Grit: A review on scientific progress...

Daniel Engber at Slate writes "Is “Grit” Really the Key to Success?"

"Up in the Hudson Valley, among the plebes at Beast Barracks, Duckworth found the secret of success. Students who identified with statements such as “Setbacks don’t discourage me” and “I never give up” were more likely than their peers to make it through West Point’s seven-week test of fortitude. (That’s how grit is measured: Students assign themselves a score of 1 to 5 for each of 10 related character statements; the 10 scores are then averaged together.) This was Duckworth’s first case study, and it delivered a clear and forceful message: If you want to make it through basic training, you gotta have grit."

"Even the task of graduating from West Point itself doesn’t really compare to the trials of Beast. When Duckworth looked at students’ grades and “military performance scores” during their first year at school, she found that grit offered little guidance on how they’d handle the rest of the United States Military Academy curriculum. The whole candidate score—that old-fashioned, talent-based assessment—did much better. Considering that three-quarters of the students who fail to finish at West Point flunk during the post-Beast curriculum, those first seven gritty weeks appear to represent a special case, and one of marginal importance.

To show that the challenges of Beast stand in for those of life, Duckworth looked for grit in other settings, places where one might not expect to find endurance as a major factor in success. For one study, she surveyed 149 undergrads at the University of Pennsylvania, finding that the students’ grit and SAT scores—the latter used as a proxy for their natural aptitude—were each and independently related to their school performance as measured by their grades. Even for these brainy Ivy Leaguers, grit seemed to be just as important as intelligence. Indeed, Duckworth writes that this was one of the key findings that led her to the “fundamental insight that would guide [her] future work.”"

He then writes

"When everyone excels on one dimension—height, SAT scores—other factors will appear to play an outsize role. In the case of Duckworth’s brainy Ivy Leaguers, this makes their SATs seem less important for predicting how they’ll do in school and exaggerates the relative importance of their grit. If she’d mixed the same people in with a more balanced sample of their peers, let’s say those with average SAT scores closer to 1,000, then the link between their aptitude and grades would have appeared more pronounced—and that would in turn have made the correlation with their grit seem less impressive."

I actually don't fully agree with that, as we could still think of Grit being important when, say, admitting smart students. 

"That’s long been a problem for personality psychologists, who often struggle with competing terms for common, underlying inclinations. The field had become a tangled mess by the 1950s and the 1960s, says Brent Roberts, a professor at the University of Illinois (whom Duckworth also cites). For any given outcome in a person’s life—whether he might turn out to be a drunk, let’s say, or a genius or a crook—researchers would devise a brand-new measure, calibrated to predict it. “It had a brutal elegance,” Roberts says, “and I often pine for those days, to be honest with you.”

But this rampant sowing of new ideas made it hard even for the specialists to find their way within the field. They didn’t always know how their measures related to their colleagues’ or if they might be duplicating one another’s work. By the 1980s and the 1990s, lumpers in psychology had embraced a grand unified theory of personality, which collapsed all the nuances that came before into a set of supertraits—the Big Five. Under this new system, grit and all its near and distant cousins—willpower, superego strength, industriousness, and so on—would fall under an umbrella factor known as “conscientiousness.” (The remaining four of the Big Five supertraits: extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and openness to experience.) Like grit, conscientiousness could be measured with a survey: a set of statements, maybe several hundred, for a person to read and then assign himself a score. (There are other ways to measure personality: A psychologist might ask people, for example, whether they engage in specific behaviors such as making lists or showing up early for meetings.)

“[The Big Five] brought clarity to a true buzz of confusion,” Roberts says, and it allowed researchers to make bigger claims about the broad significance of character. A measure of someone’s conscientiousness, for example, could help predict her longevity and physical health, as well as her marital stability. It could also tell you how likely she would be to find success in high school, college, and the workplace. But if the adoption of the Big Five proved useful in the lab, it made the science of personality harder to explain to outsiders. “When I say, conscientiousness,” says Roberts, “people go, ‘Huh?’ ”

That’s why Duckworth worked so hard to give her measure a catchy name. “I came up with it over other terms like pluck, tenacity, persistence, perseverance,” she said during one interview. “It has the connotations that I wanted. It sounds good.” It’s true: Conscientiousness comes off as something weak—a nerdy way of playing by the rules; grit suggests a vigorous, old-fashioned form of virtue. Grit’s the antidote for an overpolished age, a return to rough-hewn authenticity. “It’s brilliant in terms of marketing,” says Roberts. “People understand it immediately.”

..

