
Speaker 3: I just had one child with my husband. We moved
Speaker 3: back to Philadelphia for the sake of his career, which
Speaker 3: is that he wanted to you know, join his father
Speaker 3: in a business in real estate. And it's here in
Speaker 3: Philadelphia where you know, my parents were living in the
Speaker 3: area as well. I grew up around here, So it
Speaker 3: wasn't that I, you know, flew across the country in
Speaker 3: order to become a graduate student of Marty Seligman because
Speaker 3: I knew he'd be the perfect fit. It was actually
Speaker 3: that I happened to be in Philadelphia when I realized
Speaker 3: that I want to do a PhD in psychology, and
Speaker 3: I looked around at the programs it would be very
Speaker 3: easily commutable, and there aren't that many, And then I
Speaker 3: went to the faculty list in alphabetical order, and when
Speaker 3: I got to s on the University of Pennsylvania Psychology
Speaker 3: website and I started clicking around and reading things that
Speaker 3: Marty had written, I felt like he would be a
Speaker 3: good match for me in terms of his well he
Speaker 3: had done research on helplessness, which in a way is
Speaker 3: the opposite of sustaining effort on things that are hard,
Speaker 3: and that also that he clearly had a pragmatic or
Speaker 3: practical bent. I think he's one of the psychologists, and
Speaker 3: he's not the only one, but it's a bit more
Speaker 3: of an exception than a rule that really thinks about
Speaker 3: on a daily kind of like, how is this going
Speaker 3: to actually change people's lives and not just be interesting
Speaker 3: from a kind of purely you know, scholarly perspective.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's something I resonate with both you and
Speaker 2: him for that. So you did, You started to study
Speaker 2: grit and it emerged from a lot of conversations you
Speaker 2: had Mari, and a lot of conversations you had with
Speaker 2: high level CEOs, with athletes, et cetera. I mean, you
Speaker 2: started this research, it kind of emerged. It's not like
Speaker 2: you started saying I have this new theory. It's kind
Speaker 2: of you let the data create it in a way.
Speaker 2: Could you talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my first and second years of graduate school, I
Speaker 3: was trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to study.
Speaker 3: So I knew that I wanted to unpack the psychology
Speaker 3: of effort and achievement. And I had some intuitions from
Speaker 3: you know, my observations of my own life, as every
Speaker 3: psychologist brings to their work, and then that's sort of
Speaker 3: you know what we do. It's very William james Ian
Speaker 3: and I had the observations from the classroom and you know,
Speaker 3: everything else that I had seen. But I didn't come
Speaker 3: into graduate school saying I'm going to study grit, which
Speaker 3: I watch I define as passion and perseverance for long
Speaker 3: term goals. Really, that idea emerged from interviewing people who
Speaker 3: are really high achieving and as many domains as I
Speaker 3: could think of. And that's a technique, a sort of like, well, okay,
Speaker 3: let's look at high achievement, and let's look at achievement
Speaker 3: across as many domains as possible. That's a time honored technique.
Speaker 3: You know. The logic of it is that if you
Speaker 3: only study world class soccer players, you might figure out
Speaker 3: something that's just very particular to soccer, you know, like
Speaker 3: having really good calves or something. You know, so you
Speaker 3: try to look for what's common across different domains. And
Speaker 3: many other psychologists had done that before me, and I'm
Speaker 3: sure many will do it afterwards as well, because it's
Speaker 3: just common sense that that would give you a clue
Speaker 3: to sort of what the active ingredients might be. And
Speaker 3: so when I talked to high achievers, I asked them,
Speaker 3: I asked them about themselves. But I quickly found out
Speaker 3: that it's hard for people to talk about themselves, you know,
Speaker 3: we're all programmed to be self effacing, and so I
Speaker 3: started asking them about the people they most admired. So
Speaker 3: even if they were a MacArthur fellow, I might ask them,
Speaker 3: you know, who they most admired in their field other
Speaker 3: than themselves, and to just tell me about them. And
Speaker 3: I think, in addition to luck, which came up a lot,
Speaker 3: you know, this person's just really lucky to have this
Speaker 3: happen at this time. In addition to talent, you know,
Speaker 3: this person has an ability to you know, to get better,
Speaker 3: to you know, see things that other people don't necessarily
Speaker 3: see or learn as well. That there were these descriptions
Speaker 3: that eventually became the Grit scale, and the two dimensions
Speaker 3: that emerge in those interviews are the same two dimensions
Speaker 3: that are in the Grit scale, which is to say
Speaker 3: that people who are very high achieving tend to bring
Speaker 3: forth great effort in a consistent and enduring way toward
Speaker 3: a goal. And the second thing is that the goal
Speaker 3: does itself doesn't change. This kind of thing that that
Speaker 3: people are working on doesn't morph and change much over time.
Speaker 3: That doesn't mean that their tactics aren't different, but the
Speaker 3: sort of like the big thing that they're working on
Speaker 3: tends to be the same, not different over time.
Speaker 2: Right, That makes a lot of sense. So you know,
Speaker 2: I've seen different definitions of grit, even in your own literature.
Speaker 2: I want to quote the latest definition I've read, and
Speaker 2: I thought we could unpack some of the elements of
Speaker 2: this definition, because I think what you've done over the years,
Speaker 2: you've gotten more or precise about exactly what grit is.
Speaker 2: Some people might not be aware of the evolution of that.
Speaker 2: So your latest definition is greatest sustained self regulation in
Speaker 2: the service of superordinate goals. So say that ten times
Speaker 2: real quick.
Speaker 3: I don't know if I could do that, but I
Speaker 3: can tell you a little bit what about why that
Speaker 3: isn't what we're trying to say. I mean, it's not
Speaker 3: the most beautifully written phrase, that's for sure. And I'll
Speaker 3: also say how for sure like anybody else, I mean,
Speaker 3: I'm trying to or if I were saying the same
Speaker 3: thing in two thousand and seven, then I am saying now,
Speaker 3: then that would say very little about how much I'd
Speaker 3: progress as somebod who's trying to understand grit. But I
Speaker 3: think in important ways, this jargoning definition that was recently.
Speaker 3: You know something that I've written in an article, in
Speaker 3: very meaningful ways like the same thing as what I
Speaker 3: started out, you know, those intuitions from those interviews. So first,
Speaker 3: let me just say what I mean by a superordinate goal.
Speaker 3: One thing that is clear to me about GRIT is
Speaker 3: that it's not just that your interests are consistent in
Speaker 3: some like very trivial way, like oh, I still like
Speaker 3: doubt nad be, you know, like, oh, it's you know,
Speaker 3: I really enjoy the New York Times Sunday magazine. And yep,
Speaker 3: sure enough, four or five years later, I still enjoy
Speaker 3: the New York Times Sunday magazine. Those are sort of
Speaker 3: lower level interests or goals that I don't think that
Speaker 3: that's the locus of consistency that really matters for GRIT.
