Angela Duckworth

Who they are

She is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and faculty co-director of the Penn-Wharton Behavior Change for Good Initiative, which she co-directs with Katherine Milkman and which launched in 2016. Her undergraduate degree is from Harvard, her MSc in neuroscience from Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship, and her PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She worked as a McKinsey consultant and as a public-school teacher before the doctorate, and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2013. None of that appears in the book itself, which states no credential on the title page or the copyright page, so it had to be established from her own faculty page and the Penn Almanac.

The claim that made grit famous was never that gritty people succeed, which is close to a tautology. It was that grit predicts success over and above intelligence and established personality traits. That is the claim that has to survive, and it is the claim the criticism is aimed at.

The criticism is published scientific disagreement and is described here as nothing else. Marcus Credé, Michael Tynan and Peter Harms pooled 88 independent samples and 66,807 people in 2017 and found grit very nearly redundant with conscientiousness, the two-facet structure unconfirmed, the predictive weight sitting almost entirely in the perseverance facet, and overall grit adding essentially nothing over conscientiousness in the prediction of academic performance. The result has since replicated on a sample of more than a quarter of a million people.

Her own answers are the most important facts about the construct. In a 2021 peer-reviewed commentary in the Journal of Personality Assessment she and her original co-author conceded the higher-order factor structure outright, stating that the two-factor hierarchical model cannot be distinguished from a model with two correlated subfactors and no higher-order factor, and that their argument should not have rested so heavily on the optimal factor solution for a questionnaire. In a 2020 review chapter on grit at work she cites Credé and colleagues by name and answers by narrowing the claim, writing that grit is conceived as a facet of conscientiousness, and concedes that shortening her own scale may have been unwise, because duration is what distinguishes grit in the first place.

The 2019 West Point study is hers as well, and it cuts both ways. It is the largest ever run, preregistered with data posted, covering 11,258 cadets across nine cohorts. It confirmed her founding claim that grit is the only reliable predictor of completing initiation training. It also reported that the whole battery of attributes explained under four per cent of the variation in graduating four years later, and it closed by observing that there may be severe limits to how well any set of personal attributes can forecast an individual's destiny. That is the single most deflationary statement about grit anywhere in the peer-reviewed record, and it is hers.

Her published position against high-stakes selection use is recorded here as materially to her credit. Her lab's distribution page discourages use of these scales in high-stakes settings where faking is a concern, names admissions and hiring decisions specifically, and states that book authors should not reproduce them. Writing in the New York Times on 26 March 2016, under the headline "Don't Grade Schools on Grit", she said she worried she had contributed inadvertently to an idea she vigorously opposes, high-stakes character assessment, and that schools should not be rewarded or punished on these measures. Duckworth and Yeager (2015) concluded that no available measure of personal qualities is suitable for between-school accountability judgements. The book contains no such caution and reports three selection contexts approvingly. Both facts belong together every time the scale comes up.

She co-founded Character Lab in 2013 with Dave Levin, co-founder of KIPP, and Dominic Randolph, head of Riverdale Country School. It was a non-profit connecting researchers with schools and publishing free guidance, and it closed at the end of June 2024. Reported donors include the Walton Family Foundation, the Bezos Family Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the John Templeton Foundation and the Kern Family Foundation. That donor list is reported by one trade outlet and has not been checked against a primary page, so it is recorded here as reported rather than confirmed.

Where this site lands, and it is a revision of an earlier and blunter verdict. Saying flatly that grit fails incremental validity is wrong as a blanket statement, because the perseverance facet does add substantially. What the record supports is that the overall composite adds little over conscientiousness, that the two-facet architecture did not hold, and that the originator has said as much herself. The underlying observation that sustained effort matters is not in dispute by anyone.

Key papers

Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007), "Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087-1101. The founding paper and the origin of the construct.

Duckworth, A. L., & Quinn, P. D. (2009), Journal of Personality Assessment, 91(2), 166-174. The short scale, and the shortening she later said may have been unwise.

Credé, M., Tynan, M. C., & Harms, P. D. (2017). The meta-analysis, 88 independent samples and 66,807 people, finding grit very nearly redundant with conscientiousness and the predictive weight concentrated in perseverance.

Duckworth, A. L., & Yeager, D. S. (2015), Educational Researcher, 44(4), 237-251. Concludes that no available measure of personal qualities is suitable for between-school accountability judgements.

The 2019 West Point study. Preregistered, data posted, 11,258 cadets across nine cohorts. Grit predicted completion of initiation training; the full battery explained under four per cent of the variation in four-year graduation.

Duckworth, A. L., Kirby, T. A., Tsukayama, E., Berstein, H., & Ericsson, K. A. (2011), "Deliberate Practice Spells Success," Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2(2), 174-181. The National Spelling Bee collaboration with Anders Ericsson.

Key ideas

Grit as defined: perseverance of effort combined with passion for a long-term goal, sustained over years rather than weeks.

The claim that mattered was incremental validity, predicting achievement over and above intelligence and existing traits. Everything in the dispute turns on that test rather than on whether an effect replicates.

The perseverance facet carries the predictive weight. The passion facet and the two-facet architecture did not survive.

She has stated in print that grit is a facet of conscientiousness, which is the critics' position arrived at by the originator.

Her own largest study is also the most deflationary item in the record, and she published its limits rather than its headline.

She has argued publicly against using these scales for admissions, hiring or school accountability. The book does not carry that caution; she does.

Narrowing is not debunking. A construct that survives as a facet with a useful vocabulary is a different outcome from one that fails to replicate.

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