Your Daily Tao

To people involved in the college-admissions process, this finding came as something of a shock; it was essentially a repudiation of one of the founding tenets of the late-twentieth-century American meritocracy. In The Big Test, Nicholas Lemann’s history of standardized college-admissions testing, he explains that the SAT was invented, in the years after World War II, because of growing skepticism about the predictive power of high-school grades. How were college-admissions officials supposed to compare a 3.5 student at a suburban high school in California with a 3.5 student at a rural high school in the Pennsylvania countryside or at an urban school in the South Bronx? The SAT was designed to correct that problem, to provide an objective tool that would distill a student’s ability to thrive in college down to a single, indisputable number. But at the colleges that Bowen and Chingos and McPherson examined, high-school grades turned out to be excellent predictors of college graduation—no matter where the student attended high school. It was true that a student with a 3.5 GPA from a high-quality high school was somewhat more likely to graduate from college than a student with a 3.5 GPA from a low-quality high school, but the difference was surprisingly modest. As the authors put it, “Students with very good high school grades who attended not-very-strong high schools nonetheless graduated in large numbers from whatever university they attended.” And when Angela Duckworth, the guru of self-control and grit at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed GPA and standardized-test scores among middle-school and high-school students, she found that standardized-test scores were predicted by scores on pure IQ tests and that GPA was predicted by scores on tests of self-control. Put Duckworth’s findings together with the discoveries in Crossing the Finish Line, and you reach a rather remarkable conclusion: whether or not a student is able to graduate from a decent American college doesn’t necessarily have all that much to do with how smart he or she is. It has to do, instead, with that same list of character strengths that produce high GPAs in middle school and high school. “In our view,” Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson wrote, “high school grades reveal much more than mastery of content. They reveal qualities of motivation and perseverance—as well as the presence of good study habits and time management skills—that tell us a great deal about the chances that a student will complete a college program.”

Good consistent grades reveal much more about the character and motivation of 1 person, rather than intelligence. Also, chracter is the most significant factor that impacts college graudation rates in the United States. While intelligence should definitely be appreciated and valued, grit is arguably more important.

Researchers, including Michael Meaney and Clancy Blair, have demonstrated that for infants to develop qualities like perseverance and focus, they need a high level of warmth and nurturance from their caregivers. What Spiegel’s success suggests, though, is that when children reach early adolescence, what motivates them most effectively isn’t licking and grooming–style care but a very different kind of attention. Perhaps what pushes middle-school students to concentrate and practice as maniacally as Spiegel’s chess players do is the unexpected experience of someone taking them seriously, believing in their abilities, and challenging them to improve themselves. During the months when I was most actively reporting at IS 318, watching the team prepare for the tournament in Columbus, I was also spending a lot of time at KIPP Infinity, tracking the development of the character report card. And as I shuttled back and forth on the subway between West Harlem and South Williamsburg, I had plenty of time to contemplate the parallels between Spiegel’s methods of training her students in chess and the way that teachers and administrators at KIPP talked to their students about day-to-day emotional crises or behavioral lapses. You may recall that KIPP’s dean, Tom Brunzell, said he considered his approach to be a kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy. When his students were flailing, lost in moments of stress and emotional turmoil, he would encourage them to do the kind of big-picture thinking—the metacognition, as many psychologists call it—that takes place in the prefrontal cortex: slowing down, examining their impulses, and considering more productive solutions to their problems than, say, yelling at a teacher or shoving another kid on the playground. In her postgame chess analyses, Spiegel had simply developed a more formalized way to do this. Like students at KIPP, IS 318 students were being challenged to look deeply at their own mistakes, examine why they had made them, and think hard about what they might have done differently. And whether you call that approach cognitive therapy or just plain good teaching, it seemed remarkably effective in producing change in middle-school students. This technique, though, is actually quite rare in contemporary American schools. If you believe that your school’s mission or your job as a teacher is simply to convey information, then it probably doesn’t seem necessary to subject your students to that kind of rigorous self-analysis. But if you’re trying to help them change their character, then conveying information isn’t enough. And while Spiegel didn’t use the word character to describe what she was teaching, there was a remarkable amount of overlap between the strengths David Levin and Dominic Randolph emphasized and the skills that Spiegel tried to inculcate in her students. Every day, in the classroom and at tournaments, I saw Spiegel trying to teach her students grit, curiosity, self-control, and optimism.

