Angela Duckworth

• PhD
• Professor at University of Pennsylvania

A growth-mindset intervention teaches the belief that intellectual abilities can be developed. Where does the intervention work best? Prior research examined school-level moderators using data from the National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM), which delivered a short growth-mindset intervention during the first year of high school. In the present...

Here we evaluate the potential for growth mindset interventions (that teach students that intellectual abilities can be developed) to inspire adolescents to be “learners”—that is, to seek out challenging learning experiences. In a previous analysis, the U.S. National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM) showed that a growth mindset could improve the g...

*Draft version 10/26/18 submitted for peer review. Please do not circulate or cite without author's permission* Recent research has proposed that the ‘law of less work’ holds for cognitive work (Kool, McGuire, Rosen, & Botvinick, 2010), with people preferring easier over more difficult cognitive tasks. Using two different adaptations of a demand se...

Little is known about the normative development of mindfulness in adolescence, and whether changes in this mental faculty are associated with resilience to stress and well-being. The current longitudinal study examined the development of one component of mindfulness, nonreactivity to inner experience, in a racially and socioeconomically diverse sam...

Self-regulation has been shown to have important implications for individual trajectories of health and well-being across the life course. The present chapter examines the development of self-regulation from a life course health development (LCHD) perspective. Using the seven principles of LCHD and the relational developmental systems (RDS) framewo...

This study investigated the benefits of self-distancing (i.e., taking an outsider's view of one's own situation) on young children's perseverance. Four- and 6-year-old children (N = 180) were asked to complete a repetitive task for 10 min while having the option to take breaks by playing an extremely attractive video game. Six-year-olds persevered...

Mindfulness training programs require the completion of daily out-of-class meditation practices, often referred to as “homework,” and individuals who adhere to these requirements have better outcomes. Nevertheless, many people fall short of the recommended amount of meditation practice. Two field studies tested whether the formation of action plans...

Deliberate practice leads to world-class excellence across domains. In the current investigation, we examined whether psychologically “wise” interventions targeting expectancies and values—stock antecedents of ordinary effortful behaviors—could motivate nonexperts to engage in deliberate practice and improve their achievement. As a preliminary, we...

Other than cognitive ability, what competencies should schools promote in children? How are they organized, and to what extent do they predict consequential outcomes? Separate theoretical traditions have suggested interpersonal, intrapersonal, and intellectual dimensions, reflecting how children relate to other people, manage their own goals and im...

Significance In the United States, large, persistent gaps exist in the rates at which racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups complete postsecondary education, even when groups are equated on prior preparation. We test a method for preventing some of those gaps by providing individuals with a lay theory about the meaning of commonplace difficultie...

A growing body of research indicates that self-control is critical to academic success. Surprisingly little is known, however, about the diverse strategies students use to implement self-control or how well these strategies work. To address these issues, we conducted a naturalistic investigation of self-control strategies (Study 1) and two field ex...

Exercising self-control is often difficult, whether declining a drink in order to drive home safely, passing on the chocolate cake to stay on a diet, or ignoring text messages to finish reading an important paper. But enacting self-control is not always difficult, particularly when it takes the form of proactively choosing or changing situations in...

The field of psychology has done a remarkable job discovering the ways people differ from one another in their abilities and talents, but has long neglected the diverse ways people can unleash those capacities. There is no plausible mechanism by which our genes directly encode skills like how to dribble a basketball, play the violin, or solve an al...

We used self-report surveys to gather information on a broad set of non-cognitive skills from 1,368 eighth graders. At the student level, scales measuring conscientiousness, self-control, grit, and growth mindset are positively correlated with attendance, behavior, and test-score gains between fourth grade and eighth grade. Conscientiousness, self-...

Countless studies have addressed why some individuals achieve more than others. Nevertheless, the psychology of achievement lacks a unifying conceptual framework for synthesizing these empirical insights. We propose organizing achievement‐related traits by two possible mechanisms of action: Traits that determine the rate at which an individual lear...

There has been perennial interest in personal qualities other than cognitive ability that determine success, including self-control, grit, growth mind-set, and many others. Attempts to measure such qualities for the purposes of educational policy and practice, however, are more recent. In this article, we identify serious challenges to doing so. We...

Experiments performed primarily with adults show that self-distancing facilitates adaptive self-reflection. However, no research has investigated whether adolescents spontaneously engage in this process or whether doing so is linked to adaptive outcomes. In this study, 226 African American adolescents, aged 11-20, reflected on an anger-related inte...

Girls earn better grades than boys, but the mechanism explaining this gender difference is not well understood. We examined the relative importance of self-control and motivation in explaining the female advantage in grades. In Study 1, we surveyed middle school teachers and found that they judged girls to be higher in both school motivation and se...