Speaker 3: What really is striking about people who are gritty is
Speaker 3: that their interests at the most abstract and general level
Speaker 3: are consistent. So, for example, I would expect that ten
Speaker 3: twenty thirty years from now, Scott Kaufman and Angela Duckworth
Speaker 3: will still be deeply interested in human behavior, human motivation,
Speaker 3: you know, psychology, right, and that I would still be
Speaker 3: interested in kids, which has been you know, as you
Speaker 3: pointed out, like a very true of me since I
Speaker 3: was a teenager. So it's at that level that I
Speaker 3: find consistency in really gritty individuals, not at these sort
Speaker 3: of lower level, more tactical kinds of things. And I
Speaker 3: think by invoking this kind of superordinate thing, what I'm
Speaker 3: also suggesting is that it's certainly not my own you
Speaker 3: know work, it's really building upon decades of research and psychology,
Speaker 3: is that human beings are goal directed. And furthermore, we
Speaker 3: can say that we have a hierarchy of sorts where
Speaker 3: there's certain goals that we have, like have a cup
Speaker 3: of coffee this morning, that are really really low level,
Speaker 3: specific concrete.
Speaker 2: Regretting that I didn't do that one right now?
Speaker 3: Yeah I could do that. I actually just had two.
Speaker 3: I highly recommend that low level goal. But you know,
Speaker 3: why do I have that level goal? It's it's sort
Speaker 3: of this for a second, you know, sort of the
Speaker 3: if you go one tier up, it's like, well, why
Speaker 3: do you care about that? Every time you ask why
Speaker 3: about a goal? You sort of go up in the hierarchy.
Speaker 3: It's like, well, I you know, really want to well,
Speaker 3: you know, first I might enjoy it, but you know,
Speaker 3: another why is that, like I want to actually be
Speaker 3: alert for like the next six hours while I'm doing
Speaker 3: something like writing a manuscript, It's like, well, why do
Speaker 3: you care about that? Well, you know, this manuscript actually
Speaker 3: matters to me because it's you know, part of you
Speaker 3: know project that of like trying to understand the measures
Speaker 3: of grit. Okay, well why does that matter? So I
Speaker 3: think that human beings not only are goal directed, we
Speaker 3: have goals that are nested in these hierarchies where every
Speaker 3: time you ask why why do you have that goal?
Speaker 3: You shoort of go up a level at the very
Speaker 3: very top of this like Christmas tree like hierarchy, you
Speaker 3: have this you know, superordinate goal. And for me, it
Speaker 3: is to help kids thrive using insights from psychological science.
Speaker 3: And that's what I you know, what I find, you know,
Speaker 3: most interesting about the consistency of interest in gritty peoples
Speaker 3: that at this abstract level, you know, there's a lot
Speaker 3: of stability, there's a lot of stubbornness, and there's also
Speaker 3: not just having that goal, because human beings are very
Speaker 3: capable of having goals that they don't actually do anything about,
Speaker 3: but there's also this you know, active effort toward accomplishing
Speaker 3: that goal. So yes, it is perseverance and passion for
Speaker 3: long term goals. But it's particularly long term goals that
Speaker 3: are superordinate in nature. And you know that passion and
Speaker 3: perseverance is really you know that it's describing the active
Speaker 3: pursuit of those super goals more than it's describing you know,
Speaker 3: these very very low level tactical objectives, right, And I.
Speaker 2: Really like that model.
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Speaker 2: We have lots of things, We have lots of goals
Speaker 2: that are not harmoniously integrated into into the superorderic goal,
Speaker 2: and we do well to apply self control mechanisms to
Speaker 2: inhibit those things. To just get nerdy for a second.
Speaker 2: You've argued that individuals who do persist over obstacles over
Speaker 2: a long period of time generate larger equal finality sets.
Speaker 2: Could you tell me a little bit what what an
Speaker 2: equal finality I don't even know how to pronounce it
Speaker 2: ecofinality set is and how that relates to Over time,
Speaker 2: you start to substitute things that are not going towards
Speaker 2: your superordentical they're kind of getting the way with you,
Speaker 2: kind of maybe get more coherence in the structure. Is
Speaker 2: that one way of looking at it.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, again like the idea of equif I
Speaker 3: don't know how to pronounce it, I personality, right, So
Speaker 3: it's an idea that actually, like if I describe it
Speaker 3: without jargon, I think will be more intuitive. And again
Speaker 3: this comes from you know, research scholarship on goals that
Speaker 3: would not mine So I'm kind of borrowing from other academics.
Speaker 3: But the idea is that you know, if you have
Speaker 3: a relatively abstract, high level goal, that there could be
Speaker 3: many ways, certainly more than one, that you could reach that. So,
Speaker 3: for example, you know, you might have the academic ambition
Speaker 3: to you know, publish research and be a professor, right,
Speaker 3: that might not be your superordinate goal because that sort
Speaker 3: of it could be you know that there's an even
Speaker 3: more like why you could ask a why question, you
Speaker 3: could go up even more level, like you know, I
Speaker 3: want to be somebody who contributes to knowledge, you know.
Speaker 3: But you know still this professor goal is not the
Speaker 3: lowest level goal either, right, because there are definitely if
Speaker 3: every time you ask how, you go down a level,
Speaker 3: every time you ask why, you go up a level.
Speaker 2: In these hierarchies, if you're only, in fact, if your
Speaker 2: only goal, if your superordinent goal is be a professor,
Speaker 2: You're probably live a very unhappy life.
Speaker 3: Absolutely absolutely, And I think it is, you know, the
Speaker 3: prescriptive recommendation here, the sort of like, well, what would
Speaker 3: be a good way to do all this? I think
Speaker 3: it is to have a pretty fully developed hierarchy where
Speaker 3: at the very top it is a you know, pretty
Speaker 3: abstract a thing where there are multiple ways that you
Speaker 3: could get there, right, multiple hows. Right. So, for example,
Speaker 3: if you really want to contribute to knowledge, and you know,
Speaker 3: time after time the professor things not working out, there
Speaker 3: are other ways to contribute to knowledge. You know, you
Speaker 3: could be part of an education technology startup, or you
Speaker 3: could become a writer. I mean, there's lots of things
Speaker 3: that you could do to contribute to knowledge, not just
Speaker 3: being a professor. And that exactly is the heart of
Speaker 3: the idea of equifinality. That the idea is that you
Speaker 3: know there are substitute paths, you know that would get
Speaker 3: you to the same destination. And in fact, you know,
Speaker 3: and I won't pretend that the grid scale does a
Speaker 3: great job of distinguishing between these lower level paths that
Speaker 3: are interchangeable to some extent, substitutable and then these higher
Speaker 3: level things like the farther you go up in the
Speaker 3: goal tree, the more you should be stubborn and sticky
Speaker 3: and kind of, you know, unwilling to substitute. The grid
Speaker 3: scale itself doesn't do a great job of that. But
Speaker 3: what I do find, particularly when you interview gritty individuals,
Speaker 3: that they're really able to distinguish between the higher and
Speaker 3: the lower level goals that they have, and at the
Speaker 3: lower level goals, they're extraordinarily flexible and creative. You know,
Speaker 3: I'm like anybody else. Just to use this personal example,
Speaker 3: like I get rejected a lot, right, you know, from journals,
Speaker 3: and you know, you get the twelve page, single space
Speaker 3: rejection letter telling you in excruciating detail why your article
Speaker 3: is bad. And then you know, what do you do. Well,
Speaker 3: it's a lower level goal to get this particular article
Speaker 3: into this particular journal this particular year. So you know,
Speaker 3: if you're gritty, you know you're not. It doesn't mean
Speaker 3: that you're stubborn about this like low level thing. It's like, oh,
Speaker 3: I'm just going to keep rewriting this article and you know,
Speaker 3: stalking the editor. That would be not grit. That would
Speaker 3: be a kind of a stubborness that I would not
Speaker 3: call grit, And I think a gritty person would say like, okay, well,
Speaker 3: how else can I achieve the higher level goal, which
Speaker 3: is to get this finding out? Okay, I'll submit to
Speaker 3: another journal or you know, I'll revise it and you know,
Speaker 3: split it up into two articles, and you know, I'll
Speaker 3: peel to the editor. There are all kinds of things
Speaker 3: that you would do that would be I mean that's
Speaker 3: the idea of equifinality, all kinds of things that you
Speaker 3: would do to get to some higher level goal about
Speaker 3: which you're a little more stubborn than the lower level ones.
