소개
Angela Duckworth is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit translating behavioral science research for educators. She received her PhD in psychology from Penn after earlier careers in management consulting and as a public-school math teacher — a teaching stint that became the origin point for her research program: the observation that her best students were not always her highest-IQ students.
Duckworth’s central contribution is the Grit Scale, a 12-item self-report instrument measuring two components: consistency of interest (passion for long-term goals) and perseverance of effort. Her doctoral and postdoctoral studies — predicting which West Point cadets would survive Beast Barracks, which Scripps National Spelling Bee finalists would advance, which Chicago public-school students would graduate — argued that grit predicted achievement above and beyond IQ. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013 and published Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance in 2016, which became a multi-year New York Times bestseller.
Her work sits in active dispute. A 2017 meta-analysis by Credé, Tynan, and Harms covering 88 studies and roughly 67,000 individuals found that grit is very strongly correlated with conscientiousness — to the point where critics argue it may not be a distinct construct — and only moderately correlated with performance outcomes. Duckworth has acknowledged the critique while continuing to defend the predictive utility of the passion–perseverance combination. Her current focus is Character Lab’s intervention research and the No Stupid Questions podcast with Stephen Dubner.
