11 ms·

Is ‘grit’ overrated in explaining student success?

69 points by sonabinu 10y ago

bryanlarsen 10y ago
That reminds me of the Stanford marshmallow experiment: give a kid a marshmallow, and tell the kid that he can eat the marshmallow now, but if they can wait 15 minutes, they'll get two marshmallows. They found that there's an excellent correlation between the kids who wait and future life success. But it also turns out that there's also an excellent correlation between kids who eat the marshmallow without waiting and kids who grow up in an environment where adults don't keep promises...
- NhanH 10y ago
  > But it also turns out that there's also an excellent correlation between kids who eat the marshmallow without waiting and kids who grow up in an environment where adults don't keep promises... Citation for this please? I don't remember that being mentioned in the marshmallow paper.
  - bryanlarsen 10y ago
    From Wikipedia: "Marshmallow Test Revisited". University of Rochester. October 11, 2012. Kidd, Celeste; Palmeri, Holly; Aslin, Richard N. (2013). "Rational snacking: Young children's decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability". Cognition 126 (1): 109–114. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2012.08.004. PMC 3730121. PMID 23063236.
- dsfyu404ed 10y ago
  Don't forget that the perceived value of incentives varies. Tell the kid he'll get a bag of marshmallows and even if he thinks you're a liar he might wait the 15min. However, the kid that once got sick from eating a whole bag of marshmallows might not be so inclined to wait it out. The parallel being that kids who's parents went to college (graduated or not) and didn't move up in the world might not see paying attention in high school to be as valuable because "I'm going to be an electrician/whatever, I'm not going to college, I want to get to work and get paid" You see this in college too "I'm not going to grad school, I'll load up on classes/party it up, graduate and be done, C's get degrees, nobody cares about my transcript once I have the diploma"
- kittyfoofoo 10y ago
  For what it's worth, In the Marshmallow Test book, the author mentions that prior to the test, the experimenter spent 15 minutes interacting with the child to build trust. They gave the child a bell, and the researcher would explain that if the researcher left the room, the child could ding the bell to bring the researcher back. They'd do a few iterations of this, with the researcher promptly rushing back each time, in order to build trust. Perhaps not a complete solution, but the problem was at least addressed.
  - LionessLover 10y ago
    It seems to me that a one-time positive experience with one person hardly influences attitudes formed over a far longer period - and I don't even need to take into account yet that for evolutionary reasons negative signals have a much stronger influence than positive ones. So to me all this shows is that they were aware of the problem - I don't see that this shows that they did anything significant to address it.
  - Joof 10y ago
    How much can you retrain someone's brain in 15 minutes? That child's experiences are not wiped out.
- shanemhansen 10y ago
  Related: "An estimated 14.0 percent of American households were food insecure at least some time during the year in 2014," http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-report/err194.aspx http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r... I question the assumptions at the foundations of these experiments. What if the decision to eat a marshmallow when you have the chance is a good strategy for a large number of people? It's easy to imply that people just need a bit of grit and hard work to succeed in life, when maybe the conclusion we should draw is that poor people often have to live hand-to-mouth. Maybe if we want to increase future life success we should focus on improving the security of their environment instead of attempting to teach them to be grittier. I don't really know. Maybe they controlled for those variables. IANAS (I am not a scientist).
  - hyperpallium 10y ago
    parent is alluding to correlation vs causation. i.e. that their future life success may be caused by reliable adults.
- kelukelugames 10y ago
  I would eat the marshmallows immediately and then steal more. I stole food all of the time because my parents were too cheap to give me enough lunch money. They own a two million dollar house in Saratoga and my father is the CEO of a semiconductor company. Go figure. I'd be more successful in life if they didn't let me go hungry all of the time. At least be less bitter.
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tokenadult 10y ago
The personality psychologists I know tell me that Martin E. P. Seligman, the originator of the idea of "learned helplessness" and the author of helpful books such as The Optimistic Child, advised his student Angela Duckworth to call "grit" by that term as a marketing move to make people pay more attention to the idea. In the psychology literature, people have been writing for a long time about the personality dimension "conscientiousness," and grit is very little distinguishable from that. I'm a homeschooling parent of four children, and it's plain as day to me (and consistent with all the statistics in the research literature) that conscientiousness matters at the margins. Two equally smart children (per IQ test), one conscientious, one less conscientious, will differ in life outcomes. Everyone knows that. The HUGE question that is well worth investigating is how much parenting or good teaching or anything else can change a young learner's level of conscientiousness. Conscientiousness changes over the course of life, so it isn't completely fixed for anyone. It varies (somewhat) among identical twins, so environmental influences do matter in development of a given degree of conscientiousness. But so far we don't know a lot yet about what kind of parenting or what kind of teaching might work best to develop conscientiousness. That's well worth learning about. Calling it "grit" is regrettable because that prompts people to neglect the prior research literature. AFTER EDIT: Comments below this comment asked for definitions of "conscientiousness." I'll put a few links here. http://pages.uoregon.edu/sanjay/bigfive.html http://pages.uoregon.edu/sanjay/bigfive.html http://http-server.carleton.ca/~tpychyl/011382000/BigFive.html http://http-server.carleton.ca/~tpychyl/011382000/BigFive.ht... http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/popkins.html http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/popkins.html
- pietro 10y ago
  I lost most of my "grit" in a split second when I was hit by a car at age 17. Until that moment, I was amazingly conscientious, and combined with a very high IQ it was logical to assume that I'd do very well in life. I still have the same IQ, but I can't for the life of me finish an education, save money, or eat the dessert last. Apparently, "grit" is dependent on functions located somewhere in the left frontal lobe [1], and if you damage that particular part of the brain, no amount of training can bring it back to what it was. After years of training and therapy, I'm still essentially a reckless, gifted child. I've learned wonderful tricks to keep me on track in life, but they only get me so far. I suspect that parenting has a similar effect to my training: It teaches the tricks, but doesn't address the underlying reality of sheer, physiological ability. [1]: Probably the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
brianwawok 10y ago
