Is perseverance that important?

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In fact, regardless of whether perseverance is important or not (of course, I personally think that the choice of direction is more important), insisting on doing something can give us a sense of guilt similar to "although I failed, I tried my best", and such a process can bring people a sense of fulfillment and happiness. As for success or not, it is another matter. In other words, any discussion of perseverance out of context is undoubtedly absurd.

This easily reminds us of the famous "10,000-hour rule". "The reason why geniuses are considered extraordinary in people's eyes is not because of their superior talents, but because of their continuous efforts. Ten thousand hours of training is a necessary condition for anyone to go from ordinary to world-class masters." This sentence by Malcolm Gladwell in "Outliers" is widely circulated. But is this really the case? In fact, according to the "survivor bias principle", this phenomenon is also well explained - that is, you only see the perseverance and ignore the correlation of other factors in complex problems.

Some argue that by developing students’ “grit”, they can persevere through difficult problems and improve their performance in school, or even close long-standing education gaps, but this idea has little evidence to support it.

This may come as a shock to you, since everyone has heard similar statements before. Grit is everywhere, and by the time you read this, it has already taken the education world by storm. “Grit predicts success, it can be measured and it can be improved.” This is fascinating.

The popularity of grit is largely due to the idea's creator and evangelist, Angela Duckworth, a MacArthur Fellow and social psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been emphasizing the importance of grit for years, and has been echoed by many celebrities.

In 2013, Duckworth gave a TED talk (which has been viewed nearly 21 million times as of August 2020) in which she analyzed issues such as school performance in a completely new way: "In education, the metric we are most familiar with is IQ. But what if performance in school and in life depends on more than just that?"

Duckworth has made similar claims elsewhere. In an interview with The New York Times, she said: "I've found in my lab that this measure is better than IQ, SAT scores, physical fitness and countless other tests at predicting who will succeed in certain situations."

The cover of her 2016 bestseller, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, features a tagline most publicists could never dream of. “Psychologists have spent decades searching for the secret to success,” enthuses Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, “and Duckworth has finally found it.”

Real grit: In a 2013 TED talk, Angela Duckworth explains how in her research, grit outweighs other predictors of educational outcomes, such as IQ, suggesting that academic success depends on more than just the ability to learn quickly. © Ryan Lash On Duckworth's website, you can measure your grit in three minutes by filling out a 10-item scale with items like "I finish what I start," "I'm a hard worker and never give up," "New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from my previous ideas," and "I have a hard time staying focused on projects that take months to complete."

For each question, you choose "very much like me," "not at all like me," or something in between. Once you're done, the site gives you a grit score. I scored a 2.4 out of 5, which is clearly too low. The test measures two different "sub-factors" of grit: patience, or the degree to which people don't get discouraged in the face of challenges, and constancy of interest (sometimes called passion), or the degree to which people don't lose heart.

Duckworth and her colleagues have tried to link individual grit scores to different life outcomes, to see whether grit is a better predictor of success than other, more established measures. In a landmark 2014 paper, for example, Duckworth and her colleagues sampled West Point cadets, Chicago Public School high school juniors and others online and found that, as the title suggests, grit predicts greater perseverance in the military, the workplace, school and marriage.

(www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00036/full)

In her TED talk, she argues that grit is especially important for “kids at risk of dropping out of school” — meaning that grit is important not only for those seeking to succeed in “extremely challenging environments” (West Point, top spelling bees), but also for those without privilege or achievement.

© InspireMyKids NPR, The Times, and a host of other high-profile media outlets helped spread the word about her idea for something exciting, and the coverage was clearly very good for Duckworth.

Duckworth’s book has been a bestseller, and the Obama administration’s Department of Education has shown great enthusiasm for grit, with the Sacramento Bee reporting in 2015 that some schools in California have begun giving students grit scores.

Yet Duckworth never seems to have explicitly found a reliable way to increase grit. In her TED talk, she said, "Parents and teachers ask me almost every day, how do you develop grit in your kids? What do you do to help your kids develop a solid work ethic? How do you keep them motivated over the long term? To be honest, I don't know." In April 2013, she gave her TED talk, and five months later, at the age of 43, she won a MacArthur Fellowship for "illuminating the role of intellectual strengths and personality traits in educational achievement."

Her strongest claim about the power of grit is still unproven. Two decades after the study began, evidence that it actually works remains to be found. Grit can tell us a lot about things we don’t know, and it can be improved. As Duckworth and her colleagues showed in their first paper on grit, personality psychologists have come up with a seemingly similar concept: Conscientiousness.

© HRDA Conscientiousness is a component of the "OCEAN" personality model. According to this model, everyone has five self-evident, measurable traits: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

The model is significant for personality psychology because it raises some valuable questions, and researchers have subsequently begun to investigate to what extent the variation in these five traits is determined by nature or nurture. A 2015 meta-analysis showed that genetic factors account for about 40% and environmental factors account for 60%. This also explains whether and to what extent various traits are related to success at work, in relationships, and in other environments.

Duckworth seems to have realized early on that grit has some similarities to conscientiousness—but also that they are different in some ways. If grit is thought to indicate only one-third of how well students do in school, then it may not be that important.