Speaker 3: And when you get to the very top, you know,
Speaker 3: that's where I find that really greedy people are at
Speaker 3: the most abstract level, the kind of the life organizing
Speaker 3: ultimate concern, as Bob Emmons would say, as sort of
Speaker 3: the life organizing goal like that, you know, there's almost
Speaker 3: nothing that could make them give up on that. Right.
Speaker 2: So this adds some good nuanced because I think there's
Speaker 2: a lot of misconception. Well, and I don't think there
Speaker 2: are a lot of misconceptions of your work, And it
Speaker 2: also is misapplied and education a lot and a lot
Speaker 2: of sometimes applied is kind of duty. Grit is just
Speaker 2: being like a robot and just doing what other people say,
Speaker 2: and they're missing the passion part of your definition passion.
Speaker 2: It's passion and perseverance. And the superner goal is kind
Speaker 2: of like a super passion right in a lot of ways,
Speaker 2: it's like your organizing passion. So what is the difference then,
Speaker 2: between self control and grit?
Speaker 3: Self control is something I also study and it's highly
Speaker 3: correlated with grit. Find self control as the ability to
Speaker 3: adjudicate between two conflicting impulses, one which is more immediately
Speaker 3: rewarding and the other which is probably you think more
Speaker 3: enduringly good for you or rewarding, but not immediately so.
Speaker 3: So at the heart of this definition is that you
Speaker 3: have a conflict between something which is going to feel
Speaker 3: good right away and is easy in some sense, and
Speaker 3: another thing which you think you'll actually find more satisfaction
Speaker 3: out of, but not easily and not right away. So,
Speaker 3: for example, if you're sitting in a lecture and you
Speaker 3: think you know if you upon reflection, you think, if
Speaker 3: I really paid attention for the next hour and twenty minutes,
Speaker 3: I think I'd overall be better off. It's just better
Speaker 3: for Angela if she does that. Alternatively, you know, I
Speaker 3: could click around on my Facebook page during this lecture
Speaker 3: and that would bemediately more pleasurable. That's the kind of
Speaker 3: conflict that human beings of all ages face all the time,
Speaker 3: and so that kind of asymmetric conflict good for me
Speaker 3: in the long run versus good for me Now, I
Speaker 3: think that's at the heart of it. The second part
Speaker 3: of my definition. When I said, you know, your ability
Speaker 3: to adjudicate between those two choices, what I mean is
Speaker 3: that your ability as a person to make those choices
Speaker 3: in your own best interest and to carry those out.
Speaker 3: So I don't mean compliance, right, which is to say
Speaker 3: that somebody, for you know, and your parents take away
Speaker 3: your cell phone because they want you to do your homework.
Speaker 3: That's not self control. That's rental control. But if you say,
Speaker 3: as my fourteen year old said to my husband last week, Dad,
Speaker 3: I want you to take away my cell phone because
Speaker 3: I have a big test coming up and I need
Speaker 3: to study for it, that is self initiated. You know.
Speaker 3: That was you know, her having some insight into this
Speaker 3: conflict and her asking somebody else to like help her
Speaker 3: get through it. That's the sort of self initiated part
Speaker 3: of self control is really important. Now, that's what self
Speaker 3: control is. Like, how is that different from grit? My
Speaker 3: perspective on this is that, you know, anytime you have
Speaker 3: any kind of conflict between two goals, when one of
Speaker 3: which is you know, better for me, even if it's
Speaker 3: only a little bit better for you versus something that's
Speaker 3: going to be more immediately awarding, you know, you have
Speaker 3: to use self control. And that happens all the time.
Speaker 3: You know, It's like I don't really feel like working
Speaker 3: on my taxes, but I really should because I don't
Speaker 3: want to be there on April fourteenth, like you know,
Speaker 3: scrambling around. You know, I shouldn't have a second cup
Speaker 3: of coffee. I should really just have one because tonight
Speaker 3: I'm going to like not sleep well. I mean, all
Speaker 3: the time people are trying to deal with these conflicts.
Speaker 3: It's like the nature of you know, human existence. I
Speaker 3: think where grit is different is the following. Yes, you know,
Speaker 3: grit often entails, you know, choosing to do something versus
Speaker 3: something else, something that's hard versus something that's easy. So
Speaker 3: there's some overlap there, But grit only pertains to those
Speaker 3: goals that are in that hierarchy that you would say like,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, but that's part of my goal hierarchy for
Speaker 3: my life defining these are all goals I have to
Speaker 3: do with that superordinate thing that really makes me tick
Speaker 3: and gives my life meaning. So you know, unless that
Speaker 3: that's how you feel about your taxes or that's how
Speaker 3: you feel about your weight, you know, those would be like,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, that's a self control conflict, but it's not
Speaker 3: really grit related. So for me, if I have to,
Speaker 3: you know, work hard on a manuscript because this manuscript
Speaker 3: is part of a research program that I really think
Speaker 3: is going to ultimately help kids thrive, well then that's
Speaker 3: about grit. But if it's just me, you know, trying
Speaker 3: to manage other goals that I have that are not
Speaker 3: part of that subordinate hierarchy, then it's not right.
Speaker 2: And self control and grit they're both part of the
Speaker 2: Big five domain conscientiousness, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say is that I don't know how
Speaker 3: much the listeners know about Big five theory of personality,
Speaker 3: but they're certainly correlated with they'd load on the factor
Speaker 3: of personality, which usually called conscientiousness. It's not that they're
Speaker 3: not related to any of the other four aspects of
Speaker 3: you know, dimensions of personality, but they certainly are most
Speaker 3: clearly loading on that. And I would say that, like,
Speaker 3: if you consider conscientious to be this like really broad
Speaker 3: you know family of personality traits that also includes orderliness
Speaker 3: and traditionalism and respect for other people's you know, interests. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 3: I think that that's definitely what we see empirically. And
Speaker 3: also it makes sense when you think about it.