Podcast on the topic and interview with the same author http://freakonomics.com/podcast/grit/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/grit/ I am not sure what I think. There is a definite correlation between grit and success. The people that try to do something once and quit are the people I know that are, 15 years after high school, working at the local pizza shack. The people I know that could try and try and try to get something done, are the pizza now doctors and programmers and lawyers. But I also know that most of the people I see as gritty had the "better" parents. So maybe it was indeed a trailing indicator.
dsfyu404ed 10y ago
Of course 'grit' correlates with success in an environment where the payoff is way beyond the horizon, things are hard and there's ample opportunities to bail. Of course it matters much less if the payoff is visible, things are easy and there's things in place to prevent/dissuade people from bailing out. Seems obvious to me.
blfr 10y ago
Yes. Every factor is overrated, except genetics which is greatly underrated. Our culture demands that we do not accept "biological determinism" and so everything else needs to be (rhetorically) stretched to cover for it. That's how we get papers and thinkpieces on grit, stereotype threat, etc. These will be found to have minimal impact if the findings are replicated at all and so new factors will need to be invented. Anecdotes from the OP aren't particularly damning but you can already see the authors angling to be the ones who feed the next cycle.
- AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
  I would expect grit to be largely the result of heritable factors, so I wouldn't say grit is overrated.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  I don't know why you're so confident this is settled. Clearly, at the extreme, someone who receives no education at all is going to be extremely hobbled in a modern society no matter how intelligent he is. At the other extreme, the best education in the world won't turn someone suffering from severe intellectual disability into a genius. But there is a large range between these and it is not really so clear, to me, that the balance is tipped so heavily in favor of genetics.
  - chongli 10y ago
    It's easier to see what's going on if you look at sports. Thousands of basketball players have received the best training, nutrition, and coaching that money can buy yet there is still a huge gap between top players like Curry or James and the rest of the field. We can talk about grit, perseverance, determination, etc. until we're blue in the face but all else being equal, talent will be the deciding factor.
    - CuriouslyC 10y ago
      Here's the thing about pro sports. There are less than 500 people who play professional basketball. The distribution of basketball playing skill is logarithmic, so there might be 5,000 people with 90% of the skill of pro players, 50,000 people with 80% of the skill, etc. As a result, even if the total difference in skill resulting from talent is small, because the number of people who play basketball is so large and the number of pro players is so small, the pro ranks are going to be filled with only the most talented people. Does that mean just because you're not naturally talented that you can't become a phenomenal basketball player? No, unless you're really short/unathletic, with enough hard work and intelligence you can probably achieve the 90% of pro skill level, which is still really freaking good. Unfortunately, most people are more motivated by the desire to be pro than the love of playing basketball, so when they are eclipsed by more talented people (a good sign you aren't going to be able to go pro) they give up and do something else. The good news is that in most areas of life, all that matters is how good you are, and there isn't some artificially cutoff goodness below which your skill is pointless and wasted. For this reason the professional sports analogy is usually unnecessarily demotivating.
emodendroket 10y ago
"Grit" is the latest pop-psych trend that will eventually fade away.
moyix 10y ago
Perhaps I misunderstood the article, but taking a collection of anecdotes (n = 36) about highly successful people who took a wide variety of paths to success doesn't seem like a very good way to attack the concept of grit. For one thing, extremely successful people are likely to be outliers in many ways, and so it may not be wise to generalize their advice. It's unfortunate, because I think grit does have real issues: it seems that a large number of studies have found that it doesn't add anything over the existing concept of conscientiousness: http://scottbarrykaufman.com/study-alert-much-ado-grit-meta-analytic-synthesis-grit-literature/ http://scottbarrykaufman.com/study-alert-much-ado-grit-meta-... http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/05/angela_duckworth_says_grit_is_the_key_to_success_in_work_and_life_is_this.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...
projectramo 10y ago
"overrated" implies an estimate of rating that diverges from the actual baseline. For this, we have to know how people rate grit in importance. There is pendulum where for a few years people will have "under estimated" intelligence, or patience, or genetics, or friends, or parents. These articles come out, and suddenly everyone "overrates" those factors to the detriment of others. Then the article moves on to the underrated factor. Unless people are actually ascribing various quantities to these factors, I don't know how "under" or "over" the estimates are from the actual influence of the factors.
thebigspacefuck 10y ago
"In each case, what we found is that they started down one path because they thought that was what they were supposed to do, and then at some point they realized that they didn’t like that path at all,” Rose said. “During that period, they fell into something else and made a series of choices that led them to success.” This describes me exactly. I'm one of those people that never knew what they wanted to do and spent a lot of time just thinking about it and being worried about my future. After switching colleges once, majors 4 times, and seriously considering dropping out more than a couple of times, I finally landed on something that felt right enough I could force myself to get through when it was hard, without it feeling pointless. I found true motivation. My internal and external worlds aligned and I rocked it. Unfortunately I think that feeling only lasted through getting my current job and I'm now back to contemplating the pointlessness/morality of my work day in and day out. The ultimate goal of my work is to replace people in a call center, to automate their jobs so they don't have to be hired anymore. I don't think I'll feel right about it until we figure out basic guaranteed incomes and what people are supposed to do to live if they don't work and all the Player Piano(Vonnegut) kind of stuff nobody talks about when they're just thinking about making money. If you're working on something that you're passionate about, that is truly changing the world for the better, please let me know. I'd love to work on something and have no doubts about what I'm doing with my life again.
- LionessLover 10y ago
  Doubt is good! As an extreme example, remember how at the end of the war Nazis committed suicide, and it happened on all levels, not just the very prominent examples like Göbbels that everybody knows about? It wasn't because they were afraid of being judged (there were plenty of them who managed to escape justice), it often was because they were so convinced of their cause that when it failed they saw no future, nit just for themselves - they actually thought it was the end for the German people's future. So please keep your doubt. The more I learn - and I've taken courses like crazy over the last couple of years - the more I doubt. It#s just that now my doubt is more specific. So what you may want to do is replace "unspecific doubt" like the one exhibited in conspiracy theories by much more specific doubt. Donn't try to abandon doubt itself! Also, life inherently only has exactly the meaning you decide it has, so looking outside yourself is prone to failure. Also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4CvFWCULuI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4CvFWCULuI :-) Seriously, as soon as you look for something on the outside to tell you what you should do you limit yourself and start on a path to failure - because now, instead of taking responsibility for your choices you will say "but I had no choice!".