"A brand-new meta-analysis of the literature on grit—conducted by researchers Marcus Credé, Michael Tynan, and Peter Harms using 88 samples and 67,000 subjects—provides some clues.* There isn’t much space between Duckworth’s measure and conscientiousness, the study argues. If you test a group of people for both traits, administering standard surveys to measure grit and conscientiousness, the results will end up very tightly linked; in some studies their relationship approaches 1-to-1. In Roberts’ view, grit corresponds very closely to a facet, or subtrait, of conscientiousness that has for many years been called industriousness."

What can we gain from the Implicit Association Test

There is a new meta-study (the psychologists really like those) on "Predicting ethnic and racial discrimination: A meta-analysis of IAT criterion studies." by Oswald, Frederick L.; Mitchell, Gregory; Blanton, Hart; Jaccard, James; Tetlock, Philip E. that appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 105(2), Aug 2013, 171-192.

The abstract reads:

"This article reports a meta-analysis of studies examining the predictive validity of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and explicit measures of bias for a wide range of criterion measures of discrimination. The meta analysis estimates the heterogeneity of effects within and across 2 domains of intergroup bias (interracial and interethnic), 6 criterion categories (interpersonal behavior, person perception, policy preference, microbehavior, response time, and brain activity), 2 versions of the IAT (stereotype and attitude IATs), 3 strategies for measuring explicit bias (feeling thermometers, multi-item explicit measures such as the Modern Racism Scale, and ad hoc measures of intergroup attitudes and stereotypes), and 4 criterion-scoring methods (computed majority–minority difference scores, relative majority–minority ratings, minority-only ratings, and majority-only ratings). IATs were poor predictors of every criterion category other than brain activity, and the IATs performed no better than simple explicit measures. These results have important implications for the construct validity of IATs, for competing theories of prejudice and attitude–behavior relations, and for measuring and modeling prejudice and discrimination."

A sentence from the conclusion

"Overall, simple explicit measures of bias yielded predictions no worse than the IATs".

I remember the first time I heard about IAT, I thought it was clever and it would help us make predictions. But, as always, this was an empirical question, not one where what matters are beliefs...

Self-Esteem of Men suffers from female success

In the new issue of JPSP there is an interesting article by Kate A. Ratliff and Shigehiro Oishi  "Gender Differences in Implicit Self-Esteem Following a Romantic Partner’s Success or Failure"

The abstract reads

This research examined the influence of a romantic partner’s success or failure on one’s own implicit and explicit self-esteem. In Experiment 1, men had lower implicit self-esteem when their partner did well at a “social intelligence” task than when their partner did poorly. Women’s implicit self-esteem was unaffected by partner performance. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that Dutch men’s implicit self-esteem was negatively affected by their romantic partner’s success. In Experiment 4, we replicated Experiments 1–3 in both the academic and social domains, and in Experiment 5, we demonstrated that men’s implicit self-esteem is negatively influenced by thinking about a romantic partner’s success both when the success is relative and when it is not. In sum, men’s implicit self-esteem is lower when a partner succeeds than when a partner fails, whereas women’s implicit self-esteem is not. These gender differences have important implications for understanding social comparison in romantic relationships.

Most of their results are only present in an Implicit Association Task, and not in explicit measures of self-esteem, here is one of their typical figures.

New Publishing Practices in Psychology

Luke Coffman pointed me to the following: "What’s New at Psychological Science
An Interview with Editor in Chief Eric Eich"

One big thing is Enhanced Reporting on Methods, which includes something like:

For each study reported in your manuscript, check the boxes below to:
(1) Confirm that (a) the total number of excluded observations and (b) the reasons for doing so have been reported in the Method section(s) [ ]. If no observations were excluded, check here [ ].
(2) Confirm that all independent variables or manipulations, whether successful or failed, have been reported in the Method section(s) [ ]. If there were no independent variables or manipulations, as in the case of correlational research, check here [ ].
(3) Confirm that all dependent variables or measures that were analyzed for this article’s target research question have been reported in the Method section(s) [ ].
(4) Confirm (a) how sample size was determined and (b) your data-collection stopping rule have been reported in the Method section(s) [ ] and provide the page number(s) on which this information appears in your manuscript:

Then they go on

"Several points merit attention. First, as shown above, the four-item Disclosure Statement applies only “to each study reported in your manuscript.” Originally, we considered adding a fifth item covering additional studies, including pilot work, that were not mentioned in the main text but that tested the same research question. However, feedback from several sources suggested that this would open a large can of worms. To paraphrase one commentator (Leif Nelson), it is all too easy for a researcher to think that an excluded study does not count. Furthermore, this actually puts a meaningful burden on the “full disclosure” researcher. The four items in the Disclosure Statement shown above are equally easy for everyone to answer; either that information is already in the manuscript or they can go back and add it. But a potential fifth item, covering additional studies, is different. The researcher who convinces himself or herself that one or more excluded studies don’t count has now saved the hours it might take to write them up for this query. File-drawering studies is damaging, but we are not convinced that this will solve that problem. A better solution involves preregistration of study methods and analyses — an approach we also take up."