Speaker 2: I've never seen you deny that either, even from your
Speaker 2: first paper. What do you say to people that, you know, what,
Speaker 2: if someone kept you those like angel I think you're
Speaker 2: just rebranding conscientiousness as grit because it has more sex appeal.
Speaker 2: What would you say to that sort of thing?
Speaker 3: Well, first, I would be really sympathetic to the idea that,
Speaker 3: you know, psychologists have a very bad habit of, you know,
Speaker 3: just like creating another word to label something that has
Speaker 3: already been studied under a long history of that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, I think that's actually a really
Speaker 3: fair point to you know, just a good caution. And
Speaker 3: here's what I would say. I guess I would say
Speaker 3: two things. One is that because of these high correlations
Speaker 3: with you know, the bigger family of conscientiousness. You know,
Speaker 3: for sure, I would like you said, you know, say, look,
Speaker 3: you know, you can understand grit and self control as
Speaker 3: being facets of this bigger, bigger family, right, like family
Speaker 3: members of this bigger family. They could be a little
Speaker 3: bit related to other families of personality, but maybe that's
Speaker 3: a nuance that's not important. So absolutely, and so as
Speaker 3: you would expect to find, you know, there's been a
Speaker 3: lot of research on facets versus like these big you know,
Speaker 3: very general personality domains like conscientiousness. And what's often found,
Speaker 3: as we find for grit as well, is that for
Speaker 3: certain outcomes that are more aligned to the facet, you know,
Speaker 3: you find stronger or incremental correlations. So we try to
Speaker 3: say that in English. So for example, with grit, you know,
Speaker 3: maybe you don't find that grit is like the single
Speaker 3: best predictor of you know, all goals that are related
Speaker 3: to being a conscientious person, Like, it may not be
Speaker 3: you know, as related to well and I said this
Speaker 3: in an article of Jamscros, like it may not be
Speaker 3: you know, the single best conscientiousness facet predicting grade point
Speaker 3: average or weight gain. Right, so those are better predicted
Speaker 3: actually by self control or the lack thereof right weight loss,
Speaker 3: I guess would be the way that phrase it. So
Speaker 3: it's not that you would expect this one facet to
Speaker 3: outpredict every other facet for every other outcome, but for
Speaker 3: the outcomes that really make sense when you think about
Speaker 3: that facet, and for GRIT, I think about, you know,
Speaker 3: where the whole research program got started, which is, you know,
Speaker 3: GRIT should predict outcomes that are really you know, really
Speaker 3: challenging and that really do you know, chief and outcomes
Speaker 3: that really do require a kind of stick to itdinous
Speaker 3: or endurance, and not all chief and outcomes are equally
Speaker 3: you know, described by that. So yes, you know, like
Speaker 3: graduating from something like college when a lot of other
Speaker 3: people are not graduating in your coport, or you know,
Speaker 3: finishing West Point, showing up the spelling bee again even
Speaker 3: though you lost again last year. Those are the kinds
Speaker 3: of things that I would expect and have found GRIT
Speaker 3: to be very predictive of. So yeah, it's part of
Speaker 3: this bigger family. I think if I have felt that
Speaker 3: conscientious was identical to GRIT, I wouldn't have gone and
Speaker 3: you know, labeled it this way and I think the
Speaker 3: other thing that makes me think it's you know, not
Speaker 3: the same thing as you know, being orderly, being organized,
Speaker 3: being self controlled, is that in conscientiousness, you don't really
Speaker 3: have a lot of the sort of like I'm passionate
Speaker 3: about a lot of conscientiousness facets are about volition, like
Speaker 3: being able to carry out things that you really, you know,
Speaker 3: want to do at some level, but they don't describe
Speaker 3: this kind of passion to do. So you wouldn't say,
Speaker 3: like somebody who's really conscientious is necessarily somebody who's like
Speaker 3: super passionate about something, thinks about it all the time.
Speaker 3: It gives their life meaning and purpose, and that's the
Speaker 3: you know, as you mentioned the passion side of grit,
Speaker 3: which I think is an important part of it.
Speaker 2: Well, you don't measure that on your grit scale, the
Speaker 2: passion aspect exactly those kinds of items like I have
Speaker 2: a passion that, et cetera. However, research that we've done
Speaker 2: does show that harmonious passion and other kinds of items
Speaker 2: that do relate to that are strongly correlated with grit.
Speaker 2: So I think that's important to mention that, even though
Speaker 2: it's not directly measured by your scale.
Speaker 3: It's correct, Yeah, I mean there are no it's you know,
Speaker 3: it's a notable that the passion scale doesn't actually have
Speaker 3: any passion words, right, So that's in part because I
Speaker 3: didn't find that language too. So when you ask people
Speaker 3: who are really accomplished in their field to describe the
Speaker 3: individuals that they admire most, you know, they won't say, think, well,
Speaker 3: they didn't to me anyway, that like, it wasn't striking
Speaker 3: that they would say, like, oh, this person has a
Speaker 3: kind of fireworks passion about what they do. It's not
Speaker 3: that they didn't, But what was more remarkable about the
Speaker 3: individuals they most admired was the consistency of that passion
Speaker 3: over time. And as somebody who's taught undergraduates for you know,
Speaker 3: some time, I have to say that the kind of
Speaker 3: you know, the ability to get just really excited about something,
Speaker 3: I mean kind of like swept up and in love
Speaker 3: with something that is of course a wonderful thing. And
Speaker 3: I won't say that there aren't high achievers who you know,
Speaker 3: who don't have that quality. But it's more remarkable to
Speaker 3: me when you know two years later that kid is
Speaker 3: still really engaged in the same general project that's the rarity, right,
Speaker 3: So yeah, yeah, that's right, And so I think there
Speaker 3: is you know, it depends on how you use the
Speaker 3: word passion. And I'm not here to tell people how
Speaker 3: the should or shouldn't use the word passion, but at
Speaker 3: least the way I'm using the word passion, I really
Speaker 3: do mean that remarkable endurance of you know, when Darwin
Speaker 3: wrote his autobiography towards the end of his life and
Speaker 3: the end of his scientific career, you know, and he
Speaker 3: talked about, you know, his abiding love for the topics
Speaker 3: that he studied. I think it really was the kind
Speaker 3: of you know, fact that it was a constant occupation
Speaker 3: for not necessarily that on any given day, you know,
Speaker 3: he had more intense love than another person. But you know,
Speaker 3: ten twenty thirty years later, you know, the other scientists
Speaker 3: might be onto different things or off of science altogether.
Speaker 3: And what struck Darwin as remarkable about himself was that
Speaker 3: he really did have an abiding interest in what he
Speaker 3: was studying.