In their first paper in 2007, Duckworth and her colleagues theorized that their new concept was measuring something different: “Grit overlaps with conscientiousness in terms of achievement, but differs in that grit emphasizes long-term endurance rather than short-term intensity.” Indeed, some of the “grit test questions” were clearly designed to capture elements of long-term focus, such as “I have a hard time staying focused on projects that take months to complete,” which, in Duckworth and her colleagues’ view, had nothing to do with conscientiousness.

It turns out that there is little support in the literature for either of these two ideas: that grit is more useful than conscientiousness, or that grit in military training or physiological functions is far beyond the "traditional" way of measuring it. Duckworth has said that grit is more important than these older, more established measures, but this is hard to prove. In the examples she cites, grit does not predict as well as its most obvious competitor, conscientiousness, or outperform traditional measures.

So what exactly is this concept? The most comprehensive answer comes from a 2017 meta-analysis called Much Ado About Grit, published by Marcus Crede and his colleagues. Crede is a progressive psychologist who is acutely aware that statistics are often misused to support half-baked ideas. He has made it his mission to criticize dubious findings in the field, and has taken a keen interest in education and work.

Kreider and his co-authors argue that grit and conscientiousness appear to measure the same underlying concept. As a result, they suggest that grit’s popularity may be the result of a “Jangle fallacy,” where people assume two things are actually the same just because they have different names. That is, if Duckworth had published a study showing that conscientiousness was somewhat predictive of academic success, other researchers would have rolled their eyes and said, “Of course, we knew that.”

But Duckworth, who has come up with a seemingly new concept with a catchy name, seems to have drawn heavily from ideas in the literature (which doesn’t mean she intentionally conflated the two concepts). In response to this criticism, NPR reported in 2016 that Duckworth said she didn’t object to thinking of grit as “being part of a conscientious family,” but that it did have independent predictive power.

As for the question of whether grit can be cultivated, there is not much evidence yet that there are reliable, scalable interventions that can improve either self-awareness or grit.

This isn’t to say that Conscientiousness stays constant throughout life. “Happily, many studies show that Conscientiousness does change with age,” Brent Roberts, a prominent personality psychologist and director of the Center for Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me in an email. “Not only does it change, but it often changes for the better, with Conscientiousness improving over time. Slow, gradual change through life experience is good, of course, but may not be comforting to parents of teenagers who still ‘lack motivation.’ ” (Sure enough, a chart of average grit differences by age in one of Duckworth’s early seminal papers captures this general pattern.)

When I emailed Duckworth to tell her there was no evidence that grit and conscientiousness can be easily modified, she said she didn’t think those traits could be changed “overnight,” but that long-term efforts certainly helped, and she suggested I consult with Roberts. But neither Duckworth, Roberts, nor anyone else I spoke with would point me to a single study showing that grit is malleable enough in educational settings to warrant the kind of attention it has received in recent years when few people initially thought it could affect how students perform in school.

When Kreider and his colleagues analyzed the data, they found that once conscientiousness was taken into account, grit no longer predicted academic performance, while the subfactor of "perseverance of effort" did provide a boost to good grades. This means that some grit scores have a slight advantage over traditional conscientiousness in predicting academic performance.

In 2018, Todd Kashdan and colleagues published a study in the Journal of Personality that sampled thousands of people from around the world and found that grit was moderately to strongly correlated with subjective well-being and beliefs about happiness, while personality strengths and interest consistency were weakly or even negatively correlated with this outcome. The clear difference between the two subscores of grit raises an interesting twist that may open up some new avenues of research. However, given other issues related to grit, this still doesn't really change the overall picture.

In July 2020, the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science published an important study that attempted to fill some gaps in the literature on perseverance.

Researchers Chen Zissman and Yoav Ganzach of Tel Aviv University and Ariel University in Israel surveyed a large, representative sample of Americans and found that “intelligence contributes 48–90 times more to educational success than grit and 13 times more to job market success.” Meanwhile, conscientiousness was twice as powerful a predictor of success as grit.

Ganzak told me in an email that this study is the first to analyze grit in a representative sample. Overall, he argues that while grit may be useful in some very specific areas, broadly speaking it’s not a strong predictor of who will or won’t succeed, or at least not as strong as the measures we have today.

The obvious question, then, is this something schools should be focusing on? It’s not as if administrators are short of other options. As Kreider noted in his meta-analysis, “Study skills, study habits, adjustment to college life, and class attendance are much more relevant to academic achievement and retention than grit, and there is strong evidence that interventions can improve student engagement with these concepts (particularly with study skills and habits).”

This is evidence of our lack of perseverance. If you title your speech “Learning skills are important and can be improved”, there will be empty seats in the audience because such a speech will be boring.

All of this provides a strong reason to question whether education for grit, or any form of hard work, can do much to alleviate the acute problem of educational inequality in the U.S. But I would argue that focusing too much on grit might be unfair to the dumb kids, because doing so reflects a narrow understanding of how inequality manifests and relates to it.

The concept of grit is popular, presumably, because it promises to save us a lot of trouble. Addressing the inequities in children’s lives would require larger and more ambitious redistributive social programs that are nearly impossible to implement given the state of American politics in the 21st century. By contrast, grit propaganda has become a stopgap measure.

About the author: Jesse Singal is a staff writer for New York Magazine, co-host of the podcast Blocked and Reported, and author of The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills.

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