Another big item seems Promoting Open Practices. They go on

"Over the past several months, a group of 11 researchers led by Brian Nosek has been grappling with these and other issues. The result is an Open Practices document that proposes three forms of acknowledgment:

• Open Data badge, which is earned for making publicly available the digitally shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported result.
• Open Materials badge, which is earned for making publicly available the digitally shareable materials/methods necessary to reproduce the reported results.
• Preregistered badge, which is earned for having a preregistered design and analysis plan for the reported research and reporting results according to that plan. An analysis plan includes specification of the variables and the analyses that will be conducted. Preregistration is an effective countermeasure to the file-drawer problem alluded to earlier in connection with Disclosure Statements.

The criteria for each badge — and the processes by which they are awarded — are described in the Open Practices document along with answers to frequently asked questions. The document proposes two ways for certifying organizations to award badges for individual studies: disclosure or peer review. For now, PS will follow the simpler disclosure method.

Manuscripts accepted for publication on or after 1 January, 2014, are eligible to earn any or all of the three aforementioned badges. Journal staff will contact the corresponding authors with details on the badge-awarding process.

Psychological Science is the first journal to implement the badge program, so changes are sure to come as editors and authors gain experience with it in the field. Again, I welcome comments and suggestions for improvement from our community."

I'll be curious about their usage and success with the registry: I have blogged about similar attempts in Economics before here.

A big impetus has been work by Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn, some of which I talked about here

Daily income targets

My colleague Pascaline Dupas has a new working paper "Daily Needs, Income Targets and Labor Supply: Evidence from Kenya" joint with Jonathan Robinson.
The abstract reads

Many studies suggest that daily income earners behave as if they have daily income targets. Less work has examined the determinants of the targets themselves. Using data on labor supply, shocks, and self-reported cash needs from 257 bicycle taxi drivers in Western Kenya, we provide evidence that many individuals treat their daily cash need as the day's target. We conjecture that in a physically demanding job, workers may have an incentive to quit early and so set a personal rule of “earning enough for the day's need” as an internal commitment device to provide effort. This heuristic is more common among less educated workers and has substantial welfare costs: greater variance in hours worked is associated with worse health, and we estimate that workers would earn 5% more by working a set number of hours each day (more if their wage elasticity were positive).

Playing Lottery

Tara Siegel Bernard in the NYtimes writes about "Win a Lottery Jackpot? Not Much Chance of That"

"When those exceedingly lucky people come forward to claim this week’s Powerball lottery jackpot, which swelled to $448 million on Wednesday, it’s hard not to think: Somebody is winning these things, right? It could be me.

This is exactly the sort of logic that, over the last year, led millions of people to spend $5.9 billion of their hard-earned dollars on Powerball alone. They spent nearly $69 billion on all lottery games in 2012, according to two lottery trade groups."

and

"“For emotionally significant events, the size of the probability simply doesn’t matter,” said Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel-prize winning psychologist. “What matters is the possibility of winning. People are excited by the image in their mind. The excitement grows with the size of the prize, but it doesn’t diminish with the size of the probability.”"

And I like especially the last sentence of this paragraph:

"Buying more tickets improves your odds, but not by much. So if you want the fantasy, just buy one. Buying more doesn’t make the fantasy any richer.

“The difference is like moving from a big house to a small house to make it less likely a meteor will strike your roof,” "

In case someone is ready to make that deal, just drop a comment...

Placebo Buttons

David McRaney advertises his new book, "You are now less dumb" through an excellent post.
It starts with
"The Misconception: All buttons placed around you do your bidding.
The Truth: Many public buttons are only there to comfort you."

"According to a 2008 article in the New Yorker, close buttons don’t close the elevator doors in many elevators built in the United States since the 1990s. In some elevators the button is there for workers and emergency personnel to use, and it only works with a key. The key-only settings isn’t always active though, as the blog Design with Intent asserts. Each elevator is different. In some, the emergency function requires a long-press of several seconds longer than the average user attempts. The website, The Straight Dope, investigated the issue in 1986 by asking elevator companies and elevator repairmen directly. According to their investigation, “The grim truth is that a significant percentage of the close-door buttons in this world…don’t do anything at all.” The reasons cited were that the button was never wired up, or that it was set to a delay, or was deactivated by the owner, or it broke long ago and no one ever complained because the doors eventually close whether or not you press the buttons."

