Angela L. Duckworth's research while affiliated with University of Pennsylvania and other places

Publications (76)

Preprint
The efficacy of behavioral interventions targeting policy-relevant outcomes often varies across sub-populations. Understanding and planning for heterogeneous treatment effects is critical to developing nuanced theories of human behavior and offering more useful guidance to policymakers. We identify one theory-driven source of heterogeneity in the e...
Preprint
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Behavioral interventions applied to policy problems often yield varying degrees of success in different sub-populations. Understanding and planning for heterogeneous treatment effects is critical to developing nuanced theories of human behavior and offering more useful guidance to policymakers. In this research, we identify one source of heterogene...
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There is growing policy interest in identifying contexts that cultivate self-regulation. Doing so often entails comparing groups of individuals (e.g., from different schools). We show that self-report questionnaires—the most prevalent modality for assessing self-regulation—are prone to reference bias , defined as systematic error arising from diffe...
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How can behavioral insights best be leveraged to solve pressing policy challenges? Because research studies are typically designed to test the validity of a particular idea, surprisingly little is known about the relative efficacy of different approaches to changing behavior in any given policy context. We discuss megastudies as a research approach...
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Purpose To evaluate if nudges delivered by text message prior to an upcoming primary care visit can increase influenza vaccination rates. Design Randomized, controlled trial. Setting Two health systems in the Northeastern US between September 2020 and March 2021. Subjects 74,811 adults. Interventions Patients in the 19 intervention arms receive...
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Self-control is often thought to be synonymous with willpower, defined as the direct modulation of impulses in order to do what is best in the long-run. However, research has also identified more strategic approaches to self-control that require less effort than willpower. To date, field research is lacking that compares the efficacy of willpower t...
Article
Research suggests that breaking overarching goals into more granular subgoals is beneficial for goal progress. However, making goals more granular often involves reducing the flexibility provided to complete them, and recent work shows that flexibility can also be beneficial for goal pursuit. We examine this trade-off between granularity and flexib...
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In a recent longitudinal study of U.S. adolescents, grit predicted rank-order increases in growth mindset and, to a lesser degree, growth mindset predicted rank-order increases in grit. The current investigation replicated and extended these findings in a younger non-Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (non-WEIRD) population. Tw...
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Lotteries have been shown to motivate behaviour change in many settings, but their value as a policy tool is relatively untested. We implemented a pre-registered, citywide experiment to test the effects of three high-pay-off, geographically targeted lotteries designed to motivate adult Philadelphians to get their COVID-19 vaccine. In each drawing,...
Article
Importance: Despite the availability of safe and effective vaccines, many people fail to get vaccinated. Messages using behavioral science principles may increase vaccination rates. Objective: To determine the effect on influenza vaccination rates of a text message telling patients that an influenza vaccine had been reserved for them. Design, s...
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Significance Encouraging vaccination is a pressing policy problem. Our megastudy with 689,693 Walmart pharmacy customers demonstrates that text-based reminders can encourage pharmacy vaccination and establishes what kinds of messages work best. We tested 22 different text reminders using a variety of different behavioral science principles to nudge...
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Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes¹. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time intervals². The lack of comparability of such individual investigations limits their po...
Article
Children's behavior changes from day to day, but the factors that contribute to its variability are understudied. We developed a novel repeated measures paradigm to study children's persistence by capitalizing on a task that children complete every day: toothbrushing (N = 81; 48% female; 36-47 months; 80% white, 14% Multiracial, 10% Hispanic, 2% As...
Preprint
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The standard experimental paradigm in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences is extremely limited. Although recent advances in digital technologies and crowdsourcing services allow individual experiments to be deployed and run faster than in traditional physical labs, a majority of experiments still focus on one-off results that do not gener...
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People generally prefer easier over more difficult mental tasks. Using two different adaptations of a demand selection task, we show that interest can influence this effect, such that participants choose options with a higher cognitive workload. Interest was also associated with lower feelings of fatigue. In two studies, participants ( N = 63 and N...
Preprint
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Lotteries have been shown to motivate behavior change in many settings. However, the value of large-scale, geographically-targeted lotteries as a policy tool for changing the behaviors of entire populations is a matter of heated debate. In mid-2021, we implemented a pre-registered, city-wide experiment in Philadelphia to test the effects of three,...
