PSYC 545 SPSS Assignment: Validity

PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals

Angela L. Duckworth University of Pennsylvania

Christopher Peterson University of Michigan

Michael D. Matthews and Dennis R. Kelly United States Military Academy, West Point

The importance of intellectual talent to achievement in all professional domains is well established, but less is known about other individual differences that predict success. The authors tested the importance of 1 noncognitive trait: grit. Defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals, grit accounted for an average of 4% of the variance in success outcomes, including educational attainment among 2 samples of adults (N � 1,545 and N � 690), grade point average among Ivy League undergraduates (N � 138), retention in 2 classes of United States Military Academy, West Point, cadets (N � 1,218 and N � 1,308), and ranking in the National Spelling Bee (N � 175). Grit did not relate positively to IQ but was highly correlated with Big Five Conscientiousness. Grit nonetheless demonstrated incremental predictive validity of success measures over and beyond IQ and conscientiousness. Collectively, these findings suggest that the achievement of difficult goals entails not only talent but also the sustained and focused application of talent over time.

Keywords: achievement, success, personality, persistence, performance

Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental resources. . .men the world over possess amounts of resource, which only exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use. (William James, 1907, pp. 322–323)

In 1907, William James proposed “a program of study that might with proper care be made to cover the whole field of psychology” (p. 332). James encouraged psychologists to address two broad problems: First, what are the types of human abilities and, second, by what diverse means do individuals unleash these abilities?

In the century that has passed since James’s suggestion, psycho- logical science has made impressive progress in answering the first of

these two questions. In particular, we know a great deal about intel- ligence, or general mental ability, a construct for which formal study was initiated by a British contemporary of James, Sir Francis Galton. Notwithstanding vigorous debates over the dimensionality and origins of intelligence, we know more about IQ—how to measure it reliably and precisely and what outcomes it predicts—than any other stable individual difference. In contrast, we know comparatively little about why, as James put it, most individuals make use of only a small part of their resources, whereas a few exceptional individuals push them- selves to their limits.

In this article, we reiterate James’s second question in the following terms: Why do some individuals accomplish more than others of equal intelligence? In addition to cognitive ability, a list of attributes of high-achieving individuals would likely include creativity, vigor, emotional intelligence, charisma, self-confidence, emotional stability, physical attractiveness, and other positive qualities. A priori, some traits seem more crucial than others for particular vocations. Extra- version may be fundamental to a career in sales, for instance, but irrelevant to a career in creative writing. However, some traits might be essential to success no matter the domain.1 We suggest that one personal quality is shared by the most prominent leaders in every field: grit.

We define grit as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining

1 In this article, we are concerned with objective accomplishments. That is, we are interested in vocational and avocational achievements that are recognized by other people, in contrast to those that are primarily of subjective value to the individual. We do not examine success in other important domains of life, such as parenting, citizenship, friendship, and so on. Thus, we use terms like success and achievement to refer to the accomplishment of widely valued goals.

Angela L. Duckworth, Department of Psychology, University of Penn- sylvania; Christopher Peterson, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan; Michael D. Matthews, Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership, United States Military Academy, West Point; Dennis R. Kelly, Institutional Research and Analysis Branch, United States Military Acad- emy, West Point.

This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. For helpful comments on a draft of this article, we thank Sigal Barsade, Dianne Chambless, Martha Farah, Gary Latham, Paul Rozin, Richard Shell, Dean Simonton, and especially Martin Seligman. We are grateful to Robert Gallop and Paul McDermott for guidance on statistical analyses. Finally, we thankfully acknowledge the efforts of Paige Kimble, Edgar Knizhnik, Patty Newbold, Patrick Quinn, and Cybelle Weeks in data acquisition and management.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Angela L. Duckworth, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3451 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. E-mail: angela_duckworth@ yahoo.com

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2007, Vol. 92, No. 6, 1087–1101 Copyright 2007 by the American Psychological Association 0022-3514/07/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087

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effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and pla- teaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina. Whereas disappoint- ment or boredom signals to others that it is time to change trajectory and cut losses, the gritty individual stays the course.