projectramo 10y ago
I am waiting for the grand reveal where we learn that luck is the dominant factor in success.
- LionessLover 10y ago
  Add "environment" and we may have something here. After all, ones own determination and attitudes are significantly influenced by environment. A long article was very recently posted either here or on reddit - was it the Washington Post? Don't remember unfortunately - about mass murderers. It looked at the actual research and tried to dispel myths like "they are all mentally ill, so if we just fix health care for mental illness to discover such people early we can solve much of the problem". The actual statistics showed that less than 10% of mass murderers (I think that was "more than two") had a treatable mental illness. Turned out that the major determining factor instead was "environment". Of course, individual factors such as certain personality traits play a role - but they are the same ones that can be found in successful people (it helps to be "full of yourself" and not dwell too much on what other people think, unless it's important for your own success). Whether such traits make you a murderer depends on your environment much more so than anything else. And here we get to "luck": Environment is a lot of luck, the initial settings matter most of all (the womb you crawled out of). Environment can greatly enhance - or dampen - whatever you inherited genetically. Who will do better, an Einstein born in a favela of Rio de Janeiro surrounded by gangs, or an average guy born to wealthy parents? Example: G.W Bush... Those are extreme examples, but even if you only look at relatively equal American middle class examples, but one ends up in a group of peers mostly interested in girls and booze, the other one in a group of kids with more academic parents and more interest in learning than party will be influenced by the group.
- forrestthewoods 10y ago
  Lucky to be born in the United States? Sure! Lucky to not have gotten cancer? Yup. Lucky to have not been hurt in a random automobile accident? I was such a stupid driver in high school. Lucky to have not lost my mind as many males do in their late teens/early 20s? Oh god yes. Lucky to have the good friends that I have? Still yes. Had I simply sat on the other side of the room of CS101 I'd have joined a different project team and have had different friends in school and to this day. Lucky to be a gainfully employed programmer on salary? I feel I could do that 10 out of 10 times. Or 9 out of 10 times if it helps the conversation. In different realities I'd work at different companies. Specialized my talents differently. Probably even live in a different city. Definitely have a different partner. But I'd have a good job somewhere. In that I'm confident. I've been "unlucky" in that no project I've ever worked on has ever blown up. Never seen a fat bonus. I've still drive the same 1999 Volkswagen Jetta I got in 2004. No fancy car for me. No lucky stock options that hit it big. I'm arguably lucky to be a programmer. Born in a good year for it. But I don't think I'm lucky to have a good job that pays well. If I were born a few years earlier I'd simply have picked a different career. I could have been a lawyer. Or a mechanical engineer. Even a doctor. I find a lot of things interesting. For careers I'd have always picked something interesting that pays well. I like teaching people quite a lot. But it doesn't pay well. So it was never a consideration. If teachers averaged 6 figures it'd have been on my short list as well.
rubenolivares 10y ago
Is it really that hard to understand success? Right person at the right place at the right time. Seriously, it's a very old idea.
- scottious 10y ago
  Not sure if you're trolling or being facetious or whatever... but I'll bite... that's a gross over-simplification, don't you think? I think the whole point is to get a better idea of what it means to be "the right person". What kind of traits can we develop to make ourselves more likely to be "the right person"? Nobody is sitting on the couch all day crossing their fingers hoping that they're the right person to create a tech startup, for example.
ColinDabritz 10y ago
Alfie Kohn has some good commentary on the topic of 'grit' as an educational philosophy: http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/downside-grit/ http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/downside-grit/ It's not just overrated, it can be actively harmful. He goes further on this and other topics in the book "The Myth of the Spoiled Child"
throw7 10y ago
If 'grit' replaces 'passionate' I'm all in. I was tired of hearing about passionate people 10 years ago. Bout time for a change.
martimoose 10y ago
A test that assesses the future success of West Point candidates might not be valid in assessing the future success of, say, a programmer or a lawyer. It does not necessarily takes the same thing to succeed in the military than to succeed in other spheres. I know of a lot of people who don't have that "grit", and would therefore probably fail at West Point, but they did not in that particular thing that they're doing.
useful 10y ago
Isn't this just type 2 (slow) thinking? The "grit" required to focus on complex tasks is the same brain function as ability to suffer for long periods during exercise, problem solving, etc. Many books and science cover this subject, I can think of two, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and "Iron War".
epalmer 10y ago
What a horrible article. The title talks about grit but then they commingled the 10,000 hour mastery concept into the conversation. > “Things like grit and 10,000 hours are mindsets that are very misleading because they are consequences not causes — they are lagging indicators of performance,” said Todd Rose, who is the author of The End of Average, a book that illustrates how averages are flawed in understanding human achievement. If we take grit to be "fire-in-the-belly" I have observed as a parent, mentor/coach of high school and adults and high performing team lead that it has several characteristics that a parent, coach, mentor, manager and even peer should be aware of. I like the "fire" analogy. As a parent I can put water on my child's fire and put it out. I can be over-bearing, abusive etc. As a manager there are many things I can do to do the same like micro manage them. As a parent I can help flame the fire (think adding fuel and oxygen). I can give them earned respect, greater levels of responsibilities and coach them with a growth mindset. I have parented, managed and mentored with an intention to make the flame lager since I first had a manager responsibility and discussed this concept with Dr. Michael Stonebreaker in the early 1980s. So far it has seemed to work for me. Genetics and early environment seems to me to be very important to starting life with a fire-in-the-belly. But what gets done with that by the individual and those that have some control over their paths early on makes a big difference. But let us not forget that to be good at engineering, for example, one has to be able to conceptualize and visualize in their minds-eye. Having grit does not make up for that. Having both is a killer for success. My observations only and yes they are not scientific.