Speaker 2: And can one have multiple superordenticals or is like life
Speaker 2: too short sort of thing to really?
Speaker 3: Now, I think it's hard to have many super Let's
Speaker 3: start with the easy thing, which is that I don't
Speaker 3: think you can, by you know, the fact that the
Speaker 3: day is only twenty four hours long, have many like
Speaker 3: a you know, big plural, like you can't have ten
Speaker 3: or fifth team supordinate goals, right, Like I'm trying to
Speaker 3: become an NFL football player, but I'm also trying to
Speaker 3: become NBA.
Speaker 2: Michael Jordan tried to do that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, no, he's also tried. He did try to
Speaker 3: do them in sequence, though, I think, right, I mean,
Speaker 3: at least like for most of his Like, I think
Speaker 3: there was a time where you're so let's just take
Speaker 3: the easy case, which is that it's hard for me
Speaker 3: to imagine having many superordic goals all the same time,
Speaker 3: right because the day is not that long. I do
Speaker 3: think that you can then ask the case, well, like, well,
Speaker 3: can you have just two or three? Right? Not many? Okay,
Speaker 3: so that's a little bit harder. I think that that
Speaker 3: would absolutely be the exception and not the rule of
Speaker 3: the people that I have studied. Sometimes I find people
Speaker 3: who have a vocational supordinate goal, like this is what
Speaker 3: I do for a living and for a profession, and
Speaker 3: it's a very stable supordinate goal, like I'm a venture
Speaker 3: capitalist or i am an education, technology entrepreneur, and like
Speaker 3: I want to help kids learn through better technology. I
Speaker 3: mean that kind of thing, and that's their supordinate professional goal,
Speaker 3: and that occasionally I'll find that people have an avocational
Speaker 3: goal that is a lot like I'm also a you know,
Speaker 3: fourth degree black belt in a kido and I you know,
Speaker 3: that's the way I pursue. And it's not like I
Speaker 3: have nine hobbies. I have that one. Or Will Schwartz,
Speaker 3: the New York Times Crossword puzzle editor, for whom puzzles
Speaker 3: are his vocational subordinate goal, which is a goal that
Speaker 3: he developed I guess you could easily say by twelve
Speaker 3: or thirteen, because I think he was already asking other
Speaker 3: puzzle makers how he could become a professional puzzle maker
Speaker 3: in middle school. But even before that. I think he
Speaker 3: submitted his first puzzle for publication when he was younger
Speaker 3: than that. So that's his vocational goal. But then he
Speaker 3: has an avocational subordinate goal which has been abiding for
Speaker 3: his whole life, when that's table tennis. So I think
Speaker 3: you occasionally will find that kind of a vocational and
Speaker 3: an avocational pursuit. I mean, for me, my vocational pursuit
Speaker 3: is psychology, and I have this like much less important
Speaker 3: avocational thing that I've been interested in for a long time,
Speaker 3: which is cooking and food. So you know, when I
Speaker 3: go to bed, you know, and I read books, it's
Speaker 3: like about you know, chefs and food and I, you know,
Speaker 3: read recipe books and so forth. I think that's often
Speaker 3: the case, right, But it's also clear to me that,
Speaker 3: you know, my avocation is my avocation, right, like it's
Speaker 3: you know, it's it's something that I do that's I
Speaker 3: enjoy and I want to get better at it, but
Speaker 3: it's not as important to me as my vocational goal.
Speaker 3: And I don't really believe in poly maths, I think,
Speaker 3: especially nowadays. Like I was just talking to an economist who's,
Speaker 3: you know, very prominent in his field, and he said
Speaker 3: to me that it took him thirty five years of
Speaker 3: working you know, really actively, right, like eighty hour weeks
Speaker 3: and economics to understand what he wanted to study. And
Speaker 3: I said, why did it take you so long? He's like, well,
Speaker 3: it takes a really long time to know what's known
Speaker 3: and then be able to say what's not known, and
Speaker 3: further to say why it is that what remains to
Speaker 3: be known remains to be known, like why it hasn't
Speaker 3: been solved already, And he just can't imagine that as
Speaker 3: a young economist as smart as he was, and he
Speaker 3: probably he thinks he's probably you know, less smart than
Speaker 3: he used to be because he's getting older. That it
Speaker 3: just took a really long And that's why I don't
Speaker 3: believe in poly maths. It's just really hard to kind
Speaker 3: of like pick up basketball and you know, outperform Kobe
Speaker 3: Bryant or you know, pick up painting and kind of
Speaker 3: like do much that's like meaningfully valuable compared to the
Speaker 3: other people who've been working on it for much longer,
Speaker 3: you know, in very short amounts of time. So I
Speaker 3: don't think you can have a lot of things simultaneously.
Speaker 3: It is possible, I think, to have them in sequence,
Speaker 3: but then again, you know, you just run up into
Speaker 3: the constraint of, like people don't live that long. So
Speaker 3: maybe you could do, you know, two things in sequence
Speaker 3: in your lifetime or three things in sequence, but I
Speaker 3: can't imagine. And it's rarely the case that people do many,
Speaker 3: many things in sequence and become world class in all
Speaker 3: of them.
Speaker 2: Right, And that's a great segue into the question about
Speaker 2: the determinants of becoming world class world class expertise, you
Speaker 2: have a formula for achievement, could you just say what
Speaker 2: that is and why does effort count twice in that formula?
Speaker 3: So the formula for achievement that I find to be compelling,
Speaker 3: though I would also admit that we don't have evidence
Speaker 3: for it, you know, we don't have data yet to
Speaker 3: say like it's absolutely true. Is the following, which is
Speaker 3: that achievement is the multiplicative product of your skill and
Speaker 3: your effort. So if you have high skill applied, you know,
Speaker 3: with a lot of effort over time cumulative effort, right,
Speaker 3: that you will achieve a lot. Right. This is holding
Speaker 3: things like luck and opportunity constant. Of course those things matter,
Speaker 3: but like, assuming you're in the same situation you have
Speaker 3: the same amount of luck, then it's the people who
Speaker 3: have really high skill and really high cumulative effort that
Speaker 3: are going to actually produce the most, you know, the
Speaker 3: most beautiful and the best and the highest number of pots.
Speaker 3: You know, if you're a potter, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Now that only has effort in the equation once. So
Speaker 3: you think, like, okay, well, what do you mean by
Speaker 3: effort counting twice. Here's what I mean. You can then
Speaker 3: ask the question like, okay, that's an interesting thing about skill.
