Cognitive Science, Education, Technology, etc.

Is it better to be organized than smart?

There's a stunning article in this month's Psychological Science. Duckworth and Seligman present a study that shows that self-discipline is more important to academic success than IQ.

This is a very interesting result, but it needs some follow-up.

Whenever you read about some personality variable (self-discipline, confidence, integrity, etc.) being studied, it's important to remember that the study must be relying on some way to measure that variable. We all have lots of connotations about what self-discipline means (careful readers will notice that I substituted "organized" for "self-disciplined" in my first sentence), but what this scientific result really means is that results on some group of tests which are claimed to measure self-discipline correlate with academic success (which is also measured in some way). In this case, the study used a combination of measures, including a questionnaire, reports from parents and teachers and a kind of goofy test where kids were asked whether they'd like a dollar right now or the promise of $2 in a week. Birds-in-hand and present value calculations notwithstanding, the correct answer is, apparently, to wait.

So, do the measures used correspond to what I'd consider self-discipline? I think so, but I'd be more convinced if they found that self-discipline could be distinguished from other characteristics that also, presumably, lead to academic success (like desire to succeed academically, belief in future success, belief in the value of studying, accurate self-assessment, etc.). To some extent, I suspect that the self-discipline measures are tapping aspects of all of these personality characteristics, so its hard to tell which one is really the crucial one to success.

There's a related issue with the outcome measures. What counts as academic success? Again, Duckworth and Seligman use multiple measures. Some seem fine (GPA, performance on an achievement test, admission to a selective high school), but others seem more like mediators than outcome measures. One of the outcome measures was the time of the day that students begin homework. Students with high self-discipline begin homework earlier. That's fine, but perhaps the time when you begin homework is also a predictor of success. In other words, you might start your homework earlier because you have high self-discipline, but you also might behave that way because you have an involved parent. And maybe it doesn't matter why you started your homework early, just that you did.

This stuff is important because, if its true that self-discipline is what really matters, then the next step is to figure out how to increase students' self-discipline. If having an involved parent leads to early homework which leads to academic success (just as strongly as student self-discipline), then let's focus on getting the kids homework started early, rather than trying to change self-discipline.

Finally, there's the issue of what IQ means. One argument against the importance of this study is that there's a difference between being smart and having a high IQ (notice how, in the first sentence, I substituted "smart" for IQ? Well, its just a blog). This is, fundamentally, the argument against any use of IQ - it doesn't capture all of what we mean when we say someone's smart. So, this is the same problem as with self-discipline -- does the measure match what we think it means? However, I'm less concerned with the IQ measure in this study. You may or may not agree that IQ=smart, but you probably have a good idea of what an IQ test is measuring. You've taken one - or a test something like one. And whatever it is that an IQ test measures, it seems pretty close to whatever it is that schools measure.

So finding something that beats IQ in predicting of academic success really is a stunning result.