alexc05 10y ago
I worked for 5 years as a high school teacher. In my observation, the "smartest kid in class" could be left in the dust by a "dumb kid" who decided to work hard. I use quotes because it does raise the question of who is really the smart one there. In this case, I do mean that the smart kid was the one who immediately showed an understanding of the material and could demonstrate proficiency sometimes beyond the course material... but was too lazy to actually hand in his work. The other kid needed massive amounts of extra attention, came in every day at lunch to see if he could just put a bit more time in, handed in the work six times with improvements each time... he crushed it. If anything, `grit` would be underrated in measuring student success if we pegged it at 100% of the variance. That said, "student success" is only one measure and is, in a number of ways, wildly artificial. There was an adage to the effect of "you only learn what you pay attention to", but in this case we might also say "you're only graded on what you do" If student success is measured in grades, and you're only graded on what you do, then doing work (aka: grit) is the only thing that matters.
- lintiness 10y ago
  "I worked for 5 years as a high school teacher. In my observation, the "smartest kid in class" could be left in the dust by a "dumb kid" who decided to work hard." my experience as a student at top 5 ugrad was similar: kids with top hs grades and work ethic destroyed the truly brilliant students (with top test scores) in terms of academic performance.
  - Joof 10y ago
    It's not that surprising considering the metrics that school uses.
  - emp_zealoth 10y ago
    I crushed HS. Admitted to top Polish technical uni, dropped out due to health/mental issues I fail at uni hard. But in part it is because how terrible the whole process is. I spend more time trying to find relevant-to-exam-information than actually learning stuff. You literally sit for hours on end, listening to someone drone on. The exams themselves aren't particularly relevant either. I usually get passing grades, maybe a B+. The hard workers get A's...but when you ask them to explain anything they just derp hard. I will ace almost any actual project. I've signed up for a Rover Challenge team and learned so much more already... I constantly regret that my knowledge is rather rickety/shallow But at the same time it's rather wide-encompassing The point is, "academic achievement" is rather moot, IMO. You pick up tools, a soldering iron and suddenly learn there is much more to it
BuckRogers 10y ago
No. Not even close. I consider myself of average intelligence, I knew a lot of more intelligent people than me in my life. Some of them are even using meth now. I succeed because I stick to things, follow through, take pride in what I do and make sure I do as well as I can. I was not an exceptional student, would have been but I worked 35 hours a week while attending college 12-19 hours a week plus studying till the library closed Sunday through Thursday. I may not be a ninja developer or whatever but I'd honestly put money on myself over some genius-flake. And if someone has grit + genius... well, watch out because it would be amazing to see in action. Maybe that's Einstein in his later years. I'm sure everyone with a high IQ believes that description fits them, but in general geniuses don't have to try very hard so they never know what 'grit' is. Or what it takes for the rest of us. I do think grit is partially taught in ways that are completely non-related to mental exercise. I grew up in the midwest in a house with no air conditioning because my father thought it would make us soft to have it. Thankfully the old man did buy us a Commodore. Yes, it gets hot in the midwest- just as hot as anywhere else in the summer. I was even raised in cloth diapers and I'm under 35... to give an idea of how old school. They also made sure I always worked, been working without lapse since I was 12 years old. I've worked on a hog farm in the July heat from 4AM-noon. While I was born in 82, I don't feel like a 'Millennial' at all. I feel like a very gritty person mentally and physically that is rare anymore but has paid off in ways. But definitely feel more in common with my brother's generation (born in '78, GenX) or maybe even older, less pampered gen. From my perspective, American society is severely missing grit. People are going to have to toughen up because this softie society won't last forever. But I don't think people know the difference between false posturing tough guy aggression based on insecurity is and what real grit means. Too much tough guy gangster rap for the lower class and too many get-rich-quit-or-I-give-up flakes in the more fortunate classes. I've heard multiple people in my lifetime tell me they "won't go to work for less than $15 an hour" or won't get out of bed for less than that. I've suffered years through horrible jobs to build a resume. Just to appear reliable, which I am. Most people don't know what it takes to get ahead for those without lots of money and without a naturally high IQ. Sometimes it sucks but lays the groundwork for later on. It's about character.
thomasmarriott 10y ago
No.
Joof 10y ago
For education, it matters. There are no choices or pivots available to a student; they have one path available to them in most cases. For life, it may not matter. You have more options to find something where you excel more easily or are more passionate about something.
fiatmoney 10y ago
It's hilarious how the educational establishment tries to take well-known concepts with a rich psychological and psychometric history behind them, rebrand them, decide they're the Most Important Thing Ever for three years or so, and then toss them for the next thing. They usually pretend along the way that the same people haven't been in charge of the educational establishment for 60 years or so, and that the present state of education is some sort of test-driven Korean drill-and-kill dystopia, to which the latest fad is a breath of fresh air. "Conscientiousness" is the term of art. It's part of the Big 5 personality model ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits ) which has its own various promoters and refuters. Inasmuch as the literature is contradictory it's because it's not a model that works super well for actually doing stuff, beyond marginal effects (more conscientious worker == better, all else equal) & tautologies (hard workers work hard and do better at hard jobs that reward hard work).
djscram 10y ago
As someone with ADHD, I have spent a lot of my life trying to have more grit. In fact, I did make it through some difficult programs, the navy nuclear power program and Georgetown Law, prior to being diagnosed. But I always came across like I wasn't trying. I wanted desperately to try, but didn't understand that my mind couldn't just add grit on demand. (though if I managed to get myself in enough of a bind, the adrenaline did help). Somewhere along the line (before being diagnosed), I came to see things like grit as a moral judgement--one that I consistently failed.
RubyRuby 10y ago
Regardless of whether you believe in measuring success by "grit", the simple quiz referenced in the article is definitely intriguing. Another point raised in this article is the idea of being able to focus on one task/goal until it's completed. Learning to multitask definitely detracts from one's ability to focus on single tasks/goals and make true progress. However, in my college and high school experiences, the structures didn't stress these common sense principles for learning enough.