I also really like that one:

"In many offices and cubicle farms, the thermostat on the wall isn’t connected to anything. Landlords, engineers and HVAC specialists have installed dummy thermostats for decades to keep people from costing companies money by constantly adjusting the temperature. According to a 2003 article in the Wall Street Journal, one HVAC specialist surmised that 90 percent of all office thermostats are fake (others say it’s more like 2 percent). Some companies even install noise generators to complete the illusion after you turn the knob.

In a survey conducted in 2003 by the Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration News, 72 percent of respondents admitted to installing dummy thermostats.

    “We had an employee that always complained of being hot,” recalls Greg Perakes, an HVACR instructor in Tennessee. “Our solution was to install a pneumatic thermostat. We ran the main air line to it inside of an enclosed I-beam. Then we just attached a short piece of tubing to the branch outlet (terminating inside the I-beam without being attached to any valves, etc.).”

    The worker “could adjust her own temperature whenever she felt the need,” Perakes says, “thus enabling her to work more and complain less. When she heard the hissing air coming from inside the I-beam, she felt in control. We never heard another word about the situation from her again. Case solved.”

    - The Air-Conditioning, Heating & Refrigeration News, Mar. 27, 2003"

Why Men Need Women

If you ever wondered what to say to "Why Men Need Women", Adam Grant in the NYtimes has an answer. Apparently, "The mere presence of female family members — even infants — can be enough to nudge men in the generous direction."

In a study by  Michael S. Dahl, Cristian L. Dezso and David Gaddis Ross, "Fatherhood and Managerial Style : How a Male CEO's Children Affect the Wages of His Employees" that appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly.
the abstract reads:

"Motivated by a growing literature in the social sciences suggesting that the transition to fatherhood has a profound effect on men’s values, we study how the wages of employees change after a male chief executive officer (CEO) has children, using comprehensive panel data on the employees, CEOs, and families of CEOs in all but the smallest Danish firms between 1996 and 2006. We find that (a) a male CEO generally pays his employees less generously after fathering a child, (b) the birth of a daughter has a less negative influence on wages than does the birth of a son and has a positive influence if the daughter is the CEO’s first, and (c) the wages of female employees are less adversely affected than are those of male employees and positively affected by the CEO’s first child of either gender. We also find that male CEOs pay themselves more after fathering a child, especially after fathering a son. These results are consistent with a desire by the CEO to husband more resources for his family after fathering a child and the psychological priming of the CEO’s generosity after the birth of his first daughter and specifically toward women after the birth of his first child of either gender."

The Nytimes article then writes about studies by Professor Van Lange

"The data showed that players who made the more generous choices had more siblings. The givers averaged two siblings; the others averaged one and a half siblings. More siblings means more sharing, which seems to predispose people toward giving.

And once again, gender mattered. The givers were 40 percent more likely to have sisters than the people who made more self-serving, competitive choices. (There was no difference in the number of brothers; it was the number of sisters, not siblings, that predicted greater giving.)"

It also points to an article by Roy Baumeister, "Is There Anything Good About Men?" At some point he writes:
"One test of what’s meaningfully real is the marketplace. It’s hard to find anybody making money out of gender differences in abilities. But in motivation, there are plenty. Look at the magazine industry: men’s magazines cover different stuff from women’s magazines, because men and women like and enjoy and are interested in different things. Look at the difference in films between the men’s and women’s cable channels. Look at the difference in commercials for men or for women.

This brings us to an important part of the argument. I’m suggesting the important differences between men and women are to be found in motivation rather than ability. What, then, are these differences? I want to emphasize two."

His first is:

"Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men."..

This leads him to think that

"Tradeoffs again: perhaps nature designed women to seek to be lovable, whereas men were designed to strive, mostly unsuccessfully, for greatness."

His second point is
"Let me turn now to the second big motivational difference. This has its roots in an exchange in the Psychological Bulletin about ten years ago, but the issue is still fresh and relevant today. It concerns the question of whether women are more social than men.

The idea that women are more social was raised by S.E. Cross and L. Madsen in a manuscript submitted to that journal. I was sent it to review, and although I disagreed with their conclusion, I felt they had made their case well, so I advocated publishing their paper. They provided plenty of evidence. They said things like, look, men are more aggressive than women. Aggression could damage a relationship because if you hurt someone then that person might not want to be with you. Women refrain from aggression because they want relationships, but men don’t care about relationships and so are willing to be aggressive. Thus, the difference in aggression shows that women are more social than men. "

He then goes on to say:

"Now consider helping. Most research finds that men help more than women. Cross and Madsen struggled with that and eventually just fell back on the tired cliché that maybe women don’t help because they aren’t brought up to help or aren’t socialized to help. But I think the pattern is the same as with aggression. Most research looks at helping between strangers, in the larger social sphere, and so it finds men helping more. Inside the family, though, women are plenty helpful, if anything more than men."