Article
This commentary addresses debate over the factor structure of the Grit Scale in both its original and short forms. Commonly (and in our own work), factor solutions are used to establish dimensionality of the construct being measured. For example, a two-factor hierarchical model was proposed for the Short Grit Scale. It has since been pointed out, c...
Article
What is the social, emotional, and academic impact of attending school remotely rather than in person? We address this issue using survey data collected from N = 6,576 high school students in a large, diverse school district that allowed families to choose either format in fall 2020. Controlling for baseline measures of well-being collected 1 month...
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Many Americans fail to get life-saving vaccines each year, and the availability of a vaccine for COVID-19 makes the challenge of encouraging vaccination more urgent than ever. We present a large field experiment ( N = 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via text message and designed to boost adoption of the influenza vaccine. Our findin...
Article
Persistence is crucial for overcoming academic and interpersonal challenges. However, there has been little progress in developing effective interventions to improve persistence in childhood. Here we outline how recent insights from cognitive science can be leveraged to promote young children’s persistence and highlight future directions to bridge...
Article
For all its popularity as a psychological construct, willpower is irremediably polysemous. A more helpful construct is self-control, defined as the self-regulation of conflicting impulses. We show how the process model of self-control provides a principled framework for examining how undesirable impulses may be weakened and desirable impulses may b...
Preprint
What is the social, emotional, and academic impact of attending school remotely rather than in person? We address this urgent policy issue using survey data collected from N = 6,576 high school students in a large, demographically diverse school district that allowed families to choose either format in fall 2020. Controlling for baseline measures o...
Article
Grit—the tendency to pursue especially long-term goals with both passion and perseverance—has been shown to predict high achievement in a range of individual performance domains. We make a case for introducing the concept of grit to the organizational behavior literature. To begin, we elaborate the conceptual foundations of grit, highlighting ways...
Preprint
Children’s behavior changes from day to day, but the factors that contribute to its variability are understudied. We developed a novel repeated measures paradigm to study children’s persistence by capitalizing on a task children complete every day: toothbrushing. Children brushed longer on days when their parents encouraged them more (d=0.50), and...
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Despite rapid growth in the empirical research on behavior change, modern science has yet to produce a coherent set of recommendations for individuals and organizations eager to align everyday actions with enduringly valued goals. We propose the process model of behavior change as a parsimonious framework for organizing strategies according to wher...
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Temptation bundling—pairing a pleasurable indulgence with a behavior that provides delayed rewards—combats present bias by making behaviors with delayed benefits more instantly-gratifying. If people are sophisticated and capable of following self-set rules to overcome present bias, they could benefit from learning about temptation bundling. Partici...
Article
Individual differences in grit and growth mindset predict effort and achievement in the face of challenges, but little is known about how the two traits influence each other during adolescence. In the current investigation, we analyzed data on grit and growth mindset collected from 1667 adolescents and their teachers on four occasions over 2 academ...
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There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field's investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we c...
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Personality traits such as grit and self-control are important determinants of success in life outcomes. However, most measures of these traits, which rely on self-reports, might be biased when used for the purpose of evaluating education policies or interventions. Recent research has shown the potential of survey effort—in particular, item non-res...
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We tested the domain-specificity or domain-generality of academic diligence in middle-school students using the Academic Diligence Task (ADT), a performance task that assesses effort on tedious problems in the face of digital distractions. Students in 8th grade (N = 439) were randomly assigned to individually complete a math, verbal, or spatial ADT...
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Mastery behaviours — seeking out challenging tasks and continuing to work on them despite difficulties — are integral to achievement but difficult to measure with precision. The current study reports on the development and validation of the computer-based persistence, effort, resilience, and challenge-seeking (PERC) task in two demographically dive...
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This study answered novel questions about the connection between high school extracurricular dosage (number of activities and participation duration) and the attainment of a bachelor’s degree. Using data from the Common Application and the National Student Clearinghouse (N = 311,308), we found that greater extracurricular participation positively p...
Article
Little is known about the naturalistic development of mindfulness in adolescence and how it relates to changes in emotional well-being. The current longitudinal study examined the development of one dimension of mindfulness, nonreactivity to difficult inner experience (or in more colloquial terms, being able to notice, but "take a step back" from d...
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When predicting success, how important are personal attributes other than cognitive ability? To address this question, we capitalized on a full decade of prospective, longitudinal data from n = 11,258 cadets entering training at the US Military Academy at West Point. Prior to training, cognitive ability was negatively correlated with both physical...