While it might be beneifical to give warmth and attention to toddlers, a different approach might be needed when kids reach the age of adolescene. Then, it might be about showing you have belief in them, and about challenging and exposing them to new obstacles and helping them overcome it.

Psychologists have demonstrated that group identity can have a powerful effect on achievement—both a positive and a negative one. In the early 1990s, Claude Steele, a psychologist who is now the dean of the school of education at Stanford University, identified a phenomenon that he called stereotype threat. If you give a person a subtle psychological cue having to do with his group identity before a test of intellectual or physical ability, Steele showed, you can have a major effect on how well he performs. Researchers have since demonstrated this effect in countless different settings. When white students at Princeton were told before trying a ten-hole mini golf course that it was a test of natural ability in sports (which they feared they didn’t possess), they scored four strokes worse than a similar group of white students who were told it was a test of their ability to think strategically (which they were confident they did possess). For black students, the effect was the opposite: when they were told the mini golf course was a test of their strategic intelligence, their scores were four strokes worse. Steele’s theory is that when you are worried about confirming a stereotype about your group—that white people aren’t athletic; that black people aren’t smart—you get anxious, and as a result, you do worse. Other researchers have found stereotype threat in pursuits much more serious than miniature golf. When people in their sixties and seventies and eighties were instructed to read an article about how memory fades with age before they took a memory test, they remembered 44 percent of the words in the test; members of a similar group who weren’t told to read the article before the test remembered 58 percent of the words. Before a challenging math test, female college students need only be reminded that they are female for them to do worse on the test than female students who don’t receive that identity cue. The good news about stereotype threat is that, just as it can be triggered by subtle cues, it can be defused by subtle interventions. One of the most effective techniques, which has now been tested in a variety of settings, is exposing students at risk of stereotype threat to a very specific message: that intelligence is malleable. If students internalize that idea, these studies show, they gain confidence, and their test scores and GPAs often rise too.

A reminder to not let stereotypes and group identity define what we are capable of. We shouldn’t be delusional about our abilities, but underestimating what we are capable of leads to us performing below our potential. The key is to be open minded and not limit our options and paths.

In the winter of 2002, as the first KIPP Academy graduates were making their way through high school, Levin’s brother, a money manager, gave him Learned Optimism, a book by Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Seligman is one of the main scholars behind the school of thought known as positive psychology, and the book, originally published in 1991, is the movement’s founding text, teaching that optimism is a learnable skill, not an inborn trait. Pessimistic adults and children can train themselves to be more hopeful, Seligman says, and if they do, they will likely become happier, healthier, and more successful. In Learned Optimism, Seligman wrote that for most people, depression was not an illness, as most psychologists believed, but simply a “severe low mood” that occurred “when we harbor pessimistic beliefs about the causes of our setbacks.” If you want to avoid depression and improve your life, Seligman counseled, you need to refashion your “explanatory style,” to create for yourself a better story about why good and bad things happen to you. Pessimists, Seligman wrote, tend to react to negative events by explaining them as permanent, personal, and pervasive. (Seligman calls these “the three P’s.”) Failed a test? It’s not because you didn’t prepare well; it’s because you’re stupid. If you get turned down for a date, there’s no point in asking someone else; you’re simply unlovable. Optimists, by contrast, look for specific, limited, short-term explanations for bad events, and as a result, in the face of a setback, they’re more likely to pick themselves up and try again.

While it dosen’t make sense to be optimistic for everything, having an optimistic outlook in general can lead to resilience and the will to constantly try new things out, despite any setbacks. Later in the book, it is also stated that the best chess players learn to be pessimistic when evaluating moves, but adopt an optimistic outlook of the game in general.

That makes sense. How many times have we made poor, rash decisions due to over-optimistic attitudes? While we do need to be upbeat and have a postiive outlook in general, it serves us well to constantly question and think about the worst case scenario of our next immediate moves.

