Just being smart doesn't mean someone will be successful. And just because someone is less smart doesn't mean that person will fail. That's one take-home message from the work of people like Angela Duckworth.
She works at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Like many other researchers, Duckworth wondered what makes one person more successful than another. When digging deeper, Duckworth found that the people who performed best shared a quality (品质) independent of smarts. They had what she now calls grit (毅力). Duckworth developed a set of questions to test it.
In one study of people 25 and older, she found that as people age, they become more likely to stick with a project. She also found that grit increases with education. People who had finished college scored higher in the grit test than people who quit before graduation did. People who went to graduate school after college scored even higher.
She then did another study with college students. Duckworth wanted to see how smarts and grit influenced performance in school. So she compared scores on college-entrance exams, which test IQ, to school grades and someone's score in the grit test. Students with higher grades seem to have more grit. That's not surprising. Getting good grades takes both smarts and hard work.
But some people counter that this grit means success. Among those people is Marcus Credé, a teacher at Iowa State University in Ames. He recently showed the results of 88 studies on grit. Together, nearly 67,000 people took part in these studies. And grit did not predict success, Credé found.
However, he thinks grit is very similar to someone's ability to set goals, work toward them and think things through before acting. It's a basic personality quality, Credé notes—not something that can be changed.
"Study habits and skills, test anxiety and class attendance are far more strongly connected to school grades than grit," Credé says. "We can teach students how to study well. We can help them with their test anxiety," he adds. "I'm not sure we can do that with grit."