I wonder about that, I need to read up on that literature, as my friend and coauthor Lise Vesterlund has a very nuanced story on this topic.

Baumeister goes on to say:

"Women specialize in the narrow sphere of intimate relationships. Men specialize in the larger group."

The Nytimes article then talks about

"On this point, the economists James Andreoni at the University of California, San Diego, and Lise Vesterlund at the University of Pittsburgh report evidence that whereas many women prefer to share evenly, “men are more likely to be either perfectly selfish or perfectly selfless.” It may be that meaningful contact with women is one of the forces that tilt men toward greater selflessness."

Adam Grant finishes his piece with:

"We recognize the direct advantages that women as leaders bring to the table, which often include diverse perspectives, collaborative styles, dedication to mentoring and keen understanding of female employees and customers. But we’ve largely overlooked the beneficial effects that women have on the men around them. Is it possible that when women join top management teams, they encourage male colleagues to treat employees more generously and to share knowledge more freely? Increases in motivation, cooperation, and innovation in companies may be fueled not only by the direct actions of female leaders, but also by their influence on male leaders."

Gender review article

Janet Shibley Hyde has a review article in the Annual Reviews on "Gender Similarities and Differences"

The abstract reads:

"Whether men and women are fundamentally different or similar has been debated for more than a century. This review summarizes major theories designed to explain gender differences: evolutionary theories, cognitive social learning theory, sociocultural theory, and expectancy-value theory. The gender similarities hypothesis raises the possibility of theorizing gender similarities. Statistical methods for the analysis of gender differences and similarities are reviewed, including effect sizes, meta-analysis, taxometric analysis, and equivalence testing. Then, relying mainly on evidence from meta-analyses, gender differences are reviewed in cognitive performance (e.g., math performance), personality and social behaviors (e.g., temperament, emotions, aggression, and leadership), and psychological well-being. The evidence on gender differences in variance is summarized. The final sections explore applications of intersectionality and directions for future research."

Emotions and Faces

The Boston Magazine has an interesting article "About Face" by Shannon Fischer.
The first part is a nice example how different methods of asking questions can lead to different results:
She starts with

"Ekman had traveled the globe with photographs that showed faces experiencing six basic emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise. Everywhere he went, from Japan to Brazil to the remotest village of Papua New Guinea, he asked subjects to look at those faces and then to identify the emotions they saw on them. To do so, they had to pick from a set list of options presented to them by Ekman. The results were impressive. Everybody, it turned out, even preliterate Fore tribesmen in New Guinea who’d never seen a foreigner before in their lives, matched the same emotions to the same faces."

..

"
“Honestly, this is going to sound terrible,” Lisa Barrett told me when I asked her about Ekman and his original study. “But at first, when I read that work, I thought, Well, nobody can take this seriously. This can’t possibly be right. It’s too cartoonish.”
"
..
"She returned to those famous cross-cultural studies that had launched Ekman’s career—and found that they were less than watertight. The problem was the options that Ekman had given his subjects when asking them to identify the emotions shown on the faces they were presented with. Those options, Barrett discovered, had limited the ways in which people allowed themselves to think.

Barrett explained the problem to me this way: “I can break that experiment really easily, just by removing the words. I can just show you a face and ask how this person feels. Or I can show you two faces, two scowling faces, and I can say, ‘Do these people feel the same thing?’ And agreement drops into the toilet.” "

And here is an interesting part: Maybe a key feature to be a successful scientist.. After a rejection of a paper that finds results that differ from the original Ekman study from Science:

"“I felt fed up,” she told me, describing her reaction. “I just felt like, Why am I banging my head against a wall? Life is short. What the hell am I doing? Clearly people don’t give a shit about data, because if they did, I wouldn’t have this battle on my hands.” She paused. “I did feel that way for about 10 minutes. And then I took a step back and said, ‘Okay, I’ve seen reviews like this before.’”
..

" “Science is about persevering in the face of ambiguity and, oftentimes, adversity,” she says. “And the data, in the end, will point the way.”"

HT: Marginalrevolution

Happiness and Self Control

 Maia Szalavitz in Time writes: "Self-Disciplined People Are Happier (and Not as Deprived as You Think)"

She writes that

"It’s easy to think of the highly self-disciplined as being miserable misers or uptight Puritans, but it turns out that exerting self-control can make you happier not only in the long run, but also in the moment.