69 points by sonabinu 10y ago

That reminds me of the Stanford marshmallow experiment: give a kid a marshmallow, and tell the kid that he can eat the marshmallow now, but if they can wait 15 minutes, they'll get two marshmallows. They found that there's an excellent correlation between the kids who wait and future life success. But it also turns out that there's also an excellent correlation between kids who eat the marshmallow without waiting and kids who grow up in an environment where adults don't keep promises...

NhanH 10y ago
> But it also turns out that there's also an excellent correlation between kids who eat the marshmallow without waiting and kids who grow up in an environment where adults don't keep promises... Citation for this please? I don't remember that being mentioned in the marshmallow paper.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  From Wikipedia: "Marshmallow Test Revisited". University of Rochester. October 11, 2012. Kidd, Celeste; Palmeri, Holly; Aslin, Richard N. (2013). "Rational snacking: Young children's decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability". Cognition 126 (1): 109–114. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2012.08.004. PMC 3730121. PMID 23063236.
dsfyu404ed 10y ago
Don't forget that the perceived value of incentives varies. Tell the kid he'll get a bag of marshmallows and even if he thinks you're a liar he might wait the 15min. However, the kid that once got sick from eating a whole bag of marshmallows might not be so inclined to wait it out. The parallel being that kids who's parents went to college (graduated or not) and didn't move up in the world might not see paying attention in high school to be as valuable because "I'm going to be an electrician/whatever, I'm not going to college, I want to get to work and get paid" You see this in college too "I'm not going to grad school, I'll load up on classes/party it up, graduate and be done, C's get degrees, nobody cares about my transcript once I have the diploma"
kittyfoofoo 10y ago
For what it's worth, In the Marshmallow Test book, the author mentions that prior to the test, the experimenter spent 15 minutes interacting with the child to build trust. They gave the child a bell, and the researcher would explain that if the researcher left the room, the child could ding the bell to bring the researcher back. They'd do a few iterations of this, with the researcher promptly rushing back each time, in order to build trust. Perhaps not a complete solution, but the problem was at least addressed.
- LionessLover 10y ago
  It seems to me that a one-time positive experience with one person hardly influences attitudes formed over a far longer period - and I don't even need to take into account yet that for evolutionary reasons negative signals have a much stronger influence than positive ones. So to me all this shows is that they were aware of the problem - I don't see that this shows that they did anything significant to address it.
- Joof 10y ago
  How much can you retrain someone's brain in 15 minutes? That child's experiences are not wiped out.
shanemhansen 10y ago
Related: "An estimated 14.0 percent of American households were food insecure at least some time during the year in 2014," http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-report/err194.aspx http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r... I question the assumptions at the foundations of these experiments. What if the decision to eat a marshmallow when you have the chance is a good strategy for a large number of people? It's easy to imply that people just need a bit of grit and hard work to succeed in life, when maybe the conclusion we should draw is that poor people often have to live hand-to-mouth. Maybe if we want to increase future life success we should focus on improving the security of their environment instead of attempting to teach them to be grittier. I don't really know. Maybe they controlled for those variables. IANAS (I am not a scientist).
- hyperpallium 10y ago
  parent is alluding to correlation vs causation. i.e. that their future life success may be caused by reliable adults.
kelukelugames 10y ago
I would eat the marshmallows immediately and then steal more. I stole food all of the time because my parents were too cheap to give me enough lunch money. They own a two million dollar house in Saratoga and my father is the CEO of a semiconductor company. Go figure. I'd be more successful in life if they didn't let me go hungry all of the time. At least be less bitter.
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tokenadult 10y ago

The personality psychologists I know tell me that Martin E. P. Seligman, the originator of the idea of "learned helplessness" and the author of helpful books such as The Optimistic Child, advised his student Angela Duckworth to call "grit" by that term as a marketing move to make people pay more attention to the idea. In the psychology literature, people have been writing for a long time about the personality dimension "conscientiousness," and grit is very little distinguishable from that. I'm a homeschooling parent of four children, and it's plain as day to me (and consistent with all the statistics in the research literature) that conscientiousness matters at the margins. Two equally smart children (per IQ test), one conscientious, one less conscientious, will differ in life outcomes. Everyone knows that. The HUGE question that is well worth investigating is how much parenting or good teaching or anything else can change a young learner's level of conscientiousness. Conscientiousness changes over the course of life, so it isn't completely fixed for anyone. It varies (somewhat) among identical twins, so environmental influences do matter in development of a given degree of conscientiousness. But so far we don't know a lot yet about what kind of parenting or what kind of teaching might work best to develop conscientiousness. That's well worth learning about. Calling it "grit" is regrettable because that prompts people to neglect the prior research literature. AFTER EDIT: Comments below this comment asked for definitions of "conscientiousness." I'll put a few links here. http://pages.uoregon.edu/sanjay/bigfive.html http://pages.uoregon.edu/sanjay/bigfive.html http://http-server.carleton.ca/~tpychyl/011382000/BigFive.html http://http-server.carleton.ca/~tpychyl/011382000/BigFive.ht... http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/popkins.html http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/popkins.html

pietro 10y ago
I lost most of my "grit" in a split second when I was hit by a car at age 17. Until that moment, I was amazingly conscientious, and combined with a very high IQ it was logical to assume that I'd do very well in life. I still have the same IQ, but I can't for the life of me finish an education, save money, or eat the dessert last. Apparently, "grit" is dependent on functions located somewhere in the left frontal lobe [1], and if you damage that particular part of the brain, no amount of training can bring it back to what it was. After years of training and therapy, I'm still essentially a reckless, gifted child. I've learned wonderful tricks to keep me on track in life, but they only get me so far. I suspect that parenting has a similar effect to my training: It teaches the tricks, but doesn't address the underlying reality of sheer, physiological ability. [1]: Probably the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

brianwawok 10y ago

Podcast on the topic and interview with the same author http://freakonomics.com/podcast/grit/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/grit/ I am not sure what I think. There is a definite correlation between grit and success. The people that try to do something once and quit are the people I know that are, 15 years after high school, working at the local pizza shack. The people I know that could try and try and try to get something done, are the pizza now doctors and programmers and lawyers. But I also know that most of the people I see as gritty had the "better" parents. So maybe it was indeed a trailing indicator.