Our hypothesis that grit is essential to high achievement evolved during interviews with professionals in investment banking, paint- ing, journalism, academia, medicine, and law. Asked what quality distinguishes star performers in their respective fields, these indi- viduals cited grit or a close synonym as often as talent. In fact, many were awed by the achievements of peers who did not at first seem as gifted as others but whose sustained commitment to their ambitions was exceptional. Likewise, many noted with surprise that prodigiously gifted peers did not end up in the upper echelons of their field.

More than 100 years prior to our work on grit, Galton (1892) collected biographical information on eminent judges, statesmen, scientists, poets, musicians, painters, wrestlers, and others. Ability alone, he concluded, did not bring about success in any field. Rather, he believed high achievers to be triply blessed by “ability combined with zeal and with capacity for hard labour” (p. 33). Similar conclusions were reached by Cox (1926) in an analysis of the biographies of 301 eminent creators and leaders drawn from a larger sample compiled by J. M. Cattell (1903). Estimated IQ and Cattell’s rank order of eminence were only moderately related (r � .16) when reliability of data was controlled for. Rating geniuses on 67 character traits derived from Webb (1915), Cox concluded that holding constant estimated IQ, the following traits evident in childhood predicted lifetime achievement: “persistence of motive and effort, confidence in their abilities, and great strength or force of character” (p. 218).

As context for the current research, we briefly review more recent research on individual differences that bear on success. We leave aside for the moment questions about how goals are set and maintained, how values and expectancies affect goal attainment, and so on. We also omit from our review situational factors and social and cultural variables that influence achievement. For a broader review than is possible here, we refer the reader to Simonton (1994) and Latham and Pinder (2005).

Talent and Achievement

Intelligence is the best-documented predictor of achievement (Gottfredson, 1997; Hartigan & Wigdor, 1989). Reliable and valid measures of IQ have made it possible to document a wide range of achievement outcomes affected by IQ, including college and grad- uate school grade point average (GPA; e.g., Bridgeman, McCamley-Jenkins, & Ervin, 2000; Kuncel, Hezlett, & Ones, 2001), induction into Phi Beta Kappa (Langlie, 1938), income (Fergusson, Horwood, & Ridder, 2005), career potential and job performance (Kuncel, Hezlett, & Ones, 2004), and choice of occupation (Chown, 1959). The predictive validities of intelli- gence rise with the complexity of the occupation considered. When corrected for attenuation due to reliability of measures and restric- tion on range, correlations between IQ and these various outcomes can be as high as r � .6, meaning that IQ may account for up to one third of the variance in some measures of success (Neisser et al., 1996).

However, in the Terman longitudinal study of mentally gifted children, the most accomplished men were only 5 points higher in IQ than the least accomplished men (Terman & Oden, 1947). To be sure, restriction on range of IQ partly accounted for the slight- ness of this gap, but there was sufficient variance in IQ (SD � 10.6, compared with SD � 16 in the general population) in the sample to have expected a much greater difference. More predic- tive than IQ of whether a mentally gifted Terman subject grew up to be an accomplished professor, lawyer, or doctor were particular noncognitive qualities: “Perseverance, Self-Confidence, and Inte- gration toward goals” (Terman & Oden, 1947, p. 351). Terman and Oden, who were close collaborators of Cox, encouraged further inquiry into why intelligence does not always translate into achievement: “Why this is so, what circumstances affect the fru- ition of human talent, are questions of such transcendent impor- tance that they should be investigated by every method that prom- ises the slightest reduction of our present ignorance” (p. 352).

Reviewing the biographical details of Darwin, Einstein, and other geniuses, Howe (1999) disputed the assumption that high achievement derives directly from exceptional mental ability: “Perseverance is at least as crucial as intelligence. . . . The most crucial inherent differences may be ones of temperament rather than of intellect as such” (p. 15). Likewise, summarizing an extensive body of research on the development of expertise, Erics- son and Charness (1994) concluded that in chess, sports, music, and the visual arts, over 10 years of daily “deliberate practice” set apart expert performers from less proficient peers and that 20 years of dedicated practice was an even more reliable predictor of world-class achievement. Like Howe, Ericsson and Charness sug- gested that inborn ability is less important than commonly thought: “More plausible loci of individual differences are factors that predispose individuals toward engaging in deliberate practice and enable them to sustain high levels of practice for many years” (p. 744).

