How Children Succeed

more effort into the coding test than the NLSY kids did, and on such a simple test, that extra level of exertion was enough for them to beat out their more-educated peers.

Now, remember that the NLSY wasn’t just a one-shot test; it tracked young people’s progress afterward for many years. So next Segal went back to the NLSY data, looked at each student’s cognitive-skills score and coding- speed score in 1979, and then compared those two scores with the student’s earnings two decades later, when the student was about forty. Predictably, the kids who did better on the cognitive-skills tests were making more money. But so were the kids who did better on the super-simple coding test. In fact, when Segal looked only at NLSY participants who didn’t graduate from college, their coding-test scores were every bit as reliable a predictor of their adult wages as their cognitive-test scores. The high scorers on the coding test were earning thousands of dollars a year more than the low scorers.

And why? Does the modern American labor market really put such a high value on being able to compare mindless lists of words and numbers? Of course not. And in fact, Segal didn’t believe that the students who did better on the coding test actually had better coding skills than the other students. They did better for a simple reason: they tried harder. And what the labor market does value is the kind of internal motivation required to try hard on a test even when there is no external reward for doing well. Without anyone realizing it, the coding test was measuring a critical noncognitive skill that mattered a lot in the grown-up world.

Segal’s findings give us a new way of thinking about the so-called low-IQ kids who took part in the M&M experiment in south Florida. Remember, they scored poorly on the first IQ test and then did much better on the second test, the one with the M&M incentive. So the question was: What was the real IQ of an average “low- IQ” student? Was it 79 or 97? Well, you could certainly make the case that his or her true IQ must be 97. You’re supposed to try hard on IQ tests, and when the low-IQ kids had the M&M’s to motivate them, they tried hard. It’s not as if the M&M’s magically gave them the intelligence to figure out the answers; they must have already possessed it. So in fact, they weren’t low-IQ at all. Their IQs were about average.

But what Segal’s experiment suggests is that it was actually their first score, the 79, that was more relevant to their future prospects. That was their equivalent of the coding-test score, the low-stakes, low-reward test that predicts how well someone is going to do in life. They may not have been low in IQ, but they were low in whatever quality it is that makes a person try hard on an IQ test without any obvious incentive. And what Segal’s research shows is that that is a very valuable quality to possess.

8. Conscientiousness

So what do you call the quality exhibited by Segal’s go-getters, the kids who exerted themselves whether or not there was a potential reward? Well, here’s the technical term that personality psychologists use: conscientiousness. Over the past couple of decades, a consensus has emerged among personality psychologists that the most effective way to analyze the human personality is to consider it along five dimensions, known as the Big Five: agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, and conscientiousness. And when Segal gave the male students in one of her surveys a standard personality test, the ones who didn’t respond to material incentives—who did well whether or not there were M&M’s involved— scored particularly high on conscientiousness.

Within the world of personality psychology, the reigning expert on conscientiousness is Brent Roberts, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has collaborated with both James Heckman, the economist, and Angela Duckworth, the psychologist. Roberts told me that in the late 1990s, when he was getting out of grad school and deciding what research field to specialize in, no one wanted to study conscientiousness. Most psychologists considered it to be the black sheep of the personality field. Many still do. It’s a cultural thing, Roberts explained. Like the word character, the word conscientiousness has some strong and not always positive associations outside academia. “Researchers prefer to study the things they value,” he told me. “And the people in society who value conscientiousness are not intellectuals, and they’re not academics, and they’re not liberals. They tend to be religious-right conservatives who think people should be more controlled.” (According to Roberts, psychologists prefer to study openness to experience. “Openness is just cool,” he explained, a little ruefully. “It’s about creativity. Plus, it has the strongest correlation with liberal ideology. Most of us in personality psychology—including me, I should say—are liberal. And we like studying ourselves.”)

Though academic personality psychologists, with the lonely exception of Roberts, mostly stayed away until recently, Big Five conscientiousness was embraced in the 1990s by a less illustrious psychological specialty: industrial/organizational psychology, or I/O psychology. Researchers in that field rarely hold positions with prestigious universities; most of them work as consultants for human-resource managers in large corporations that have a very specific need, far removed from esoteric academic debates: they want to hire the most productive, reliable, and diligent workers they can find. When I/O psychology began using various personality assessments to help corporations identify those workers, they found consistently that Big Five conscientiousness was the trait that best predicted workplace success.

What intrigues Roberts most about conscientiousness is that it predicts so many outcomes that go far beyond the workplace. People high in conscientiousness get better grades in high school and college; they commit fewer crimes; and they stay married longer. They live longer—and not just because they smoke and drink less. They have fewer strokes, lower blood pressure, and a lower incidence of Alzheimer’s disease. “It would actually be nice if there were some negative things that went along with conscientiousness,” Roberts told me. “But at this point it’s emerging as one of the primary dimensions of successful functioning across the lifespan. It really goes cradle to grave in terms of how well people do.”

9. The Downside of Self-Control

Of course, that doesn’t mean that everyone agrees that conscientiousness is an entirely positive thing. In fact, some of the first empirical evidence for the connections between conscientiousness and success in school and the workplace came from people who didn’t think much of either school or the workplace. In their 1976 book Schooling in Capitalist America, the Marxist economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis argued that American public schools had been set up to perpetuate social-class divisions. In order for capitalists to keep proletarians in their class of origin, they wrote, “the educational system must try to teach people to be properly subordinate.” Bowles and Gintis drew on contemporary research by Gene Smith, a psychologist who had found that the test that most reliably predicted a high-school student’s future didn’t measure IQ; it measured how a student’s peers rated him on a trait Smith called “strength of character,” which included being “conscientious, responsible, insistently orderly, not prone to daydreaming, determined, persevering.” This measure was three times more successful in predicting college performance than any combination of cognitive ratings, including SAT scores and class rank. Intrigued by Smith’s results, Bowles and Gintis and a colleague undertook a new research project, subjecting all 237 students in the senior class of a big high school in New York state to a variety of IQ and personality tests. They found, as expected, that cognitive scores were quite predictive of GPA, but an index they derived from a combination of sixteen personality measures, including conscientiousness, had an equivalent predictive power.

To psychologists like Seligman and Peterson and Duckworth and Roberts, these results are a resounding demonstration of the importance of character to school success. To Bowles and Gintis, they were evidence that the school system was rigged to create a docile proletariat. Teachers rewarded repressed drones, according to Bowles and Gintis; they found that the students with the highest GPAs were the ones who scored the lowest on measures of creativity and independence, and the highest on measures of punctuality, delay of gratification, predictability, and dependability. Bowles and Gintis then consulted similar scales for office workers, and they found that supervisors judged their workforce the way teachers judged their students. They gave low ratings to employees with high levels of creativity and independence and high ratings to those workers with high levels of tact, punctuality, dependability,