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One in 12 adults worldwide has diabetes.1 Medical treatment can reduce diabetes-related complications, but adherence to treatment can be difficult.2 The reasons for nonadherence are multifactorial. Social scientists have found that character skills—sometimes referred to as socioemotional, noncognitive, or soft skills—are an important factor in whet...
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A global priority for the behavioural sciences is to develop cost-effective, scalable interventions that could improve the academic outcomes of adolescents at a population level, but no such interventions have so far been evaluated in a population-generalizable sample. Here we show that a short (less than one hour), online growth mindset interventi...
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Common sense suggests that people struggling to achieve their goals benefit from receiving motivational advice. What if the reverse is true? In a preregistered field experiment, we tested whether giving motivational advice raises academic achievement for the advisor. We randomly assigned n = 1,982 high school students to a treatment condition, in w...
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Compared with admissions test scores, why are high school grades better at predicting college graduation? We argue that success in college requires not only cognitive ability but also self-regulatory competencies that are better indexed by high school grades. In a national sample of 47,303 students who applied to college for the 2009/2010 academic...
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Significance Although diversity training is commonplace in organizations, the relative scarcity of field experiments testing its effectiveness leaves ambiguity about whether diversity training improves attitudes and behaviors toward women and racial minorities. We present the results of a large field experiment with an international organization te...
Conference Paper
It is widely acknowledged that the language we use reflects numerous psychological constructs, including our thoughts, feelings, and desires. Can the so called "noncognitive" traits with known links to success, such as growth mindset, leadership ability, and intrinsic motivation, be similarly revealed through language? We investigated this question...
Article
Self-distancing (i.e., creating mental distance between the self and a stimulus by adopting a less egocentric perspective) has been studied as a way to improve adolescents' and adults' emotion regulation. These studies instruct adolescents and adults to use visual imagery or language to create distance from the self before engaging in self-regulati...
Article
Self-control refers to the alignment of thoughts, feelings, and actions with enduringly valued goals in the face of momentarily more alluring alternatives. In this review, we examine the role of self-control in academic achievement. We begin by defining self-control and distinguishing it from related constructs. Next, we summarize evidence that nea...
Article
Almost everyone struggles to act in their individual and collective best interests, particularly when doing so requires forgoing a more immediately enjoyable alternative. Other than exhorting decision makers to "do the right thing," what can policymakers do to reduce overeating, undersaving, procrastination, and other self-defeating behaviors that...
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Achieving important goals is widely assumed to require confronting obstacles, failing repeatedly, and persisting in the face of frustration. Yet empirical evidence linking achievement and frustration tolerance is lacking. To facilitate work on this important topic, we developed and validated a novel behavioral measure of frustration tolerance: the...
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Typically, individuals struggling with goal achievement seek advice. However, in the present investigation (N = 2,274), struggling individuals were more motivated by giving advice than receiving it. In a randomized, controlled, double-blind field experiment, middle-school students who gave motivational advice to younger students spent more time on...
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Prior research indicates that visual self-distancing enhances adaptive self-reflection about negative past events (Kross & Ayduk, 2011). However, whether this process is similarly useful when people reflect on anxiety-provoking future negative experiences, and if so, whether a similar set of mechanisms underlie its benefits in this context, is unkn...
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Grit, the inclination to pursue long-term goals with passion and perseverance, predicts academic achievement and professional success, but how to encourage grit in students remains an open question. The goal of the current study was to understand how perceptions of school culture influence the development of grit in middle school students. We condu...
Article
The measurement of grit and other character skills in schools, most often using self-report questionnaires, has grown in recent years. Very little is known about whether self-report questionnaires are subject to age effects. Using a longitudinal sample of 14,762 students in Mexico surveyed in 9th and 12th grades (three years apart), we estimate the...
Article
Self‐distancing has been shown to improve children's self‐regulation in a variety of tasks. However, it is unknown whether this strategy is more effective for some children than others. This study investigated self‐distancing in relation to individual differences in executive function (EF) and effortful control (EC). Typically developing 4‐ (n = 72...
Article
Typically, individuals struggling with goal achievement seek advice. However, in the present investigation (N = 2,274), struggling individuals were more motivated by giving advice than receiving it. In a randomized-controlled, double-blind, field experiment, middle school students who gave motivational advice to younger students spent more time on...