Speaker 3: You know, we're not all equally skilled. Where does skill
Speaker 3: come from? I think skill is developed and where skill
Speaker 3: is developed is, you know, with effort. So I have
Speaker 3: a second equation, which is say like, well, if you
Speaker 3: really want to know what skill is, skill is equal
Speaker 3: to talent times effort. So if you ask the question, well,
Speaker 3: who's going to become the most skilled person here, it's
Speaker 3: going to be the person who has the highest amount
Speaker 3: of talent and who puts the most cumulative effort toward it. Right,
Speaker 3: So something who works really hard for a long time
Speaker 3: but has a high rate of learning, which is how
Speaker 3: I define talent. So if you just use a little algebra,
Speaker 3: you find that achievement is therefore talent times effort times effort,
Speaker 3: so talent times effort squared. And then it's just a
Speaker 3: little thought experiment if you change, if you wiggle effort
Speaker 3: a little bit, and you say, well, what happens if
Speaker 3: you increase effort by just a little bit, what happens
Speaker 3: to achievement versus increasing talent a little bit? And what
Speaker 3: happens to achievement. It's only by virtue of the fact
Speaker 3: that the effort variable happens twice in the equation that
Speaker 3: you get a bigger return on that increase in effort
Speaker 3: because it does count twice. It helps you build skill,
Speaker 3: but it also helps make that skill productive.
Speaker 2: Could you say that's only given that you've passed a
Speaker 2: certain threshold of talent? Like what I mean, I could
Speaker 2: put in as much effort and practice into becoming a
Speaker 2: world class swimmer as I could, and I wouldn't get
Speaker 2: much return on my investment, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it just falls out of the equation
Speaker 3: that like, if you multiply anything by a very small
Speaker 3: number by zero, right, that you still get zero. So
Speaker 3: let's just take the extreme example, which is, you know,
Speaker 3: not really plausible, but you like literally have zero to
Speaker 3: talent in swimming for no matter what effort you put in,
Speaker 3: there's no gain in skill and there's no gain in
Speaker 3: you know, productivity. So then you know, absolutely, you know,
Speaker 3: then you would sort of like, you know, it doesn't
Speaker 3: matter how much effort you would put in, And so
Speaker 3: I think that's true. I mean, one position that I
Speaker 3: would like to clarify not that everybody has to worry
Speaker 3: about like Angela Duckworth and what she thinks about things.
Speaker 3: But I think the research that I've done by focusing
Speaker 3: on the psychology of effort and the psychology of like
Speaker 3: sticking with things, you know, I think there's an easy
Speaker 3: mistake to be made, which is to think that I
Speaker 3: don't believe that human beings differ much in their ability
Speaker 3: to improve in skill that I don't believe in talent.
Speaker 3: I do believe in talent. I think that we differ
Speaker 3: in all kinds of ways, including the rate at which
Speaker 3: we improve in things. And I would further say that
Speaker 3: grit and talent and everything else about human beings is partly,
Speaker 3: although not entirely, a function of our gene.
Speaker 2: So did you just use the g word, Angela doction word? No,
Speaker 2: I'm just cooking. It's not that scary as people think.
Speaker 2: I don't think genes is as scary as people make
Speaker 2: it out to be if they really understand the mechanisms
Speaker 2: of genes.
Speaker 3: Right, I agree, And I think it's really hard to
Speaker 3: talk about. You know, it's not the fault of people
Speaker 3: who you know, don't like immerse themselves in the research literature,
Speaker 3: like you know, I don't fault human beings for sort
Speaker 3: of like having a kind of sometimes a misunderstanding of genes,
Speaker 3: like why should they I have misunderstandings of lots of
Speaker 3: things that I don't spend time thinking about, but I
Speaker 3: do think it's really important to acknowledge that really every
Speaker 3: aspect of human behavior, including your intelligence, including your preference
Speaker 3: for broccoli or you know, your likelihood to vote for
Speaker 3: you know, one presidential candidate this fall versus another. You know,
Speaker 3: they all have some genetic influence. It's not like there's
Speaker 3: a single grit gene. I think it's really really well
Speaker 3: established that even for very simple characteristics like eye color
Speaker 3: or height, there's not an a gene. There are many genes,
Speaker 3: dozens hundreds that interact with each other in mind bogglingly
Speaker 3: complex ways, and that there's nothing that has been studied
Speaker 3: where you could say there's really no influence of environment
Speaker 3: at all, in the sense that like the genes are
Speaker 3: just your destiny, right height, yeah, yeah, and even height
Speaker 3: right right. So you know, human beings have been getting
Speaker 3: taller and taller. When you go to museums and you
Speaker 3: look at these costumes from like the sixteenth century, and
Speaker 3: they're really small and You're like, oh, why are these
Speaker 3: systems because people are bigger, And that is not because
Speaker 3: our genes have changed in that very short time period historically,
Speaker 3: it's because our environments have become you know, we eat
Speaker 3: a lot more, right, you know, we're also fatter. By
Speaker 3: the way, the gene thing doesn't scare me. I mean,
Speaker 3: I was a neurobioso my you know, I think my
Speaker 3: undergraduate degree is technically biology with a neurobiology concentration, and
Speaker 3: then you know, I have a degree in neuroscience. I'm like,
Speaker 3: I'm not afraid of biology, and I'm not afraid of genetics.
Speaker 3: I think that these things seem to people to be like,
Speaker 3: oh well, then therefore it's not malleable, like oh therefore
Speaker 3: we shouldn't have, you know, schools devote attention to like
Speaker 3: I think that that's the wrong question even, you know,
Speaker 3: if you think about like eyesight, like myopia, right, like
Speaker 3: you could be near sighted. Of course, that's very much
Speaker 3: a function of your genes, right, that really runs in families.
Speaker 3: But you know that doesn't mean that like we couldn't
Speaker 3: have invented eyeglasses and contact ones is to change, you know,
Speaker 3: effectively people's visions. So I find it a very understandable
Speaker 3: but it's a very misguided kind of way of thinking
Speaker 3: about all of this. You know, does grit matter? I
Speaker 3: think so, does talent matter? I think so.
Speaker 2: Right, just because one thing matters doesn't mean nothing else matters.
Speaker 2: And that's you know, the media loves, you know, saying
Speaker 2: this is the thing you know that matters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I can't control what journalists, right, And I
Speaker 3: try to make these views clear. But sometimes when I
Speaker 3: read things, I think to myself, like, that's not what
Speaker 3: I meant. And I don't even know if that's what
Speaker 3: I said. So, you know, I don't want to become
Speaker 3: some like cranky academic which is like mad at everyone
Speaker 3: all the time or not like you're not You're not,
Speaker 3: but I do. I think that's a really good point
Speaker 3: to make that you're pointing out.
Speaker 2: Thanks. Yeah, And another the potential role of genes. I
Speaker 2: mean there, you know, there's this recent study that came
Speaker 2: out Pom Robert Pullman and colleagues showing that grid has
Speaker 2: a strong heritability. Well, no, duh. I mean I think
Speaker 2: we've kind of the point in the sense that every
Speaker 2: psychological trait has a substantial heritability coefficient and you said,
Speaker 2: that doesn't mean it can't change, but could mean something.
Speaker 2: It could mean that people differ in how naturally gritty
Speaker 2: they are. That could be true as well. You know,
Speaker 2: there's both sides of that coin.