Self-controlled behavior refers to actions aligned with valued, longer term goals in the face of conflicting impulses to seek immediate gratification. In this article, we argue that the psychological processes that contribute to self-controlled behavior can be grouped into two functionally distinct categories: Volitional processes facilitate self-c...

Why does self-control predict such a wide array of positive life outcomes? Conventional wisdom holds that self-control is used to effortfully inhibit maladaptive impulses, yet this view conflicts with emerging evidence that self-control is associated with less inhibition in daily life. We propose that one of the reasons individuals with better self...

Background/Context Surprisingly little progress has been made in linking teacher effectiveness and retention to factors observable at the time of hire. The rigors of teaching, particularly in low-income school districts, suggest the importance of personal qualities that have so far been difficult to measure objectively. Purpose/Objective/Research...

Many important learning tasks feel uninteresting and tedious to learners. This research proposed that promoting a prosocial, self-transcendent purpose could improve academic self-regulation on such tasks. This proposal was supported in 4 studies with over 2,000 adolescents and young adults. Study 1 documented a correlation between a self-transcende...

Other than talent and opportunity, what makes some people more successful than others? One important determinant of success is self-control—the capacity to regulate attention, emotion, and behavior in the presence of temptation. A second important determinant of success is grit—the tenacious pursuit of a dominant superordinate goal despite setbacks...

In two cross-sectional studies, we explored the motivational orientations correlates of the character strength of grit and its two component facets: perseverance of effort and consistency of interests over time. Specifically, we examined how individual differences in grit are explained by distinct approaches to pursuing happiness in life: pleasure...

Conflicts between immediately rewarding activities and more enduringly valued goals abound in the lives of school-age children. Such conflicts call upon children to exercise self-control, a competence that depends in part on the mastery of metacognitive, prospective strategies. The process model of self-control organizes these strategies into five...

Schools are an important context for both basic and applied scientific research. Unlike the laboratory, however, the physical and social conditions of schools are not under the exclusive control of scientists. In this article, we liken collecting data in schools to putting on a theatrical production. We begin by describing the large cast of charact...

Are helping professionals who have experienced the same types of struggles as their clients more engaged at work? In the current investigation, we examine this question in samples of police detectives (with and without a history of violent victimization) and mental health workers (with and without a history of mental illness). Our results indicate...

Remaining committed to goals is necessary (albeit not sufficient) to attaining them, but very little is known about domain-general individual differences that contribute to sustained goal commitment. The current investigation examines the association between grit, defined as passion and perseverance for long-term goals, other individual difference...

With data from the middle cohort of the Pittsburgh Youth Study, a prospective longitudinal study of inner-city boys, we examined whether Big Five agreeableness facets could be reliably recovered in this sample, and whether facets predicted educational, occupational, social, and antisocial life outcomes assessed a decade later. Caregivers described...

Why does performing certain tasks cause the aversive experience of mental effort and concomitant deterioration in task performance? One explanation posits a physical resource that is depleted over time. We propose an alternative explanation that centers on mental representations of the costs and benefits associated with task performance. Specifical...

The commentaries on our target article are surprisingly sympathetic to our overall approach to explaining subjective effort, though disagreement with particulars inevitably emerged. Here, in our response, we first review the few disagreements concerning the basic structure of our proposal, highlighting areas in which little or no resistance was voi...

Impulsivity is a salient individual difference in children with well-established predictive validity for life outcomes. The current investigation proposes that impulsive behaviors vary systematically by domain. In a series of studies with ethnically and socioeconomically diverse samples of middle school students, we find that schoolwork-related and...

The current intervention tested whether a metacognitive self-regulatory strategy of goal pursuit can help economically disadvantaged children convert positive thoughts and images about their future into effective action. Mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII) entails mental contrasting a desired future with relevant obstacles of r...

This investigation tests whether the predictive power of the delay of gratification task (colloquially known as the "marshmallow test") derives from its assessment of self-control or of theoretically unrelated traits. Among 56 school-age children in Study 1, delay time was associated with concurrent teacher ratings of self-control and Big Five cons...

Resumo Esta intervenção testou se uma estratégia metacognitiva autorregulatória de persecução de metas pode ajudar crianças economicamente desfavorecidas a converterem imagens e pensamentos positivos sobre o seu futuro em acção efectiva. O Contraste Mental com Intenções de Implementação (MCII) implica contrastar mentalmente um futuro desejado com o...

An interview is presented with Angela Lee Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania who researches on the personal qualities of grit and perseverance and their relation to academic achievement. Topics include the difference between grit and resilience, the psychological response to failure, and research on grit and the college dropout rates of st...