Conference Paper
We leverage a unique national dataset of 41,359 college applications to prospectively predict 4-year bachelor's graduation in a generalizable manner. Our features include sociodemographics, institutional graduation rates, academic achievement, standardized test scores, engagement in extracurricular activities, work experiences, and ratings by teach...
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Commitment devices impose costs on one's future self for failing to follow through on one's intentions, offer no additional benefit to one's future self for following through on the intention, and people voluntarily enroll in them. Enrollment in commitment devices reflects self-awareness that one may lack sufficient self-control to fulfill one's in...
Preprint
Full-text available
Commitment devices impose costs on one’s future self for failing to follow through on one’s intentions, offer no additional benefit to one’s future self for following through on the intention, and people voluntarily enroll in them. Enrollment in commitment devices reflects self-awareness that one may lack sufficient self-control to fulfill one’s in...
Article
In 2002, we discovered that self-control “outdoes” talent in predicting academic success during adolescence. Since then, a surfeit of longitudinal evidence has affirmed the importance of self-control to achieving everyday goals that conflict with momentary temptations. In parallel, research that has “lumped” self-control with other facets of Big Fi...
Article
Prior research has shown that adverse events in the lives of adolescents precipitate psychological distress, which in turn impairs self-control. This study (N = 1,343) examined the protective effects of stress mindsets—beliefs about the extent to which stress might be beneficial or strictly detrimental. The results confirmed that increasing the num...
Article
Objective: Can having too much self-control make people unhappy? Researchers have increasingly questioned the unilateral goodness of self-control and proposed that it is beneficial only up to a certain point, after which it becomes detrimental. The little empirical research on the issue shows mixed results. Hence, we tested whether a curvilinear r...
Article
It is generally acknowledged that engagement plays a critical role in learning. Unfortunately, the study of engagement has been stymied by a lack of valid and efficient measures. We introduce the advanced, analytic, and automated (AAA) approach to measure engagement at fine-grained temporal resolutions. The AAA measurement approach is grounded in e...
Article
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...

Citations

... In October 2022, Duckworth and Milkman summarized the megastudy approach in A Guide to Megastudies [44]. They described its origins, implementation steps, strengths, conditions, limitations, and future. ...
... In addition, the proliferation of recently developed distance-learning methods greatly increases the demands on children's self-regulation capabilities 14,15 -prompting leading institutions such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to conclude that self-regulation is the key twenty-first-century skill for student success and should thus be primarily promoted 16 . A considerable literature emphasizes that self-regulation and related skills are malleable in children [17][18][19][20][21][22][23] , especially by use of explicit strategy instruction [24][25][26] , and that influences during early childhood and in younger ages generally play an important role in later skill formation [27][28][29][30][31] . Despite its fundamental importance, self-regulation is not a school subject-such as reading, language or mathematics-that is directly taught in schools as a regular part of the curriculum. ...
... However, when students were doing related tasks related to Chinese and English, they might be easily distracted because of a lack of interest. And that leads to the question of whether self-control ability can fluctuate when an individual is doing totally different tasks [6,8,13]. Back to the experiment, we believe that some of the students have extraordinary academic performance in some subjects but show overall lower academic performance because we use the percentage of the sum scores of two important exams. ...
... Moreover, vulnerable populations who are disproportionately harmed by COVID-19 benefit indirectly from interventions that boost population vaccination rates. Targeting vaccine lotteries by geographic area can further improve equity(25). ...
... Our findings also connect to the literature on health nudges, which similarly tends to focus on low-cost, scalable interventions. Much of this literature has focused on text-based interventions, which have shown potential across a number of domains, ranging from flu appointments to court appearances (21)(22)(23). Specifically, in the context of COVID-19, Dai et al. (24) sent participants in California text-based reminders to make vaccination salient and easy to remember. They find that reminders sent 1 d and 8 d after notification of vaccine eligibility increased vaccination rates by 3.57% points and 1.06% points, respectively. ...
... Is this research approach suitable for the pressing question of vaccine hesitancy? After the exercise behavior megastudy, Milkman conducted a study on vaccine hesitancy in 2020 [40]. Studies have shown that only 79% of people who intended to receive the influenza vaccine did so [41]. ...
