Angela Duckworth is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the personal qualities and situational affordances that support achievement and well-being. She is a MacArthur Fellow and bestselling author of Grit, which posited that passion and perseverance were the keys to personal success. Her next book is Situated: Find the People and Places that Bring Out Your Best, which argues that adjusting environment, peers, mentors, and culture portends greater success and well-being than fundamental characteristics like will power.
Here’s the first part of the transcript where we get into it, but watch the whole thing. We talk about critiques that were raised about Grit and the commendable way Duckworth responded, why the peer system of Alcoholics Anonymous works so well, and advice for graduate students and postdocs based on Duckworth’s research.
Willpower is overrated
Holden Thorp: Hi, this is editor-in-chief of Science, Holden Thorp. Today, I’m talking with Angela Duckworth. She is a professor and psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book, Grit, was a number one New York Times bestseller that talked about how passion and perseverance made people successful beyond just, uh, their talent.
Her new book is called Situated. It’s all about how to get your environment and the people surrounding you and your situation tuned up so that you can be successful. There’s lots of lessons in here for scientists, and so, uh, here we go with Angela. So Angela, thanks for coming on. It’s great to talk to you about Situated.
Congratulations.
Angela Duckworth: Thank you, Holden.
Holden Thorp: Your new book, Situated, is a follow-up in some ways to your first book, Grit, which has sold millions of copies and become part of the zeitgeist of the whole world, and it’s about how passion and perseverance in a very special combination are what have made a lot of people successful in ways that maybe are, were counterintuitive.
Situated is, uh, more about what surrounds us, and so why don’t you start by just kinda telling us why you decided to write this book and who you think can benefit the most from it?
Angela Duckworth: So the story of this book is, I guess, also the story of my research career. I started off studying individuals, and how they were different from each other.
So in, in psychology we’d say I started studying individual differences, and I specifically wanted to know what are the personal characteristics of people who become great at what they do. This, Holden, is a lifelong fascination for me. It’s not even that I like sports, but I love studying Olympic athletes or, you know, people who are inducted into the Hall of Fame for, I mean, anything.
It’s like tennis, golf, badminton. I really like studying human excellence, and I wanted to know what is different about those individuals than others. So where I started was trying to understand how important effort was compared to talent. And having grown up in a family where, you know, my dad was talking about who’s the smartest cousin and IQ scores, I just wanted to show my dad and myself that there may be something else, another personal quality that was important.
It turns out in my research on grit and measures of IQ or physical ability are usually correlated at zero on average. Sometimes actually weakly negatively correlated, meaning those for whom there’s an early advantage in how quickly they pick things up. You know, maybe in some samples like that is slightly unlikely to be — I don’t wanna over-exaggerate a small correlation — but a weak negative correlation means that knowing nothing else, it’s maybe you’re less hardworking and, and persistent.
So this quality of grit is passion and perseverance over really long periods. It’s really the hallmark of stamina over a long time. It’s not like intensity, but consistency. A happy way to spend the first half of my career, try to understand the mindsets that led to it, try to understand the habits of people who have this personal quality of grit.
I think you’re not really a scientist unless you keep examining the question maybe from other angles, from a broader perspective. I mean, to me, this second half of my career has just been like widening the aperture, taking a wide angle lens, and then noticing that common denominators aren’t just inside the person, but also outside them.
So for example, I noticed that high achievers have mentors. Not all of them, but most of them. They tend not to be loners. They tend to spontaneously turn to peers, for example, to try to figure things out. And there were other common denominators as well. So that, that in a way is the backstory of this, of this second book.
And I’ve been studying it as a scientist mostly with a cadre of collaborators and behavioral economists ‘cause that’s what behavioral economists do, change the situation to change decisions. Also with psychologists like James Gross. So this, this book is, I hope, an expansion, not a...
It’s certainly not a negation of the importance of individual effort. I think individual effort is always going to matter, but in some situations effort makes sense and pays off more than in others.
Holden Thorp: Mm-hmm. And I’ve seen some reviews and podcast headlines that have said a title of the book could be “Willpower is Overrated.”
Are, are you happy with people characterizing it that way or what do you think about that?
Angela Duckworth: I think that’s fair. I think willpower is overrated, and, and as a scientist who’s been studying willpower alongside grit, by the way, and I don’t think they’re the same, maybe I could tell you what I think the research says on what willpower is, what it’s not, and, and why it is, I think, the worst way to try to change yourself.
So I, I think willpower is really the exercise of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, right? I’m not a neuroscientist. I do collaborate with them and I do have a degree in neuroscience, but I am not a neuroscientist. But we, we do have a part of the brain that is in charge of executive function, and that part of the brain is capable of suppressing lower-level impulses.
“I kinda wanna eat that, but I won’t.” “I kinda feel like doing that, but I won’t.” “I kinda don’t feel like doing that, but I should, and I will,” right? So we can will ourselves. We have the power to will ourselves to do things that are not immediately enjoyable or rewarding. And as a species, we have more willpower than any other animal on the planet.
We are better at delaying gratification than squirrels and chipmunks and cats and dogs, and even chimpanzees. But, but the question is, is that what grit really is? If you look at somebody like Katie Ledecky or Michael Phelps, two of the greatest swimmers of all time. I told you I don’t always have to be interested in the actual craft.
I just have to be interested in the craftsman. And so, if you take these swimmers who like-- Can you imagine what it’s like to wake up 365 days a year at 5:00 in the morning and throw yourself into a pool and then just work at the edge of aerobic capacity for, for, for days and weeks and months and years?
It’s not willpower. They’re not doing it because their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is suppressing the impulse to stay. It’s, it’s really not grit. I think grit is not willpower because people who really have grit actually love what they do. They do have a voluntary obsession, not an involuntary obsession.
And yeah, they have to do hard things that they don’t always feel like doing, but, but by and large it’s intrinsically motivated. So, so I wanna say that willpower is a thing. I mean, it’s not like not a thing. It is. We have a part of the brain for it. I also wanna say that I don’t think it’s definitional of grit.
I also don’t think... There’s a New Yorker review of this book, and I think somewhere in the very beginning, the reviewer, who’s in charge of her own thoughts, not, not my thoughts, says that grit is just willpower in extremis, and I disagree with that. But, but the reason why I would agree with the headline that says willpower is overrated is that it really is, and that’s not just my research, Holden.
That’s many scientists who study self-control and behavior change have found that highly successful people, people who achieve their goals, who work out when they wanna work out, who eat the way they wanna eat, who aren’t on their phones when they don’t wanna be on their phones, who get their work done, they are not forcing themselves.
They are strategically avoiding temptation and setting themselves up for the behavior they want. So it’s nuanced, but that’s why we’re having a conversation. I, I think willpower is not an effective way to change yourself, and even if it’s not the same thing as grit, the prescriptive recommendation is very similar, maybe the same, which is I think we should, we should for our children and ourselves, and maybe our PhD students and anybody else, we should figure out what situations would naturally incline us to think and then act in the ways that we want to, and then just act there as opposed to waiting until you have an unwanted impulse and suppressing it.
The whole interview is great. Please watch!