Grit: What Angela Duckworth's Research Shows and Where Critics Push Back

The grit Angela Duckworth describes is passion and perseverance for long-term goals: staying with something that matters to you for years, through setbacks and slow progress. Her 2007 studies linked higher grit scores to finishing training at the US Military Academy at West Point and to reaching later rounds of the National Spelling Bee.¹ Ten years later, a meta-analysis by Marcus Credé and colleagues found that grit is only moderately linked to performance, overlaps heavily with the personality trait conscientiousness, and draws most of its predictive power from its perseverance half.²

Both camps have a point, and Duckworth has accepted part of the critique. For your own goals, the research favors the perseverance half: doing the hard practice, finishing what you start and coming back after a setback. Grit is one strand of a larger subject, how beliefs and habits of mind shape behavior.

The grit Angela Duckworth defined: passion plus perseverance

Angela Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, defines grit as passion and perseverance for long-term goals. Her 2007 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology asked which qualities besides intellectual talent predict achievement, and in its data grit did not rise with IQ.¹ Researchers usually score grit in two parts: perseverance of effort, which is working hard and finishing what you start, and consistency of interest, which is keeping the same goals for years.²

On her own site she describes grit as caring about one goal so much that it organizes and gives meaning to most of what you do, and holding to it when progress is slow or you fail. She separates it from talent, luck and how intensely you want something right now.³

A nurse who spends four years of evening classes qualifying as a nurse practitioner, through a failed exam and a move to a new hospital, shows both parts. The evenings are the perseverance; keeping the same goal from year one to year four is the consistency. Someone who works as hard but changes field every year has only the first.

Before judging your own grit, separate the two. Ask whether you tend to finish hard things, and separately whether your big goals stay put long enough for that effort to add up.

What the Grit Scale measures, and what it cannot

The Grit Scale is a short self-reportself-report: A measure in which people describe their own behavior, feelings or circumstances, usually by answering a questionnaire. When the same person supplies both of the things being compared, shared habits of answering can make the link between them look stronger than it is.Full entry in the glossary questionnaire. People rate statements about their effort and their interests, such as whether setbacks discourage them or whether new ideas distract them from old ones, and the average of those ratings, between 1 and 5, is the score. The original version has 12 items, and an 8-item short form followed in 2009.³

Duckworth is unusually frank about its limits. Her site warns that a higher score is easy to fake, and that people judge themselves against different standards, a distortion called reference bias, so a score mixes how gritty you are with how demanding you are of yourself. She says the scale suits research and self-reflection and should not be used to select employees, admit students, rate teachers or compare schools and countries.³

A junior doctor surrounded by colleagues on very long shifts may rate herself only “somewhat” hardworking, while someone in a relaxed office who does a little more than his peers rates himself “very much”. The scale records the comparison as much as the behavior.

A grit questionnaire used to decide something about you is being used in a way its author advises against. For your own use, treat the score as the start of a conversation with yourself.

The studies that made grit famous

Duckworth’s case rested mostly on studies in demanding US settings. Her 2007 paper reported six studies covering the education of adults recruited online, Ivy League students’ grades, two classes of West Point cadets and children in the National Spelling Bee. Across them, grit’s average share of the variance in these outcomes was about 4 percent, and it still predicted success after IQ and conscientiousness were taken into account.¹

The spelling bee data showed a possible mechanism. In a 2011 follow-up, grittier spellers did more deliberate practice, studying and memorizing words alone, which was rated the most effortful and least enjoyable way to prepare. That practice, more than being quizzed or reading for fun, predicted how far they went, and it carried the link between grit and final performance.⁴

Teachers were another test. In two samples of novice teachers placed in low-income US school districts, raters who did not know the outcomes scored grit from résumés, giving points for sticking with and advancing in college activities and jobs. Teachers with higher scores were more likely to stay through the year and got better results with their students, while SAT scores, college grades and interview ratings of leadership potential predicted neither. The authors note that the design was observational, so other unmeasured qualities could explain the link.⁵

The largest test came in 2019: Duckworth and colleagues followed 11,258 West Point cadets across a decade of intakes. On average, about 3 in 100 cadets left during the first summer of training, known as Beast Barracks. Of the qualities measured, grit was the only reliable predictor of finishing that summer and predicted graduation better than cognitive ability, but it added only modestly to academic, military and physical grades.⁶

Across these studies, grit seems to matter most for staying in something hard and much less for how well you score once you are there. If your problem is quitting too early, grit is a useful lens; if it is the quality of your work, look first at skill and practice methods.

Does grit predict success? What a 2017 meta-analysis found

Grit predicts success, but modestly, according to a 2017 analysis that pooled 88 samples. Marcus Credé, Michael Tynan and Peter Harms pooled grit studies from Duckworth’s lab and many others in a meta-analysismeta-analysis: A study that combines the results of earlier studies on the same question into one overall estimate. Pooling makes the estimate more precise, but it cannot repair the studies it pools: a meta-analysis of surveys is still survey evidence.Full entry in the glossary in the same journal as her original paper.