dsfyu404ed 10y ago

Of course 'grit' correlates with success in an environment where the payoff is way beyond the horizon, things are hard and there's ample opportunities to bail. Of course it matters much less if the payoff is visible, things are easy and there's things in place to prevent/dissuade people from bailing out. Seems obvious to me.

blfr 10y ago

Yes. Every factor is overrated, except genetics which is greatly underrated. Our culture demands that we do not accept "biological determinism" and so everything else needs to be (rhetorically) stretched to cover for it. That's how we get papers and thinkpieces on grit, stereotype threat, etc. These will be found to have minimal impact if the findings are replicated at all and so new factors will need to be invented. Anecdotes from the OP aren't particularly damning but you can already see the authors angling to be the ones who feed the next cycle.

AlgorithmicTime 10y ago
I would expect grit to be largely the result of heritable factors, so I wouldn't say grit is overrated.
emodendroket 10y ago
I don't know why you're so confident this is settled. Clearly, at the extreme, someone who receives no education at all is going to be extremely hobbled in a modern society no matter how intelligent he is. At the other extreme, the best education in the world won't turn someone suffering from severe intellectual disability into a genius. But there is a large range between these and it is not really so clear, to me, that the balance is tipped so heavily in favor of genetics.
- chongli 10y ago
  It's easier to see what's going on if you look at sports. Thousands of basketball players have received the best training, nutrition, and coaching that money can buy yet there is still a huge gap between top players like Curry or James and the rest of the field. We can talk about grit, perseverance, determination, etc. until we're blue in the face but all else being equal, talent will be the deciding factor.
  - CuriouslyC 10y ago
    Here's the thing about pro sports. There are less than 500 people who play professional basketball. The distribution of basketball playing skill is logarithmic, so there might be 5,000 people with 90% of the skill of pro players, 50,000 people with 80% of the skill, etc. As a result, even if the total difference in skill resulting from talent is small, because the number of people who play basketball is so large and the number of pro players is so small, the pro ranks are going to be filled with only the most talented people. Does that mean just because you're not naturally talented that you can't become a phenomenal basketball player? No, unless you're really short/unathletic, with enough hard work and intelligence you can probably achieve the 90% of pro skill level, which is still really freaking good. Unfortunately, most people are more motivated by the desire to be pro than the love of playing basketball, so when they are eclipsed by more talented people (a good sign you aren't going to be able to go pro) they give up and do something else. The good news is that in most areas of life, all that matters is how good you are, and there isn't some artificially cutoff goodness below which your skill is pointless and wasted. For this reason the professional sports analogy is usually unnecessarily demotivating.

emodendroket 10y ago

"Grit" is the latest pop-psych trend that will eventually fade away.

moyix 10y ago

Perhaps I misunderstood the article, but taking a collection of anecdotes (n = 36) about highly successful people who took a wide variety of paths to success doesn't seem like a very good way to attack the concept of grit. For one thing, extremely successful people are likely to be outliers in many ways, and so it may not be wise to generalize their advice. It's unfortunate, because I think grit does have real issues: it seems that a large number of studies have found that it doesn't add anything over the existing concept of conscientiousness: http://scottbarrykaufman.com/study-alert-much-ado-grit-meta-analytic-synthesis-grit-literature/ http://scottbarrykaufman.com/study-alert-much-ado-grit-meta-... http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story/2016/05/angela_duckworth_says_grit_is_the_key_to_success_in_work_and_life_is_this.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...

projectramo 10y ago

"overrated" implies an estimate of rating that diverges from the actual baseline. For this, we have to know how people rate grit in importance. There is pendulum where for a few years people will have "under estimated" intelligence, or patience, or genetics, or friends, or parents. These articles come out, and suddenly everyone "overrates" those factors to the detriment of others. Then the article moves on to the underrated factor. Unless people are actually ascribing various quantities to these factors, I don't know how "under" or "over" the estimates are from the actual influence of the factors.

thebigspacefuck 10y ago

"In each case, what we found is that they started down one path because they thought that was what they were supposed to do, and then at some point they realized that they didn’t like that path at all,” Rose said. “During that period, they fell into something else and made a series of choices that led them to success.” This describes me exactly. I'm one of those people that never knew what they wanted to do and spent a lot of time just thinking about it and being worried about my future. After switching colleges once, majors 4 times, and seriously considering dropping out more than a couple of times, I finally landed on something that felt right enough I could force myself to get through when it was hard, without it feeling pointless. I found true motivation. My internal and external worlds aligned and I rocked it. Unfortunately I think that feeling only lasted through getting my current job and I'm now back to contemplating the pointlessness/morality of my work day in and day out. The ultimate goal of my work is to replace people in a call center, to automate their jobs so they don't have to be hired anymore. I don't think I'll feel right about it until we figure out basic guaranteed incomes and what people are supposed to do to live if they don't work and all the Player Piano(Vonnegut) kind of stuff nobody talks about when they're just thinking about making money. If you're working on something that you're passionate about, that is truly changing the world for the better, please let me know. I'd love to work on something and have no doubts about what I'm doing with my life again.

LionessLover 10y ago
Doubt is good! As an extreme example, remember how at the end of the war Nazis committed suicide, and it happened on all levels, not just the very prominent examples like Göbbels that everybody knows about? It wasn't because they were afraid of being judged (there were plenty of them who managed to escape justice), it often was because they were so convinced of their cause that when it failed they saw no future, nit just for themselves - they actually thought it was the end for the German people's future. So please keep your doubt. The more I learn - and I've taken courses like crazy over the last couple of years - the more I doubt. It#s just that now my doubt is more specific. So what you may want to do is replace "unspecific doubt" like the one exhibited in conspiracy theories by much more specific doubt. Donn't try to abandon doubt itself! Also, life inherently only has exactly the meaning you decide it has, so looking outside yourself is prone to failure. Also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4CvFWCULuI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4CvFWCULuI :-) Seriously, as soon as you look for something on the outside to tell you what you should do you limit yourself and start on a path to failure - because now, instead of taking responsibility for your choices you will say "but I had no choice!".

projectramo 10y ago

I am waiting for the grand reveal where we learn that luck is the dominant factor in success.