Personality and Achievement

The Big Five model has provided a descriptive framework for much of the contemporary empirical work on traits that predict success (Goldberg, 1990; John & Srivastava, 1999; McCrae & Costa, 1987; Tupes & Christal, 1992). In a 1991 meta-analysis, Barrick and Mount concluded that Big Five Conscientiousness related more robustly to job performance than did Big Five Ex- traversion, Openness to Experience, Neuroticism, or Agreeable- ness (Barrick & Mount, 1991). Uncorrected correlations between conscientiousness and job performance ranged from r � .09 to r � .13, depending on the occupational group. In a meta-analysis of confirmatory studies of personality measures as predictors of job performance, Tett, Jackson, and Rothstein (1991) observed a sample-weighted mean correlation between conscientiousness and job performance of r � .12.

One might conclude from these meta-analyses that at best, any given personality trait accounts for less than 2% of variance in achievement. If so, compared with IQ, personality would seem inconsequential. Alternatively, it is possible that more narrowly defined facets of Big Five factors may more robustly predict particular achievement outcomes (Paunonen & Ashton, 2001). It is also possible that there exist important personality traits not rep- resented as Big Five facets. A serious limitation of the Big Five

1088 DUCKWORTH, PETERSON, MATTHEWS, AND KELLY

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taxonomy derives from its roots in the factor analyses of adjec- tives. Traits for which there are fewer synonyms (or antonyms) tend to be omitted. We agree with Paunonen and Jackson (2000) that

the ultimate test of whether a dimension of behavior is important to the understanding of human behavior depends not on the size of the factor in the language of personality. . .if such dimensions are able to account for criterion variance not accounted for by the Big Five personality factors, then those dimensions need to be considered separately in any comprehensive description of the determinants of human behavior. (p. 833)

Thus, although we recognize the utility of the Big Five taxonomy as a descriptive framework in which newly characterized person- ality traits should be situated, we do not believe that it provides an exhaustive list of traits worth studying.

Conscientious individuals are characteristically thorough, care- ful, reliable, organized, industrious, and self-controlled. Whereas all of these qualities bear a plausible contribution to achievement, their relative importance likely varies depending upon the type of achievement considered. For example, Galton (1892) suggested that self-control—the ability to resist temptation and control im- pulses—is a surprisingly poor predictor of the very highest achievements:

People seem to have the idea that the way to eminence is one of great self-denial, from which there are hourly temptations to di- verge. . . . This is true enough of the great majority of men, but it is simply not true of the generality of those who have gained great reputations. Such men, biographies show to be haunted and driven by an incessant instinctive craving for intellectual work. (p. 36)

Consistent with Galton’s distinction, Hough (1992) distinguished between achievement and dependability aspects of conscientious- ness. According to Hough, the achievement-oriented individual is one who works hard, tries to do a good job, and completes the task at hand, whereas the dependable person is self-controlled and conventional (p. 144). In a meta-analysis, Hough found scales classified as measuring achievement orientation predicted job pro- ficiency (r � .15) and educational success (r � .29) better than did dependability (r � .08 and r � .12, respectively).

Grit overlaps with achievement aspects of conscientiousness but differs in its emphasis on long-term stamina rather than short-term intensity. The gritty individual not only finishes tasks at hand but pursues a given aim over years. Grit is also distinct from depend- ability aspects of conscientiousness, including self-control, in its specification of consistent goals and interests. An individual high in self-control but moderate in grit may, for example, effectively control his or her temper, stick to his or her diet, and resist the urge to surf the Internet at work—yet switch careers annually. As Galton (1892) suggested, abiding commitment to a particular vo- cation (or avocation) does not derive from overriding “hourly temptations.”

