How Children Succeed

and delay of gratification. To Bowles and Gintis, these findings confirmed their thesis: Corporate America’s rulers wanted to staff their offices with bland and reliable sheep, so they created a school system that selected for those traits.

According to Roberts’s research, people who score high on conscientiousness tend to share certain characteristics: they are orderly, hard-working, reliable, and respectful of social norms. But perhaps the most important ingredient of conscientiousness is self-control. And when it comes to self-control, Marxist economists are not the only people who are skeptical of its value.

In Character Strengths and Virtues, Peterson and Seligman contended that “there is no true disadvantage of having too much self-control”; it is a capacity, like strength or beauty or intelligence, with no inherent downside—the more you have, the better. But an opposing school of thought, led by the late Jack Block, a psychological researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, argued that too much self-control could be just as big a problem as too little. Overcontrolled people are “excessively constrained,” Block and two colleagues wrote in one paper. They “have difficulty making decisions [and] may unnecessarily delay gratification or deny themselves pleasure.” According to these researchers, conscientious people are classic squares: they’re compulsive, anxious, and repressed.

Block’s findings are certainly valid; it’s easy to see how conscientiousness can descend into compulsiveness. But at the same time, it is hard to argue with the data showing correlations between self-control and positive outcomes. In 2011, that pool of evidence grew further when a team of researchers published the results of a three-decade-long study of more than a thousand young people in New Zealand that showed, in new detail, clear connections between childhood self-control and adult outcomes. When their subjects were between the ages of three and eleven, the researchers, led by the psychologists Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt and including Brent Roberts, used a variety of tests and questionnaires to measure the children’s self-control and then combined those results into a single self-control rating for each child. When they surveyed the subjects at age thirty-two, they found that the childhood self-control measure had predicted a wide array of outcomes. The lower a subject’s self-control in childhood, the more likely he or she was at thirty-two to smoke, to have health problems, to have a bad credit rating, and to have been in trouble with the law. In some cases, the effect sizes were huge: Adults with the lowest self-control scores in childhood were three times more likely to have been convicted of a crime than those who scored highest as kids. They were three times more likely to have multiple addictions, and they were more than twice as likely to be raising their children in a single-parent household.

10. Grit

But even Angela Duckworth agrees that self-control has its limitations. It may be very useful for predicting who will graduate from high school, but, she says, it’s not as relevant when it comes to identifying who might invent a new technology or direct an award-winning movie. And after publishing her groundbreaking self-control-versus-IQ study in Psychological Science in 2005, Duckworth began to sense that self-control wasn’t precisely the driver of success that she was looking for. She considered her own career. She was, by objective measures, very intelligent, and she recognized that she had high levels of self-discipline: she got up early; she worked hard; she met deadlines; she made it to the gym on a regular basis. And though she was certainly successful—very few doctoral students have their first-year theses published in a prestigious journal like Psychological Science—her peripatetic early career was much less directed than that of, say, David Levin, who had found his life’s calling at twenty-two and had persisted at the same goal ever since, overcoming many obstacles and creating, with Michael Feinberg, a successful network of charter schools educating thousands of students. Duckworth felt that Levin, who was about her age, possessed some trait that she did not: a passionate commitment to a single mission and an unswerving dedication to achieve that mission. She decided she needed to name this quality, and she chose the word grit.

Working with Chris Peterson, Seligman’s coauthor on Character Strengths and Virtues, Duckworth developed a test to measure grit, which she called the Grit Scale. It is a deceptively simple test, just twelve brief statements on which respondents must evaluate themselves, including “New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones”; “Setbacks don’t discourage me”; “I am a hard worker”; and “I finish whatever I begin.”

For each statement, respondents score themselves on a five-point scale, ranging from 5, “very much like me,” to 1, “not like me at all.” The test takes about three minutes to complete, and it relies entirely on self-report —and yet when Duckworth and Peterson took it out into the field, they found it was remarkably predictive of success. Grit, Duckworth discovered, is only faintly related to IQ—there are smart gritty people and dumb gritty people—but at Penn, high grit scores allowed students who had entered college with relatively low college-board scores to nonetheless achieve high GPAs. At the National Spelling Bee, Duckworth found that children with high grit scores were more likely to survive to the later rounds. Most remarkable, Duckworth and Peterson gave their grit test to more than twelve hundred freshman cadets as they entered the military academy at West Point and embarked on the grueling summer training course known as Beast Barracks. The military has developed its own complex evaluation, called the whole candidate score, to judge incoming cadets and predict which of them will survive the demands of West Point; it includes academic grades, a gauge of physical fitness, and a leadership potential score. But the more accurate predictor of which cadets persisted in Beast Barracks and which ones dropped out turned out to be Duckworth’s simple little twelve-item grit questionnaire.

11. Quantifying Character

As they began consulting with Angela Duckworth and her colleagues on character, David Levin and Dominic Randolph were easily persuaded that self-control and grit were essential character strengths for their students. Yet those didn’t seem like the only strengths that mattered. Seligman and Peterson’s full list of twenty-four, however, felt too unwieldy, too difficult to turn into a practical system of instruction for their schools. So Levin and Randolph asked Peterson if he could narrow the list down to a more manageable handful, and Peterson identified a set of strengths that were, according to his research, especially likely to predict life satisfaction and high achievement. After a few small adjustments, they settled on a final list of seven:

grit

self-control

zest

social intelligence

gratitude

optimism

curiosity

Over the next year and a half, Duckworth worked with Levin and Randolph to turn the list of seven strengths into a two-page evaluation tool, a questionnaire that could be completed by teachers or by parents or by the students themselves. For each strength, teachers suggested a variety of possible indicators, statements much like the twelve indicators Duckworth chose for her grit questionnaire, and she road-tested several dozen of them at Riverdale and KIPP, asking teachers to rate students and students to rate themselves on a five-point scale for each indicator. She eventually settled on the twenty-four most statistically reliable indicators, from “This student is eager to explore new things” (an indicator of curiosity) to “This student believes that effort will improve his or her future” (optimism).

For Levin, the next step was clear. Back in 2007, at a small, invitation-only conference on positive psychology that Randolph organized at Lawrenceville, he had hit on the idea of grading KIPP students on character in the same way they were graded on math and science and history. Wouldn’t it be cool, Levin had mused at the time, if each student graduated from school with not only a GPA but also a CPA (for character point average)? If you were a