Listen up “Grit” researchers – grit is not a construct. Duckworth never offered any coherent justification for combining perseverance and passion into a single thing. That higher-order model in Duckworth & Quinn (2009) is an unidentified model.
The fact that Duckworth and Quinn did not know how to do factor analysis and could not be bothered to correct their published errors is not a good reason for you to base our own research program on this profoundly flawed concept.
Also, please stop stating that "grit" is an excellent predictor of success. Its not. It's much worse than cognitive ability and a wide array of other predictors, I'm repeating myself but I keep being asked to review grit papers and have to make these points over and over again.
Duckworth to the NYT: "My lab has found that this measure beats the pants off I.Q., SAT scores, physical fitness and a bazillion other measures to help us know in advance which individuals will be successful in some situations."
That statement is complete nonsense. Her own work does not support this. For example, in her four-study paper with Eskreis-Winkler grit is a terrible predictor in all four samples and other predictors such as g and physical fitness do much better.
That was a paper that was submitted just a few weeks after the recording of her famous TED talk in which, for example, she states that grit is a great predictor of staying in school for high school kids in Chicago.
In that study (Eskreis-Winkler et al., Study 3) grit predicts 3% of the variance in retention in these high school kids. 3%!
That's half of the variance explained by standardized achievement tests in that same study and about the same amount of variance as explained by gender.
That's half of the variance explained by standardized achievement tests in that same study and about the same amount of variance as explained by gender.
In study 1 of that same paper grit explains <2% of variance in retention for Army Special Ops selection course. IQ explains >6% and physical fitness explains >10%. How does this turn into "beats the pants off" other predictors??
I realize that "grit" is now a vampire theory (cannot be killed by evidence) but I do wish "grit" researchers would actually familiarize with the evidence a little bit better.
The whole mess is not exactly helped by Jachimowicz et al. (2018, PNAS) who inexplicably base the paper on the assumption that the entire grit scale measures just perseverance even when no-one has ever made this claim before and when their own data shows a clear 2-factor solution