An interview is presented with Angela Lee Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania who researches on the personal qualities of grit and perseverance and their relation to academic achievement. Topics include the difference between grit and resilience, the psychological response to failure, and research on grit and the college dropout rates of st...

In this review, we evaluate developmental and personality research with the aim of determining whether the personality trait of conscientiousness can be identified in children and adolescents. After concluding that conscientiousness does emerge in childhood, we discuss the developmental origins of conscientiousness with a specific focus on self-reg...

Conscientiousness has been shown to predict healthy behaviors, healthy social relationships, and physical health and longevity. The causal links, however, are complex and not well elaborated. Many extant studies have used comparable measures for conscientiousness, and a systematic endeavor to build cross-study analyses for conscientiousness and hea...

This article investigates how personality and cognitive ability relate to measures of objective success (income and wealth) and subjective success (life satisfaction, positive affect, and lack of negative affect) in a representative sample of 9,646 American adults. In cross-sectional analyses controlling for demographic covariates, cognitive abilit...

This paper assesses the effects of personality traits on economic preparation for retirement, wealth accumulation, and consumption, among persons 66 to 69 years of age. Among the five chief personality traits of neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness, we focus most on conscientiousness. We find levels of adequate...

Some students fare better than others, even when researchers control for family background, school curriculum, and teacher quality. Variance in academic performance that persists when situational variables are held constant suggests that whether students fail or thrive depends on not only circumstance but also relatively stable individual differenc...

The increasing prominence of standardized testing to assess student learning motivated the current investigation. We propose that standardized achievement test scores assess competencies determined more by intelligence than by self-control, whereas report card grades assess competencies determined more by self-control than by intelligence. In parti...

We propose a model of impulsivity that predicts both domain-general and domain-specific variance in behaviours that produce short-term gratification at the expense of long-term goals and standards. Specifically, we posit that domain-general impulsivity is explained by domain-general self-control strategies and resources, whereas domain-specific imp...

The importance of self-control to a wide range of developmental outcomes prompted the current investigation of negative life events and self-control in early adolescence. In three prospective, longitudinal studies, negative life events reported by the mother (in Study 1) or child (in Studies 2 and 3) predicted rank-order decreases in self-control o...

In a previous study, we found the family of personality traits known as conscientiousness to be associated in cross-sectional analyses with both lifetime earnings and wealth. In this study, we used data from an Internet survey of HRS respondents in the second quarter of 2009 to test whether conscientiousness and other Big Five factors prospectively...

Two brief intervention studies tested whether teaching students to mentally contrast a desired future with its present reality resulted in better academic performance than teaching students to only think about the desired future. German elementary school children (N = 49; Study 1) and US middle school children (N = 63; Study 2) from low-income nei...

Although children and adolescents vary in their chronic tendencies to adaptively versus maladaptively reflect over negative feelings, the psychological mechanisms underlying these different types of self-reflection among youngsters are unknown. We addressed this issue in the present research by examining the role that self-distancing plays in disti...

There is extraordinary diversity in how the construct of self-control is operationalized in research studies. We meta-analytically examined evidence of convergent validity among executive function, delay of gratification, and self- and informant-report questionnaire measures of self-control. Overall, measures demonstrated moderate convergence (r(ra...

Intelligence tests are widely assumed to measure maximal intellectual performance, and predictive associations between intelligence quotient (IQ) scores and later-life outcomes are typically interpreted as unbiased estimates of the effect of intellectual ability on academic, professional, and social life outcomes. The current investigation critical...

The expert performance framework distinguishes between deliberate practice and less effective practice activities. The current longitudinal study is the first to use this framework to understand how children improve in an academic skill. Specifically, the authors examined the effectiveness and subjective experience of three preparation activities w...

This paper explores the power of personality traits both as predictors and as causes of academic and economic success, health, and criminal activity. Measured personality is interpreted as a construct derived from an economic model of preferences, constraints, and information. Evidence is reviewed about the "situational specificity" of personality...

Self-control is among the most widely studied constructs in the social sciences. For instance, more than 3% of peer-reviewed psychology articles in the past year were referenced by the key word “self-control” or closely related terms. The report by Moffitt et al. (1) in PNAS substantially advances this growing literature by demonstrating robust pre...

Personality tests are being added to large panel studies with increasing regularity, such as the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). To facilitate the inclusion and interpretation of these tests, we provide some general background on personality psychology, personality assessment, and the validity of personality tests. In this review, we provide bac...

Adolescents struggle with setting and striving for goals that require sustained self‐discipline. Research on adults indicates that goal commitment is enhanced by mental contrasting (MC), a strategy involving the cognitive elaboration of a desired future with relevant obstacles of present reality. Implementation intentions (II), which identify the a...