... Pertumbuhan dan perkembangan anak usia dini melaju sangat pesat dan merupakan saat yang fundamental bagi fase kehidupan selanjutnya (Berk & Longman, 2007). Penyiapan sumber daya manusia Indonesia dapat dilakukan sejak usia dini karena masa ini disebut dengan masa keemasan yang mana stimulasi kepada anak dapat dengan cepat diserap oleh anak dan sangat menentukan masa depannya (Leonard et al., 2022). Pada masa ini, anak usia dini perlu mendapatkan pelayanan yang esensial mencakup seluruh aspek perkembangan anak melalui program PAUD holistik integratif (Oktaviani & Dimyati, 2021). ...
... A study found that descriptive norms could increase physical activity among gym-members, but only if the message describes that "an increasing majority" or "minority" of the population exercises frequently. On the other hand, referring to "increasing minority" or "majority" of the population did not have significant effect on the frequency of gym visits (Milkman, Gromet, et al., 2021). These results highlight the necessity to gain further understanding on the factors influencing the effect of norms. ...
... Nesse estudo, oStroop task (STROOP, 1935) foi utilizado como indutor de FM nos atletas treinados em uma versão adaptada apenas com estímulos incongruentes e a adição da função "troca" a fim de incrementar carga à tarefa cognitiva; além disso, a duração da tarefa com demanda cognitiva variou entre os voluntários para que tivéssemos uma aplicação individualizada da carga cognitiva. Confirmamos, para tanto, que essa configuração foi eficaz para induzir FM ao observarmos aumento nas respostas subjetivas relacionadas à EVA e comportamentais relacionadas ao TR ao estímulo "troca" no Stroop task, independente da condição experimental conduzida (FM ou PPS+FM); ainda, observamos que os atletas submetidos às condições FM e PPS conjugadas apresentaram prejuízo da acurácia ao final da aplicação do Stroop task, possivelmente em decorrência de desengajamento da tarefa em razão da redução da motivação(MILYAVSKAYA et al., 2021), que causa diminuição do esforço para realizar a tarefa na presença de recompensa pouco atrativa.Nesse sentido, o Stroop task é um método que tem sido proposto como indutor de FM em diversos estudos com atletas de diferentes modalidades esportivas(HABAY et al., 2021a) e tem sido eficaz em cumprir esse propósito em atletas de futebol(BADIN et al., 2016;COUTINHO et al., 2018; GANTOIS et al., 2020;SMITH et al., 2016a), basquetebol (FORTES et al., 2022aMOREIRA et al., 2018; SHAABANI et al., 2020), badminton(VAN CUTSEM et al., 2019), ciclistas(MARTIN et al., 2016;VRIJKOTTE et al., 2018), corrida de orientação (BATISTA et al., 2021) e sprint (FORTES et al., 2021a) etc. Apesar disso, sabe-se também que é possível induzir a FM com tarefas que não exigem inibição cognitiva (por exemplo, tarefas que exigem funções executivas como memória de trabalho) e que apenas 10 minutos de tarefa com alta demanda cognitiva já parece promover alguma magnitude de FM (DALLAWAY; LUCAS; RING, 2022).O presente estudo, ao propor a individualização da carga cognitiva, optou por adotar um limiar de 70 mm da EVA (0-100 mm) sem delimitar a duração da aplicação do Stroop task.Essa configuração é diferente do que estudos prévios propuseram, uma vez que o Stroop task tem sido aplicado nos estudos com duração variando entre 15 min e 90 min(BADIN et al., 2016;FILIPAS et al., 2021b; GANTOIS et al., 2020;MOREIRA et al., 2018; SHAABANI et al., 2020;TRECROCI et al., 2020;VAN CUTSEM et al., 2019;VOGT et al., 2018) e tem adotado estímulos congruentes e/ou incongruentes em sua configuração(CAO et al., 2022;HABAY et al., 2021a;VAN CUTSEM et al., 2017b). Adicionalmente, verificamos que em estudos prévios os atletas têm alcançado entre 44 mm e 70 mm na EVA quando submetidos ao Stroop task com as configurações mencionadas anteriormente(BADIN et al., 2016;COUTINHO et al., 2018;FILIPAS et al., 2021b; KOSACK et al., 2020;SMITH et al., 2019;TRECROCI et al., 2020;VAN CUTSEM et al., 2019). ...
... Obviously, this narrative resonates with popular beliefs about the value of hard work-beliefs that are succinctly captured in the aphorism "Winners never quit and quitters never win." Another reason why some researchers and practitioners have enthusiastically embraced grit is the hope that grit might offer a target for interventions aimed at fostering individual agency, performance, and success [9,10]. ...