Speaker 3: It's true, isn't it true? Of everything? Right? I mean,
Speaker 3: that's the thing the hereticgbility COVID. So Robert Pluman sent
Speaker 3: me the manuscript, so I ran into him. We were
Speaker 3: on a panel together, and the manuscript is still being reviewed,
Speaker 3: and you know, he emailed me afterwards and said like, oh, well,
Speaker 3: you know, I have this manuscript that's under review, and
Speaker 3: I read it and I emailed him back and I said,
Speaker 3: of course, I'm not surprised, right that you're getting heritability
Speaker 3: estimates of between twenty and thirty seven percent for GRIT,
Speaker 3: depending on which facet you're looking at, like which aspect
Speaker 3: of great you know, perseverance being thirty seven percent heritable,
Speaker 3: twenty percent heritable for consistency of interest. Because that is
Speaker 3: in line with like every other study that's ever been
Speaker 3: done on personality traits. There's a second part of that
Speaker 3: article where he says in the article he and his
Speaker 3: co authors he's not the first author that GRIT is
Speaker 3: like shockingly like, yes, it predicts outcomes, particularly perseverance, you know,
Speaker 3: predicting changes in test scores over or just standardized test scores,
Speaker 3: I think for this British sample, but not as well
Speaker 3: as conscientiousness, which we were talking about a few minutes ago.
Speaker 3: And I said in my email back to him, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm not surprised about that either, because I've published and
Speaker 3: you know, here's the link to the article that I
Speaker 3: don't think that grit should predict like all aspects of
Speaker 3: achievement equally, and in fact, in my own work, I mean,
Speaker 3: I've said that, like, for example, self control should predict
Speaker 3: your grades better than your grit, because grit is about
Speaker 3: like really personally meaningful, hard to achieve long term goals,
Speaker 3: and self control is just about anything that you and
Speaker 3: anyone who's ever taught a kid knows that like doing
Speaker 3: their homework at night and doing well on the test
Speaker 3: on Fridays, less about their personally meaningful, passion driven goals
Speaker 3: than just sort of like not watching TV, which is
Speaker 3: a little bit more fun than studying for history. So
Speaker 3: I was a little disappointed to find that like none
Speaker 3: of my comments made into the you know, helped you know,
Speaker 3: inform the final article, but you know that's science and
Speaker 3: they have the right to write whatever they want to write.
Speaker 3: But my own feeling and for my own other research,
Speaker 3: standardized test scores are you know, they're used in that
Speaker 3: article to just be like, oh, standwri's test scores equals
Speaker 3: turnemic achievement, and I think there are many other things.
Speaker 3: Santai's testcores are not perfectly correlated with your grades. They're
Speaker 3: not perfectly correlated with your school tendents. They're absolutely not
Speaker 3: perfectly correlated with graduations. Standarized test scores are a weaker
Speaker 3: predictor of whether you will graduate from college, for example,
Speaker 3: than your GPA.
Speaker 2: They're almost perfectly correlated with IQ.
Speaker 3: By the way, exactly what I found, and I think
Speaker 3: you've also found in your research is that if you
Speaker 3: take measures of IQ and you look at you know,
Speaker 3: how that correlates with US standardized test scores or and
Speaker 3: work that I've done, like looking at changes in standardized
Speaker 3: test scores, right, you find really remarkable correlations between IQ
Speaker 3: and test scores. But if you look at grade point average, right,
Speaker 3: which you know we we I mean as a former teacher,
Speaker 3: I'll tell you it's like, if you have our kid
Speaker 3: who really tries hard to learn in your class, they're
Speaker 3: going to move their grades more than they're going to
Speaker 3: move their test scores, in part because they are given
Speaker 3: the opportunity to learn the things that are going into
Speaker 3: their grades, whereas test scores are not, you know, they're
Speaker 3: not perfectly aligned with what you're doing in school. So
Speaker 3: there's always an amount of kind of like, all right,
Speaker 3: I'm going to give you this problem you've never seen before,
Speaker 3: Like go to it, and it's a longer conversation and
Speaker 3: maybe one we don't have time for this podcast. But
Speaker 3: you know what these intelligence tests are really assessing. I mean,
Speaker 3: because people just take it as m as like, oh, well,
Speaker 3: they're assessing intelligence. I don't know that people are stopping
Speaker 3: to ask themselves like, well what is that? And you know,
Speaker 3: if the general public could actually look at these IQ tests,
Speaker 3: you know, like if they would actually ever be printed,
Speaker 3: which they so often aren't because you know, the publisher
Speaker 3: doesn't want to keep them secret because they don't want
Speaker 3: anyone to be able to cheat on them. Or but
Speaker 3: if you actually look at a lot of IQ tests,
Speaker 3: they are strikingly similar or to standardized tests. So it
Speaker 3: sort of like you look at the question and it's like,
Speaker 3: you know, what is an armadillo? And armadillo is a
Speaker 3: you know kind of animal, and armadillo is a kind
Speaker 3: of you know, army, and you're like, Okay, now I
Speaker 3: have to guess whether that is from an IQ test
Speaker 3: or from a standardized achievement test. You often can't even
Speaker 3: tell the difference.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, So you know, the correlation between the SAT and
Speaker 2: IQ is as high as the reliability of the SAT itself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that that article that was published I think now
Speaker 3: more than a decade ago, right in psych science. I mean,
Speaker 3: you know, I'm not saying that IQ doesn't exist, right,
Speaker 3: I do think there's absolutely something about you know, the
Speaker 3: aptitude to learn new things. And I would further say
Speaker 3: that we likely differ in that. I would a further
Speaker 3: say that, you know, part of our differences must be
Speaker 3: accounted for by the DNA that we inherited from our
Speaker 3: mom and dad, and that we're not going to do
Speaker 3: a whole lot to change, right epigenetics socide. So I'm
Speaker 3: not saying any of these things aren't true. Like I'm
Speaker 3: not saying IQ.
Speaker 2: Is that's not important. You're also not saying it's not important,
Speaker 2: and I.
Speaker 3: Also not yeah exactly, you know, I think, you know,
Speaker 3: if you asked me, like Angela, would you like to
Speaker 3: have ten more IQ points, I would say yes, please,
Speaker 3: like I'd love to have ten more iq ps, I.
Speaker 2: Think that's possible for you.
Speaker 3: No, it's absolutely trust me, it is absolutely. So it's just,
Speaker 3: you know, these things are complicated. I think oversimplifying, you know,
Speaker 3: is never in anyone's interest. But you know, anyway, my
Speaker 3: own view of this recent finding is I'm not surprised
Speaker 3: that grit is partly hertable at the same level of
Speaker 3: genetic contribution has been found with other traits. I'm also
Speaker 3: not surprised that on test scores alone, yes it predicts,
Speaker 3: but maybe not as well as you know Big five
Speaker 3: conscientiousness as a whole, which is the major, second major
Speaker 3: finding of that publication. What I don't want readers to
Speaker 3: come away from, at least what I don't come with
Speaker 3: is that, like a human beings, achievement in academics can
Speaker 3: be perfectly summarized and completely summarized by how they do
Speaker 3: on a standardized achievement test that takes a few hours.