Grit also differs from need for achievement, described by Mc- Clelland (1961) as a drive to complete manageable goals that allow for immediate feedback on performance. Whereas individuals high in need for achievement pursue goals that are neither too easy nor too hard, individuals high in grit deliberately set for themselves extremely long-term objectives and do not swerve from them— even in the absence of positive feedback. A second important

distinction is that need for achievement is by definition a noncon- scious drive for implicitly rewarding activities and, therefore, impossible to measure using self-report methods (McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1992). Grit, in contrast, can entail ded- ication to either implicitly or explicitly rewarding goals. Further, we see no theoretical reason why individuals would lack aware- ness of their level of grit.

Development of the Grit Scale

The aforementioned reasoning suggests that grit may be as essential as IQ to high achievement. In particular, grit, more than self-control or conscientiousness, may set apart the exceptional individuals who James thought made maximal use of their abili- ties. To test these hypotheses, we sought a brief, stand-alone measure of grit that met four criteria: evidence of psychometric soundness, face validity for adolescents and adults pursuing goals in a variety of domains (e.g., not just work or school), low likelihood of ceiling effects in high-achieving populations, and most important, a precise fit with the construct of grit.

We reviewed several published self-report measures but failed to find any that met all four of our criteria. The only stand-alone measure of perseverance we found, the Perseverance Scale for Children (Lufi & Cohen, 1987), is not face valid for adults. The Passion Scale (Vallerand et al., 2003) assesses commitment to a subjectively important activity but not perseverance of effort. The tenacity scale used by Baum and Locke (2004) and derived from Gartner, Gatewood, and Shaver (1991) was developed for entre- preneurs and is not face valid for adolescents. Similarly, the Career Advancement Ambition Scale (DesRochers & Dahir, 2000) refers to attitudes toward one’s “profession” and “firm.” Cassidy and Lynn (1989) developed a need for achievement questionnaire that taps work ethic and desire for excellence, which are consonant with the construct of grit, but also several irrelevant qualities such as the needs for money, domination of others, superiority over competitors, and social status. Finally, the goal commitment scale by Hollenbeck, Williams, and Klein (1989) assesses state-level, not trait-level, goal commitment.

The Present Research

In the absence of adequate existing measures, we developed and validated a self-report questionnaire called the Grit Scale. We expected grit to be associated with Big Five Conscientiousness and with self-control but, in its emphasis on focused effort and interest over time, to have incremental predictive validity for high accom- plishment over and beyond these other constructs.

We also tested the hypothesis that grit would be unrelated to IQ. Whereas personality and IQ represent independently flourishing literatures, few contemporary investigations have incorporated both kinds of measures. Thus, we have learned surprisingly little about how personality traits and intelligence are related and about their relative contributions to performance. There are notable ex- ceptions to this trend (cf. Ackerman & Heggestad, 1997; Chamorro-Premuzic & Furnham, 2005), but in general, psychol- ogy has ignored the recommendations of Wechsler (1940) and R. B. Cattell and Butcher (1968), who cautioned that the indepen- dent study of either noncognitive or cognitive individual differ- ences, to the exclusion of the other, would be impoverished.

1089PERSEVERANCE AND PASSION

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Study 1

Study 1 was a cross-sectional study for which the major purpose was to develop and validate a self-report measure of grit in a large sample of adults aged 25 years or older. The predictive validity of grit was assessed by its association with higher levels of lifetime schooling among individuals of identical age.

The broad age range of the adults in Study 1 allowed us to venture a second question: Does grit grow with age? Although personality traits are by definition relatively stable over time, Big Five Conscientiousness and stability of vocational interests both increase over the life span (McCrae et al., 1999; Srivastava, John, Gosling, & Potter, 2003; Swanson, 1999). Thus, we expected older adults to be slightly higher in grit than younger individuals.

Method

Participants and procedure. Beginning in April 2004, we set up a link on the www.authentichappiness.org website inviting visitors to help validate the Grit Scale. This noncommercial, public website provides free information about psychology research and access to a variety of self-report measures to over 500,000 regis- tered users. All participants indicated how old they were (25 to 34 years, 35 to 44 years, 45 to 54 years, 55 to 64 years, and 65 years and older) and their level of education (some high school, high school graduate, some college, Associate’s degree, Bachelor’s degree, or postcollege graduate degree). By October 2005, we collected data on 1,545 participants aged 25 and older (M � 45 years; 73% women, 27% men).

Development of the Gri