Marcus Crede, Iowa State University – Is Grit Overrated?

Marcus Credé (Christopher Gannon/Iowa State University)

Is grit overrated?

Marcus Crede, assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University, explains why this secret of success may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

Marcus Crede is an assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University. His research focuses on a variety of non-cognitive influences on performance in work and educational settings as well as methodological and measurement challenges encountered when measuring non-cognitive variables. He holds a PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Is Grit Overrated?

Grit is often described as the “secret to success” and a better predictor of performance than other variables such as intelligence and admissions test scores. But all the enthusiasm for grit is really not warranted.

My colleagues, Michael Tynan and Peter Harms, and I combined the findings from 88 different studies of grit representing over 66,000 people to see if the accumulated scientific literature supported all the hype. In combination, this data tells us that grit is not a very good predictor of success at all – certainly far worse than many other known predictors – and that grit appears to simply be a repackaging of another personality trait, conscientiousness, that we’ve known about for a very long time. Importantly, grit does not tell us anything about performance that we did not already know from conscientiousness. It’s perhaps a sexier title, but it’s nothing new.

Over the past decade we’ve heard a lot about how critical it is that children, students, teachers, soldiers, spelling bee contestants, and employees exhibit grit in order to be successful. There is even growing enthusiasm for incorporating the teaching of grit into school curricula. Based on our analysis, educators may want to focus less on grit and rather focus their often limited resources on other more important areas that we know help children and adults succeed – such as the development of study habits and study skills, reducing test anxiety, helping students adjust to new environments, and improving class attendance.