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