The research, which was published in the Journal of Personality, showed that self-control isn’t just about deprivation, but more about managing conflicting goals."

and

"The authors write that “feeling good rather than bad may be a core benefit of having good self-control, and being well satisfied with life is an important consequence.”

The smartphone experiment also revealed how self-control may improve mood. Those who showed the greatest self-control reported more good moods and fewer bad ones. But this didn’t appear to linked to being more able to resist temptations — it was because they exposed themselves to fewer situations that might evoke craving in the first place. They were, in essence, setting themselves up to happy. “People who have good self-control do a number of things that bring them happiness — namely, they avoid problematic desires and conflict,” says the study’s co-author Kathleen Vohs, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota."

Here's the abstract of the original study

J Pers. 2013 Jun 11. doi: 10.1111/jopy.12050. [Epub ahead of print]
"Yes, But Are They Happy? Effects of Trait Self-Control on Affective Well-Being and Life Satisfaction." by Hofmann W, Fisher RR, Luhmann M, Vohs KD, Baumeister RF.

Abstract
OBJECTIVE:
Does trait self-control (TSC) predict affective well-being and life satisfaction -positively, negatively, or not?
METHOD:
We conducted three studies (Study 1: n=414; 64.0% female; Mage =35.0 years; Study 2: n=208; 66.0% female; Mage =25.24 years; Study 3: n=234; 61.0% female; Mage =34.53 years). The key predictor was TSC, with affective well-being and life satisfaction ratings as key outcomes. Potential explanatory constructs including goal conflict, goal balancing, and emotional distress also were investigated.
RESULTS:
TSC is positively related to affective well-being and life satisfaction, and managing goal conflict is a key as to why. All studies, moreover, showed that the effect of TSC on life satisfaction was at least partially mediated by affect. Study 1's correlational study established the effect. Study 2's experience sampling study demonstrated that compared to those low in TSC, those high in TSC experience higher levels of momentary affect even as they experience desire, an effect partially mediated through experiencing lower conflict and emotional distress. Study 3 found evidence for the proposed mechanism-that TSC may boost well-being by helping people to avoid frequent conflict and balance vice-virtue conflicts by favoring virtues.
CONCLUSION:
Self-control positively contributes to happiness through avoiding and dealing with motivational conflict.

This medical format of conclusion is like the abstract of an abstract. (though in fairness, too often I read abstracts that just pose the question without any hint of at the result. Though, trying to force me to read through the paper to find out only works sometimes...)

Publication Bias

Here is a really fun experiment, old though, and, as so often with fun experiments, run by psychologists:

"Peer-review practices of psychological journals: The fate of published articles, submitted again"
Douglas P. Peters and Stephen J. Ceci June Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume5, Issue02, June 1982 pp 187-195

The abstract reads:
"A growing interest in and concern about the adequacy and fairness of modern peer-review practices in publication and funding are apparent across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Although questions about reliability, accountability, reviewer bias, and competence have been raised, there has been very little direct research on these variables. 

The present investigation was an attempt to study the peer-review process directly, in the natural setting of actual journal referee evaluations of submitted manuscripts. As test materials we selected 12 already published research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices. 

With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.” A number of possible interpretations of these data are reviewed and evaluated."



I wonder if that was one motivator for the double blind refereeing at the AER... I guess Google made all that pretty meaningless...

Stereotype Threat

Here is a collection of recent papers on stereotype threat that caught my eye...

Shapiro, Jenessa R.; Williams, Amy M.; Hambarchyan, Mariam  "Are all interventions created equal? A multi-threat approach to tailoring stereotype threat interventions." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 104(2), Feb 2013, 277-288.
"To date, stereotype threat interventions have been considered interchangeable. Across 4 experiments, the present research demonstrates that stereotype threat interventions need to be tailored to the specific form of experienced stereotype threat to be effective. The Multi-Threat Framework (Shapiro & Neuberg, 2007) distinguishes between group-as-target stereotype threats—concerns that a stereotype-relevant performance will reflect poorly on the abilities of one's group—and self-as-target stereotype threats—concerns that a stereotype-relevant performance will reflect poorly on one's own abilities. The present experiments explored Black college students' performance on diagnostic intelligence tests (Experiments 1 and 3) and women's interest (Experiment 2) and performance (Experiment 4) in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Across the 4 experiments, participants were randomly assigned to experience either a group-as-target or self-as-target stereotype threat. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that role model interventions were successful at protecting only against group-as-target stereotype threats, and Experiments 3 and 4 revealed that self-affirmation interventions were successful at protecting only against self-as-target stereotype threats. The present research provides an experimental test of the Multi-Threat Framework across different negatively stereotyped groups (Black students, female students), different negatively stereotyped domains (general intelligence, STEM), and different outcomes (test performance, career interest). This research suggests that interventions should address the range of possible stereotype threats to effectively protect individuals against these threats. Through an appreciation of the distinct forms of stereotype threats and the ways in which interventions work to reduce them, this research aims to facilitate a more complete understanding of stereotype threat."

