Duckworth, A. L., & Seligman, M. E. (2005). Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of
adolescents. Psychological
science,16(12), 939-944.
My piano
teacher, who was raised in the Soviet Union, has many complaints about "Israeli"
parents (by "Israeli" she means parents who are not of Russian origin…). These parents, she says, ask their children:
"Did you enjoy the lesson?" My
teacher thinks this question is not right, since learning to play the piano
isn't supposed to be fun! As she says:
"Now you work hard, and the pleasure comes later." Students who "survive" years of
study with this excellent teacher, who combines demands and expectations with a
lot of support, play very well and enjoy it very much.
In order
to persevere with piano lessons,
as with every other demanding activity, one needs to have self discipline and
an ability to delay gratification. Indeed,
greater ability to delay gratification measured at age 4 predicted higher academic
and social functioning more than a decade later. Self-discipline was found to
be the only one among 32 measured personality variables (e.g., self-esteem,
extraversion, energy level) that predicted college grade point average (GPA)
more robustly than SAT scores did. Similarly, high self-discipline
distinguished Phi Beta Kappa undergraduates from nonPhi Beta Kappa students of
equal intellectual ability.
This paper
describes two studies by Martin Seligman and Angela Lee Duckworth, who is known
to the readers of this blog due to her excellent TED talk. Duckworth and Seligman asked what predicts
achievement better: self discipline or intelligence.
Seventy one
percent of the eighth grade students of a certain high school chose to participate
in the first study (the paper gives no information about the grade point
average and the estimated self discipline of the students who did not choose to
participate). At the beginning of the
school year, the students completed self report questionnaires about
impulsivity and the ability to regulate thoughts, emotions, impulses and
actions. They also completed
questionnaires about their hypothetical ability to delay gratification: each
question had the student choose between an immediate, small reward and a
delayed, larger one (the choice was hypothetical).
The students'
parents completed questionnaires about their children's self control as opposed
to their tendency for impulsivity (on the same scale), their ability to control
their impulses and their ability to obey rules.
Here I have
to say that throughout the paper, there seems to be a dichotomy between
"self control" and "impulsivity". I think this dichotomy is
not correct. A child can have low self
discipline (for example, he may begin to study for a test late at the evening
before the test) – and not have any problems with impulsivity.
Seven months
later, at the end of the school year, the authors gathered information about
the student's academic achievements. The
information consisted of report-card grades, a standardized achievement test, attendance,
and selection into the school's high school program. The students' self discipline was assessed
again using the same self report questionnaires.
Eighty three
percent of the eighth grade students of the consecutive year chose to
participate in the second study (again, no information is given about the grade
point average and the estimated self discipline of the students who did not
choose to participate).
At the
beginning of the school year the students, their parents and their teachers
completed the same questionnaires as in the previous study. In addition to that, each child received an
envelope containing a 1$ bill. The student
could choose to take the dollar, or to return the envelope and receive 2$ the
following week. The students also took a
group intelligence test – Otis Lennon School Ability Test. This test assesses verbal, quantitative, and
figural reasoning skills. I'm not sure whether
this unknown group administered test is comparable
with one of the renowned individually administered intelligence tests. In addition
to that, the students were asked to answer questions about their study habits
and lifestyles (for example: "What time do you usually start your homework?").
As in the
first study, seven months later, at the end of the school year, the authors
gathered information about the student's academic achievements.
Both studies showed that highly
self-disciplined adolescents outperformed their more impulsive peers on every
academic-performance variable, including report-card grades, standardized
achievement-test scores, admission to a competitive high school, and
attendance. Highly self-disciplined adolescents also spent
more time on their homework, watched less television, and started their
homework earlier in the day. Self discipline measured in the fall predicted
more variance in each of these outcomes than did IQ, and unlike IQ,
self-discipline predicted gains in academic performance over the school year.
Most correlations between self-discipline
and academic-performance variables ranged from medium to large in effect size,
and all were statistically significant. In contrast, correlations between IQ and
academic-performance variables were at most medium in magnitude, and only half
were statistically significant in the predicted direction
In
Study 2, the correlation between
self-discipline and final GPA (r = .67) was twice the size of the correlation
between IQ and final GPA (r = .32).
This is
the paper's epilogue:
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