Speaker 2: Right on, right on last part of this interview, let's
Speaker 2: leave on a positive note here talking about interventions, some
Speaker 2: exciting new interventions. You and your colleagues are working on
Speaker 2: some new potentially objective measures of grit. Just to throw
Speaker 2: something out there, I thought, really cool, you're developing some
Speaker 2: novel role playing interventions. Is that right?
Speaker 3: So the graduate student that I have who has been
Speaker 3: working on grit and how to change you know, either
Speaker 3: grit or some of the things that we think gritty
Speaker 3: people do, right, And that's a you know, maybe it's
Speaker 3: a nuanced distinction. But sometimes when we do things like
Speaker 3: get people to work a little harder and do more
Speaker 3: deliberate practice, which is one of the things I'll tell
Speaker 3: you about in a moment. You know, we don't know
Speaker 3: whether we want to say, oh, this person is definitely grittier,
Speaker 3: but we do want to say that, you know, when
Speaker 3: we measure deliberate practice, we can get people to do
Speaker 3: a little more of it over a certain you know,
Speaker 3: short time period, which is about as far as we've gotten.
Speaker 3: So this student is named Lauren s Chris Winkler. She
Speaker 3: came to me. She was a very very serious pianist
Speaker 3: during her whole childhood and adolescence, and she really had
Speaker 3: a very strong interest in the kind of hard practice
Speaker 3: that she had to do to become a skill that
Speaker 3: she did because she's really, really good. I think she's
Speaker 3: considered actually becoming a professional musician, but then decided to go,
Speaker 3: you know, the liberal arts route. And you know, she
Speaker 3: had this observation that after recitals, for example, people would
Speaker 3: you know, invariably come up to her and say, gosh, Lauren,
Speaker 3: you're so talented. You're just you have such a gift
Speaker 3: for music, and she tried to explain to them that
Speaker 3: she's practiced hours a day at the very limit of
Speaker 3: her ability. That's what deliberate practice is. To practice beyond
Speaker 3: where your current skills are, to get feedback on it,
Speaker 3: on what you've done, on what you've done wrong of course, right,
Speaker 3: how you've deviated from what you really want to do,
Speaker 3: and then to like reflect on that and experiment a
Speaker 3: little bit, and then you know, try practicing that whole
Speaker 3: piece over again, or just that passage, and then you're
Speaker 3: doing it over and over and over again for hours
Speaker 3: a day when you're really at the peak of your training,
Speaker 3: and to do that every day, and I mean, it's
Speaker 3: almost hard to explain in words like what that means
Speaker 3: it's like, you know, really imagine for yourself, sitting at
Speaker 3: the piano bend for hours a day doing what you
Speaker 3: cannot do, struggling with complete concentration, and then doing it again,
Speaker 3: you know, on Tuesday, and then doing it again on Wednesday,
Speaker 3: and for years. And that's what she did, and so
Speaker 3: she was really interested in that. Her intervention research, which
Speaker 3: she gets, you know, really the credit for not me
Speaker 3: is one of the studies that she going to publish
Speaker 3: very soon in JPSP is showing that if you teach
Speaker 3: non experts, in this case, you know, middle school kids,
Speaker 3: and she has some other samples too, but they're not selective,
Speaker 3: they're not like Olympic athletes. If you just teach them
Speaker 3: like what deliberate practice is and give them the evidence
Speaker 3: that you know, most people who do deliberate practice don't
Speaker 3: find it fun. They find that it's actually very frustrating
Speaker 3: because they're doing things and getting a lot of failure feedback.
Speaker 3: If they just knew that that, they might actually do
Speaker 3: more of it right, because it might make them feel
Speaker 3: that when they're confused and the way I think is
Speaker 3: really hard, well, that that's normal, not a sign that
Speaker 3: they can't learn, And so she's found in random assignment,
Speaker 3: placebo controlled longitudinal studies that she's able to increase the
Speaker 3: amount of deliberate practice and actually objective measures of achievement,
Speaker 3: especially among those who are sort of below the median,
Speaker 3: below average in their achievement or their skill coming into
Speaker 3: the experiment. Now she finds this effect, you know, is there,
Speaker 3: it's visible, it's reliable. You know, a month later, you know,
Speaker 3: if you go out and ask yourself, four months later,
Speaker 3: do these middle school kids continue to you know, work harder?
Speaker 3: The effect is now no longer reliable, So it's in
Speaker 3: the right direction, but it's not statistically significant. That makes
Speaker 3: us think that, like, yes, there's some psychological slack in
Speaker 3: the system, that you can get kids to work harder
Speaker 3: than they did and do better than they've done, But
Speaker 3: it's naive to think that a little intervention is going
Speaker 3: to change their beliefs and change the way they work forever.
Speaker 3: So we're not selling this as kind of like a
Speaker 3: thirty minute cure for a low grit personality, but we
Speaker 3: are saying that, like, wow, there might be potential in
Speaker 3: people that they're not realizing, and that if we had
Speaker 3: you know, a lot of reinforcement of these beliefs and practices,
Speaker 3: like if teachers knew this and you know, regularly reinforced
Speaker 3: it in the language that they used when they assigned,
Speaker 3: you know, homework, when they gave back pests to kids,
Speaker 3: that maybe that that effect would actually be able to
Speaker 3: be sustained. So that's one thing she's doing. And you
Speaker 3: had mentioned some other things that you know she's like
Speaker 3: about identity and so forth. Those are other directions that
Speaker 3: you know, we're also taking a happiness say more about those.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I'll link to some of your articles on
Speaker 2: the podcast show notes page so people can read that.
Speaker 2: And you know a lot of people have been using
Speaker 2: the character report card to measure so many things, and
Speaker 2: there's some other options for measuring grit. I know you're
Speaker 2: working on an academic diligence task, right, and so I'll
Speaker 2: put up, you know, as many resources I can so
Speaker 2: that people can get a better picture. So I want
Speaker 2: to thank you so much for talking to me today, Angela,
Speaker 2: and I consider you a friend as well as a colleague,
Speaker 2: and I really value the work you do. And I
Speaker 2: think you know you're going to be on book tour
Speaker 2: soon and you're going to blow up even more than
Speaker 2: you already have. I hope this was helpful as practice
Speaker 2: a little bit as well for the kind of criticisms
Speaker 2: you might get. And I hope I highlighted that your
Speaker 2: work does show a level of nuance that people might
Speaker 2: not be aware of.
Speaker 3: Well, thanks, Scott, I really create You're also a dear
Speaker 3: friend and a terrific thought partner. And I guess maybe
Speaker 3: in closing, let me say that, you know, I'm sure
Speaker 3: I'm wrong about a lot of things. That's what science
Speaker 3: is all about. I hope to be less wrong over time.
Speaker 3: But you know, the criticism is great, right. Criticism you
Speaker 3: know is not always correct, but sometimes is invariably makes
Speaker 3: you think about things a little more carefully and makes
Speaker 3: you learn more wonderful.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 3: Thank you all right, Thankscott, Thanks.
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