Woodcock, Anna; Hernandez, Paul R.; Estrada, Mica; Schultz, P. Wesley The consequences of chronic stereotype threat: Domain disidentification and abandonment. Pages 635-646 Oct 2012, JPSP

"Stereotype threat impairs performance across many domains. Despite a wealth of research, the long-term consequences of chronic stereotype threat have received little empirical attention. Beyond the immediate impact on performance, the experience of chronic stereotype threat is hypothesized to lead to domain disidentification and eventual domain abandonment. Stereotype threat is 1 explanation why African Americans and Hispanic/Latino(a)s “leak” from each juncture of the academic scientific pipeline in disproportionately greater numbers than their White and Asian counterparts. Using structural equation modeling, we tested the stereotype threat-disidentification hypothesis across 3 academic years with a national longitudinal panel of undergraduate minority science students. Experience of stereotype threat was associated with scientific disidentification, which in turn predicted a significant decline in the intention to pursue a scientific career. Race/ethnicity moderated this effect, whereby the effect was evident for Hispanic/Latino(a) students but not for all African American students. We discuss findings in terms of understanding chronic stereotype threat. "

And a critical review on stereotype threat:

Can Stereotype Threat Explain the Gender Gap in Mathematics Performance and Achievement?

Gijsbert Stoet , David C. Geary, Review of General Psychology, 2012, Vol. 16, No. 1, 93–102

"Men and women score similarly in most areas of mathematics, but a gap favoring men is consistently found at the high end of performance. One explanation for this gap, stereotype threat, was first proposed by Spencer, Steele, and Quinn (1999) and has received much attention. We discuss merits and shortcomings of this study and review replication attempts. Only 55% of the articles with experimental designs that could have replicated the original results did so. But half of these were confounded by statistical adjustment of preexisting mathematics exam scores. Of the unconfounded experiments, only 30% replicated the original. A meta-analysis of these effects confirmed that only the group of studies with adjusted mathematics scores displayed the stereotype threat effect. We conclude that although stereotype threat may affect some women, the existing state of knowledge does not support the current level of enthusiasm for this as a mechanism underlying the gender gap in mathematics. We argue there are many reasons to close this gap, and that too much weight on the stereotype explanation may hamper research and implementation of effective interventions."

This paper, I guess because of its controversy, has received some attention at science daily blog 
"A University of Missouri researcher and his colleague have conducted a review that casts doubt on the accuracy of a popular theory that attempted to explain why there are more men than women in top levels of mathematic fields. The researchers found that numerous studies claiming that the stereotype, "men are better at math" -- believed to undermine women's math performance -- had major methodological flaws, utilized improper statistical techniques, and many studies had no scientific evidence of this stereotype."

I would be happy for comments, as it seems a big literature which I am somewhat familiar with but not really an expert on, I myself have never tried to manipulate stereotype threat...

Daily Horizons...

Here's an interesting piece by Uri Simonsohn and Francesca Gino: "Daily Horizons: Evidence of Narrow Bracketing in Judgment From 10 Years of M.B.A. Admissions Interviews"  Psychological Science, 24(2) 219– 224
The abstract reads:
"Many professionals, from auditors, venture capitalists, and lawyers, to clinical psychologists and journal editors, divide continuous flows of judgments into subsets. College admissions interviewers, for instance, evaluate but a handful of applicants a day. We conjectured that in such situations, individuals engage in narrow bracketing, assessing each subset in isolation and then—for any given subset—avoiding much deviation from the expected overall distribution of judgments. For instance, an interviewer who has already highly recommended three applicants on a given day may be reluctant to do the same for a fourth applicant. Data from more than 9,000 M.B.A. interviews supported this prediction. Auxiliary analyses suggest that contrast effects and nonrandom scheduling of interviews are unlikely alternative explanations of the observed pattern of results."

Grit

The Chronicle of higher education has a few articles on an interesting psychology measure, "grit", championed by Angela L. Duckworth.