The predictive validity of personality for important life outcomes is well established, but conventional longitudinal analyses cannot rule out the possibility that unmeasured third-variable confounds fully account for the observed relationships. Longitudinal hierarchical linear models (HLM) with time-varying covariates allow each subject to serve a...

Studies of adolescents and young adults have shown that schooling impacts economic outcomes beyond its impact on cognitive ability. Research has also shown that the personality trait of conscientiousness predicts health outcomes, academic outcomes, and divorce. Using the Big Five taxonomy of personality traits, this study examines whether non-cogni...

To determine whether more self-controlled children are protected from weight gain as they enter adolescence. Prospective, longitudinal study. Ten sites across the United States from 1991 to 2007. The 844 children in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development birth cohort who had heig...

In a prospective longitudinal study, we examined whether the personality trait of self-control protects against weight gain during the transition from childhood to adolescence. We obtained multi-method, multi-source measures of self-control from a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse sample of 105 fifth-grade students. Height and weight were re...

In this investigation, we test whether temporal discounting is domain-specific (i.e., compared to other people, can an individual have a relatively high discount rate for one type of reward but a relatively low discount rate for another?), and we examine whether individual differences in the types of rewards one finds tempting explain domain-specif...

Recent findings from developmental neuroscience suggest that the adolescent brain is too immature to exert control over impulsive drives, such as sensation seeking, that increase during adolescence. Using a discounting of delayed reward paradigm, this research examines the ability to delay gratification as a potential source of control over risk-ta...

This three-year prospective, longitudinal study compared the predictive validity of self-control and IQ for academic outcomes in a sample of adolescents attending an urban high school. Self-control predicted persistence at this high school through the end of the eleventh grade. Among students who did not drop out, more self-controlled ninth graders...

Conscientiousness is often found to predict academic outcomes, but is defined differently by different models of personality. High school students (N = 291) completed a large number of Conscientiousness items from different models and the Big Five Inventory (BFI). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of the items uncovered eight facets: Ind...

Some teachers are dramatically more effective than others, but traditional indicators of competence (e.g., certification) explain minimal variance in performance. The rigors of teaching suggest that positive traits that buffer against adversity might contribute to teacher effectiveness. In this prospective longitudinal study, novice teachers (N = 3...

Sackett, Borneman, and Connelly's article and recent meta-analyses (e.g., Kuncel & Hezlett, 2007) should lay to rest any doubt over whether high-stakes standardized tests predict important academic and professional outcomes-they do. The challenge now is to identify noncognitive individual differences that determine the same outcomes. Noncognitive i...

In this article, we introduce brief self-report and informant-report versions of the Grit Scale, which measures trait-level perseverance and passion for long-term goals. The Short Grit Scale (Grit-S) retains the 2-factor structure of the original Grit Scale (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007) with 4 fewer items and improved psychometric...

Is self-discipline overrated? Is the only benefit of self-control higher report card grades? Are self-disciplined children generally uncreative, anxious, and unhappy? Does contemporary American culture put inordinate emphasis on the virtue of self-discipline? As a research psychologist and former middle and high school math teacher, my answer to al...

This paper explores the interface between personality psychology and economics. We examine the predictive power of personality and the stability of personality traits over the life cycle. We develop simple analytical frameworks for interpreting the evidence in personality psychology and suggest promising avenues for future research.

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...

Several cross-sectional studies have demonstrated an association between subjective well-being and school success (Gilman & Huebner, 2003; Verkuyten & Thijs, 2002). In a prospective, longitudinal study, we explored the direction of causality in this relationship. At the beginning of the school year, fifth grade students completed measures of well-...

Throughout elementary, middle, and high school, girls earn higher grades than boys in all major subjects. Girls, however, do not outperform boys on achievement or IQ tests. To date, explanations for the underprediction of girls' GPAs by standardized tests have focused on gender differences favoring boys on such tests. The authors' investigation sug...

In a longitudinal study of 140 eighth-grade students, self-discipline measured by self-report, parent report, teacher report, and monetary choice questionnaires in the fall predicted final grades, school attendance, standardized achievement-test scores, and selection into a competitive high school program the following spring. In a replication with...

Positive psychology is the scientific study of positive experiences and positive individual traits, and the institutions that facilitate their development. A field concerned with well-being and optimal functioning, positive psychology aims to broaden the focus of clinical psychology beyond suffering and its direct alleviation. Our proposed conceptu...

Some children fare better academically than others, even when family background and school and teacher quality are controlled for (Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005). Variance in performance that persists when situational variables are held constant suggests that individual differences play an important role in determining whether children thrive or f...