The study

Moderate evidence

Eighty-eight samples pooled: how much grit tells you about performance

Pooling 584 effect sizes from 88 independent samples covering 66,807 people, the review found grit only moderately correlated with performance and retention and very strongly correlated with conscientiousness. Combining the two parts into one overall grit trait was not supported, and perseverance of effort predicted outcomes more strongly than consistency of interest. Perseverance still explained academic performance with conscientiousness held constant. In the authors’ reading, programs to raise grit may have only weak effects on performance, and grit’s main value may lie in its perseverance half.²

NPR’s report on the paper put the size in context: grit’s overall correlationcorrelation: A measure of how closely two things move together, running from minus one, where one rises as the other falls, through zero, meaning no link, to plus one. It says how strong the relationship is, not what causes it, and it is not a percentage.Full entry in the glossary with academic success was about 0.2, against about 0.5 for SAT scores and college performance. The same report described a wording problem Credé caught. A 2009 paper by Duckworth and Patrick Quinn said West Point cadets one standard deviation above average in grit were “99% more likely” to complete summer training, a figure that described odds. In plain percentages, about 95 percent of all cadets finished, against about 98 percent of the grittiest.⁷

1. Perseverance of effort: working hard and finishing what you start; the facet that carried most of the link with performance
2. Consistency of interest: keeping the same goals and interests for years; a weaker and less consistent predictor
3. Performance and retention: grades, staying in a program, finishing training

A link of that size shows up across a whole school or army intake, yet in a single life it is hard to spot. A gap of a few points in a group where almost everyone succeeds is real, and far smaller than “99% more likely” sounds.

Two later studies point the same way from other places. In the UK, a study of 2,321 pairs of 16-year-old twins found that grit added little to the prediction of national exam grades once the Big Five personality traits, mainly conscientiousness, were counted.⁸ An online survey of 7,617 people across six continents found perseverance moderately to strongly linked to well-being and strengths in every region studied, while consistency of interest had weak or even negative links. A single overall grit score held together in individualistic countries but not in collectivist ones in Latin America and Asia.⁹

Other criticisms are about the story more than the statistics. K. Anders Ericsson, the expertise researcher who co-wrote the spelling bee study, argued in his book Peak that labelling persistent people “gritty” after the fact explains nothing, and that motivation depends on the situation. Writers in Education Week have called the grit narrative a form of victim blaming when it is used to play down poverty, racism or poor teaching.¹⁰

Myth

Grit is the secret of success and matters more than talent.

Fact

Grit is modestly linked to success. A 2017 meta-analysis found it only moderately correlated with performance, with most of the link coming from perseverance.

When you meet a claim that a trait makes success “twice as likely” or “99% more likely”, ask what share of people succeeded without it. If most did, the trait cannot be adding much.

Is grit different from conscientiousness?

Grit and conscientiousness overlap heavily. The UK twin study found grit perseverance and conscientiousness largely the same trait, both in behavior and in their genetic roots.⁸ The site’s guide to conscientiousness, the Big Five trait behind self-discipline covers the trait itself.

Duckworth’s answer is that grit belongs to the conscientiousness family without being identical to it. In her reply to Credé she called it “a member of the conscientiousness family” with predictive power of its own.⁷ On her FAQ page she says grit matters most in challenging, personally meaningful pursuits: returning to the spelling bee to do better than last year takes grit, while getting your taxes started early takes self-control more than grit.³

A day of resisting your phone to finish a report is a self-control problem, which the guide to self-discipline as skill, trait or well-designed life treats in depth. Sticking with a three-year apprenticeship through a bad first year is a different problem, about meaning and commitment more than impulses. Work out which kind you face before choosing a fix.

How Duckworth answered her critics

Duckworth accepted several of the criticisms in public. In emails quoted by NPR in 2016, she agreed the West Point result should have been described differently, while insisting the tables and statistics were correct and the intent was not to mislead. She also agreed that the effects she had found sat in what personality psychologists would call the small-to-medium range, and said she was thinking of revising the passion questions on her scale, where Credé found the weakest results.⁷

She pushed back on how far Credé took his findings:

I can’t see, exactly, how the author goes from these findings to the rather bold claims in his press release.

Her FAQ adds that grit alone will save no one: a child who arrives at school hungry or scared is not ready to learn, and gritty people still need mentors, supportive surroundings and a real opportunity.³

The exchange is a useful model for reading popular psychology. The original researcher conceded the size of the effect and the wording, and the critic’s own data showed that perseverance carries real information. When you read a confident book summary of grit, check which of those two concessions it leaves out.

Can grit be learned? Evidence from a school trial in Istanbul

One randomized study suggests grit can be built up in children, though the evidence is younger and thinner than the studies that made grit famous. It ran in two independent samples of elementary schools in Istanbul, Turkey, and was published in 2019 by Sule Alan, Teodora Boneva and Seda Ertac.¹¹

Teachers were trained to deliver a curriculum of short videos, case studies and classroom activities on four ideas: abilities can grow with practice, effort builds skill, failure is information rather than a verdict, and goals are worth setting.¹² Children who received it were more likely to put effort into building skill on an incentivized task and to succeed at it, and two and a half years later they scored about 0.2 standard deviations higher on a standardized math test.¹¹ That is a modest gain, and it comes from one country and one age group.

The curriculum overlaps heavily with growth mindsetgrowth mindset: The belief that abilities such as intelligence can be developed through effort, good strategies and help from others; a fixed mindset is the belief that they cannot. It names a belief, and programs that teach it have shown small or no gains in school results.Full entry in the glossary teaching, so the study cannot separate training grit from changing beliefs about ability. Our search turned up no trial that tests whether raising grit in adults changes their careers.

What you can sensibly take from grit research

Grit research supports a narrower lesson than the bestseller suggests. Finishing what you start predicts staying the course in hard settings, deliberate practice seems to be one route by which it works, and the passion half predicts much less.

Track perseverance in records you can check. A runner training for a first marathon can log the sessions completed and the long runs done after a missed week; a language learner can count lessons finished and conversations attempted. Those counts show perseverance directly, where a questionnaire shows only how you rate yourself. Keep your circumstances in view too, since time, money, health and support shape how much perseverance is possible.

The bottom line

Grit is a real but modest predictor of staying with hard things, and most of its value sits in perseverance of effort. Pick one goal that matters to you this month, book the practice you most avoid into your week, and keep a simple log of what you finish.