In Traits of the 'Get It Done' Personality: Laser Focus, Resilience, and True Grit, Katherine Mangan cites Robert J. Sternberg, president of the American Psychological Association,
"Being passionate about your work and resilient in the face of setbacks are key, most experts agree. "You're going to go through periods where your articles get rejected, students are giving you bum ratings, and your grant applications are rejected," says Mr. Sternberg, who, after 35 years at Yale and Tufts, became provost and a professor of psychology at Oklahoma State University in 2010. "If you don't believe in yourself, it's easy to think that you're a loser and to stop trying," he says."

She then goes on

"Ms. Duckworth, a former middle-school math teacher, became interested in studying the traits, other than intelligence, that help some students succeed. She zeroed in on the dogged determination and focus shared by successful students, spelling-bee champions, and West Point cadets. Taking a page from a John Wayne movie, she called it "grit." "The gritty person approaches achievement as a marathon," she writes in an article published in an online journal. "The gritty person sticks with it, whereas others might be distracted by boredom, failure, adversity, or plateaus." "

In a more recent article of the Chronicle "'Noncognitive' Measures: The Next Frontier in College Admissions: Admissions offices want to know about traits, like leadership, initiative, and grit, that the SAT doesn't test", grit comes up again:

"Over the last decade, a handful of colleges have designed "noncognitive" assessments to measure attributes—like leadership and the ability to meet goals—that content-based tests do not. Succeeding in college often requires initiative and persistence, or what some researchers call "grit." Noncognitive measures are an attempt to gauge such qualities. If the SAT asks what a student has learned, these assessments try to get at how she learned it."

For more on grit, see also the following from public radio

Here's a link to the grit test.

Stay tuned for a later post on some of the studies, still have to look at them in more detail... Comments from someone who knows something about that very welcome!

The End of History

In the recent Science issue there is an article on "The End of History Illusion" by Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson. The abstract reads:

"We measured the personalities, values, and preferences of more than 19,000 people who ranged in age from 18 to 68 and asked them to report how much they had changed in the past decade and/or to predict how much they would change in the next decade. Young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future. People, it seems, regard the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives. This “end of history illusion” had practical consequences, leading people to overpay for future opportunities to indulge their current preferences."

Turns out the NYtimes also found this paper interesting, see the column by John Tierney

This reminds me a little of the following:

Loewenstein, G., O'Donoghue, T. & Rabin, M. (2003). Projection bias in predicting future utility. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118, 1209-1248.
That abstract reads:

"People exaggerate the degree to which their future tastes will resemble their current tastes. We present evidence from a variety of domains which demonstrates the prevalence of such projection bias, develop a formal model of it, and use this model to demonstrate its importance in economic environments. We show that, when people exhibit habit formation, projection bias leads people to consume too much early in life, and to decide, as time passes, to consume more—and save less—than originally planned. Projection bias can also lead to misguided purchases of durable goods. We discuss a number of additional applications and implications."

Both are reasons why we may have a hard time to make choices for our future, choices that we actually are happy about once that future occurs.

Stay tuned for more on time inconsistency...

Applying the Peak-End-Rule to Teaching

The chronicle of higher education has an advise section that proposes to apply a psychological concept, the peak-end rule, to how to teach classes (or maybe how to get good ratings), check out "Mind the 'Peak-End' Rule".

If you don't know the article by Kahneman, D., B. L. Fredrickson, C. A. Schreiber, and D. A. Redelmeier, “When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End,” Psychological Science,
IV (1993), 401–05, check it out; see also Kahneman, Daniel, Peter P.Wakker and Rakesh Sarin, "Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility", The Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 1997.

Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality and development.

My Stanford colleague has a series of interesting work on the effect of different beliefs about intelligence: Do we think it is innate, or can it be changed by hard work? Her main hypothesis is that people who believe that intelligence is innate dread failure because failure is a (negative) signal about one's abilities. On the other hand, people that believe that intelligence can be changed by work do not fear failure as much, they can use failure as an opportunity to learn and grow. The mindset on intelligence will therefore have an impact on whether we seek challenges, and how much stress we feel when exposed to complicated new tasks.

Here's a feature about her work in NY Magazine and a BBC article

A good summary of her work is her book: Dweck, C. S. (1999). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality and development. Philadelphia, PA: Taylor and Francis/Psychology

Press.

Here is a recent paper of hers,  "Can Everyone Become Highly Intelligent? Cultural Differences in and Societal Consequences of Beliefs About the Universal Potential for Intelligence" by Rattan Aneeta; Savani, Krishna; Naidu N.V.R and Dweck, Carol S. in the November 2012 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

I would be very interested in an experiment showing the correlation between those beliefs and classroom behavior over the long run, controlling for initial grades etc. Something in the style of what me and my coauthors did in "Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices" (see my former post)