LionessLover 10y ago
Add "environment" and we may have something here. After all, ones own determination and attitudes are significantly influenced by environment. A long article was very recently posted either here or on reddit - was it the Washington Post? Don't remember unfortunately - about mass murderers. It looked at the actual research and tried to dispel myths like "they are all mentally ill, so if we just fix health care for mental illness to discover such people early we can solve much of the problem". The actual statistics showed that less than 10% of mass murderers (I think that was "more than two") had a treatable mental illness. Turned out that the major determining factor instead was "environment". Of course, individual factors such as certain personality traits play a role - but they are the same ones that can be found in successful people (it helps to be "full of yourself" and not dwell too much on what other people think, unless it's important for your own success). Whether such traits make you a murderer depends on your environment much more so than anything else. And here we get to "luck": Environment is a lot of luck, the initial settings matter most of all (the womb you crawled out of). Environment can greatly enhance - or dampen - whatever you inherited genetically. Who will do better, an Einstein born in a favela of Rio de Janeiro surrounded by gangs, or an average guy born to wealthy parents? Example: G.W Bush... Those are extreme examples, but even if you only look at relatively equal American middle class examples, but one ends up in a group of peers mostly interested in girls and booze, the other one in a group of kids with more academic parents and more interest in learning than party will be influenced by the group.
forrestthewoods 10y ago
Lucky to be born in the United States? Sure! Lucky to not have gotten cancer? Yup. Lucky to have not been hurt in a random automobile accident? I was such a stupid driver in high school. Lucky to have not lost my mind as many males do in their late teens/early 20s? Oh god yes. Lucky to have the good friends that I have? Still yes. Had I simply sat on the other side of the room of CS101 I'd have joined a different project team and have had different friends in school and to this day. Lucky to be a gainfully employed programmer on salary? I feel I could do that 10 out of 10 times. Or 9 out of 10 times if it helps the conversation. In different realities I'd work at different companies. Specialized my talents differently. Probably even live in a different city. Definitely have a different partner. But I'd have a good job somewhere. In that I'm confident. I've been "unlucky" in that no project I've ever worked on has ever blown up. Never seen a fat bonus. I've still drive the same 1999 Volkswagen Jetta I got in 2004. No fancy car for me. No lucky stock options that hit it big. I'm arguably lucky to be a programmer. Born in a good year for it. But I don't think I'm lucky to have a good job that pays well. If I were born a few years earlier I'd simply have picked a different career. I could have been a lawyer. Or a mechanical engineer. Even a doctor. I find a lot of things interesting. For careers I'd have always picked something interesting that pays well. I like teaching people quite a lot. But it doesn't pay well. So it was never a consideration. If teachers averaged 6 figures it'd have been on my short list as well.

rubenolivares 10y ago

Is it really that hard to understand success? Right person at the right place at the right time. Seriously, it's a very old idea.

scottious 10y ago
Not sure if you're trolling or being facetious or whatever... but I'll bite... that's a gross over-simplification, don't you think? I think the whole point is to get a better idea of what it means to be "the right person". What kind of traits can we develop to make ourselves more likely to be "the right person"? Nobody is sitting on the couch all day crossing their fingers hoping that they're the right person to create a tech startup, for example.

ColinDabritz 10y ago

Alfie Kohn has some good commentary on the topic of 'grit' as an educational philosophy: http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/downside-grit/ http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/downside-grit/ It's not just overrated, it can be actively harmful. He goes further on this and other topics in the book "The Myth of the Spoiled Child"

throw7 10y ago

If 'grit' replaces 'passionate' I'm all in. I was tired of hearing about passionate people 10 years ago. Bout time for a change.

martimoose 10y ago

A test that assesses the future success of West Point candidates might not be valid in assessing the future success of, say, a programmer or a lawyer. It does not necessarily takes the same thing to succeed in the military than to succeed in other spheres. I know of a lot of people who don't have that "grit", and would therefore probably fail at West Point, but they did not in that particular thing that they're doing.

useful 10y ago

Isn't this just type 2 (slow) thinking? The "grit" required to focus on complex tasks is the same brain function as ability to suffer for long periods during exercise, problem solving, etc. Many books and science cover this subject, I can think of two, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" and "Iron War".

epalmer 10y ago

What a horrible article. The title talks about grit but then they commingled the 10,000 hour mastery concept into the conversation. > “Things like grit and 10,000 hours are mindsets that are very misleading because they are consequences not causes — they are lagging indicators of performance,” said Todd Rose, who is the author of The End of Average, a book that illustrates how averages are flawed in understanding human achievement. If we take grit to be "fire-in-the-belly" I have observed as a parent, mentor/coach of high school and adults and high performing team lead that it has several characteristics that a parent, coach, mentor, manager and even peer should be aware of. I like the "fire" analogy. As a parent I can put water on my child's fire and put it out. I can be over-bearing, abusive etc. As a manager there are many things I can do to do the same like micro manage them. As a parent I can help flame the fire (think adding fuel and oxygen). I can give them earned respect, greater levels of responsibilities and coach them with a growth mindset. I have parented, managed and mentored with an intention to make the flame lager since I first had a manager responsibility and discussed this concept with Dr. Michael Stonebreaker in the early 1980s. So far it has seemed to work for me. Genetics and early environment seems to me to be very important to starting life with a fire-in-the-belly. But what gets done with that by the individual and those that have some control over their paths early on makes a big difference. But let us not forget that to be good at engineering, for example, one has to be able to conceptualize and visualize in their minds-eye. Having grit does not make up for that. Having both is a killer for success. My observations only and yes they are not scientific.

alexc05 10y ago

I worked for 5 years as a high school teacher. In my observation, the "smartest kid in class" could be left in the dust by a "dumb kid" who decided to work hard. I use quotes because it does raise the question of who is really the smart one there. In this case, I do mean that the smart kid was the one who immediately showed an understanding of the material and could demonstrate proficiency sometimes beyond the course material... but was too lazy to actually hand in his work. The other kid needed massive amounts of extra attention, came in every day at lunch to see if he could just put a bit more time in, handed in the work six times with improvements each time... he crushed it. If anything, `grit` would be underrated in measuring student success if we pegged it at 100% of the variance. That said, "student success" is only one measure and is, in a number of ways, wildly artificial. There was an adage to the effect of "you only learn what you pay attention to", but in this case we might also say "you're only graded on what you do" If student success is measured in grades, and you're only graded on what you do, then doing work (aka: grit) is the only thing that matters.

lintiness 10y ago
"I worked for 5 years as a high school teacher. In my observation, the "smartest kid in class" could be left in the dust by a "dumb kid" who decided to work hard." my experience as a student at top 5 ugrad was similar: kids with top hs grades and work ethic destroyed the truly brilliant students (with top test scores) in terms of academic performance.
- Joof 10y ago
  It's not that surprising considering the metrics that school uses.
- emp_zealoth 10y ago
  I crushed HS. Admitted to top Polish technical uni, dropped out due to health/mental issues I fail at uni hard. But in part it is because how terrible the whole process is. I spend more time trying to find relevant-to-exam-information than actually learning stuff. You literally sit for hours on end, listening to someone drone on. The exams themselves aren't particularly relevant either. I usually get passing grades, maybe a B+. The hard workers get A's...but when you ask them to explain anything they just derp hard. I will ace almost any actual project. I've signed up for a Rover Challenge team and learned so much more already... I constantly regret that my knowledge is rather rickety/shallow But at the same time it's rather wide-encompassing The point is, "academic achievement" is rather moot, IMO. You pick up tools, a soldering iron and suddenly learn there is much more to it

BuckRogers 10y ago

No. Not even close. I consider myself of average intelligence, I knew a lot of more intelligent people than me in my life. Some of them are even using meth now. I succeed because I stick to things, follow through, take pride in what I do and make sure I do as well as I can. I was not an exceptional student, would have been but I worked 35 hours a week while attending college 12-19 hours a week plus studying till the library closed Sunday through Thursday. I may not be a ninja developer or whatever but I'd honestly put money on myself over some genius-flake. And if someone has grit + genius... well, watch out because it would be amazing to see in action. Maybe that's Einstein in his later years. I'm sure everyone with a high IQ believes that description fits them, but in general geniuses don't have to try very hard so they never know what 'grit' is. Or what it takes for the rest of us. I do think grit is partially taught in ways that are completely non-related to mental exercise. I grew up in the midwest in a house with no air conditioning because my father thought it would make us soft to have it. Thankfully the old man did buy us a Commodore. Yes, it gets hot in the midwest- just as hot as anywhere else in the summer. I was even raised in cloth diapers and I'm under 35... to give an idea of how old school. They also made sure I always worked, been working without lapse since I was 12 years old. I've worked on a hog farm in the July heat from 4AM-noon. While I was born in 82, I don't feel like a 'Millennial' at all. I feel like a very gritty person mentally and physically that is rare anymore but has paid off in ways. But definitely feel more in common with my brother's generation (born in '78, GenX) or maybe even older, less pampered gen. From my perspective, American society is severely missing grit. People are going to have to toughen up because this softie society won't last forever. But I don't think people know the difference between false posturing tough guy aggression based on insecurity is and what real grit means. Too much tough guy gangster rap for the lower class and too many get-rich-quit-or-I-give-up flakes in the more fortunate classes. I've heard multiple people in my lifetime tell me they "won't go to work for less than $15 an hour" or won't get out of bed for less than that. I've suffered years through horrible jobs to build a resume. Just to appear reliable, which I am. Most people don't know what it takes to get ahead for those without lots of money and without a naturally high IQ. Sometimes it sucks but lays the groundwork for later on. It's about character.

thomasmarriott 10y ago

No.

Joof 10y ago

For education, it matters. There are no choices or pivots available to a student; they have one path available to them in most cases. For life, it may not matter. You have more options to find something where you excel more easily or are more passionate about something.

fiatmoney 10y ago

It's hilarious how the educational establishment tries to take well-known concepts with a rich psychological and psychometric history behind them, rebrand them, decide they're the Most Important Thing Ever for three years or so, and then toss them for the next thing. They usually pretend along the way that the same people haven't been in charge of the educational establishment for 60 years or so, and that the present state of education is some sort of test-driven Korean drill-and-kill dystopia, to which the latest fad is a breath of fresh air. "Conscientiousness" is the term of art. It's part of the Big 5 personality model ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits ) which has its own various promoters and refuters. Inasmuch as the literature is contradictory it's because it's not a model that works super well for actually doing stuff, beyond marginal effects (more conscientious worker == better, all else equal) & tautologies (hard workers work hard and do better at hard jobs that reward hard work).

djscram 10y ago

As someone with ADHD, I have spent a lot of my life trying to have more grit. In fact, I did make it through some difficult programs, the navy nuclear power program and Georgetown Law, prior to being diagnosed. But I always came across like I wasn't trying. I wanted desperately to try, but didn't understand that my mind couldn't just add grit on demand. (though if I managed to get myself in enough of a bind, the adrenaline did help). Somewhere along the line (before being diagnosed), I came to see things like grit as a moral judgement--one that I consistently failed.

RubyRuby 10y ago

Regardless of whether you believe in measuring success by "grit", the simple quiz referenced in the article is definitely intriguing. Another point raised in this article is the idea of being able to focus on one task/goal until it's completed. Learning to multitask definitely detracts from one's ability to focus on single tasks/goals and make true progress. However, in my college and high school experiences, the structures didn't stress these common sense principles for learning enough.