The dominant advice to parents in the 1950s, based on behavioral theory, was to avoid “spoiling” infants by picking them up or otherwise comforting them when they cried. In a series of studies in the 1960s and early 1970s, Ainsworth showed that the effect of early nurturance was exactly the opposite of what the behaviorists expected. Babies whose parents responded readily and fully to their cries in the first months of life were, at one year, more independent and intrepid than babies whose parents had ignored their cries. In preschool, the pattern continued—the children whose parents had responded most sensitively to their emotional needs as infants were the most self-reliant. Warm, sensitive parental care, Ainsworth and Bowlby contended, created a “secure base” from which a child could explore the world. Although psychologists in the 1960s had at their disposal many tests to evaluate the cognitive abilities of infants and children, they had no reliable way to measure a child’s emotional capacities. So Ainsworth invented a method to do just that, an unusual procedure called the Strange Situation. At Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, where Ainsworth was a professor, a mother would bring her twelve-month-old child into a lab set up as a playroom. After playing with her infant for a while, the mother left the room, sometimes leaving the child with a stranger, sometimes leaving him or her alone. After a brief interval, she would return. Ainsworth and her researchers observed the whole procedure through one-way mirrors, and then categorized the children’s reactions. Most children greeted the returning mother happily, running to her and reconnecting with her, sometimes tearfully, sometimes with joy. These children Ainsworth labeled securely attached, and in subsequent experiments over the past few decades, psychologists have come to believe that they make up about 60 percent of American children. Children who did not have a warm reunion—pretending to ignore the mother when she returned; lashing out at her; falling to the floor in a heap—were labeled anxiously attached. Ainsworth found that a child’s reaction in the Strange Situation was directly related to his parents’ degree of responsiveness in that first year of life. Parents who were attuned to their child’s mood and responsive to his cues produced securely attached children; parenting that was detached or conflicted or hostile produced anxiously attached children. And early attachment, Ainsworth said, created psychological effects that could last a lifetime.

Against common intuition, readily responding to your babies cries at the infant stage will actually lead to them being more independent at the 1 year mark. We sometimes think that “forcing” situations where people get to sink or swim will make them stronger. However, such situations might not necessarily apply to kids. Of course, putting them in a bubble, like in Haidts book, “Codding of the American Mind”, is also not ideal. The key is balance. We need to be stressed occasionally to grow, but not too often and long, otherwise we might break.

But then Evans and Schamberg did something new: They introduced some biological measures of stress. When the children in the study were nine years old, and again when they were thirteen, Evans’s researchers took a number of physiological readings from each child, including blood pressure, body mass index, and levels of certain stress hormones, including cortisol. Evans and Schamberg combined those biological data to create their own measure of allostatic load: the physical effects of having an overtaxed stress-response system. When they sat down with all the data and compared each child’s Simon score, poverty history, and allostatic-load reading, they found that the three measures correlated—more time in poverty meant higher allostatic-load numbers and lower scores on Simon. But then came the surprise: When they used statistical techniques to factor out the effect of allostatic load, the poverty effect disappeared completely. It wasn’t poverty itself that was compromising the executive-function abilities of the poor kids. It was the stress that went along with it. This was, potentially at least, a big deal in terms of our understanding of poverty. Picture two boys sitting together playing Simon for the first time. One is from an upper-middle-class home, and one is from a low-income home. The kid from the upper-middle-class home is doing a lot better at memorizing the patterns. We might be inclined to assume that the reason for this effect is genetic—maybe there’s a Simon gene that rich kids are more likely to possess. Or maybe it has to do with material advantages in the upper-middle-class kid’s home—more books, more games, more electronic toys. Or maybe his school is a better place to learn short-term memory skills. Or perhaps it’s some combination of the three. But what Evans and Schamberg found is that the more significant disadvantage the low-income boy faces is in fact his elevated allostatic load. And if another low-income boy came along with low levels of allostatic load—if, for whatever reason, he had had a less stressful childhood, despite his family’s poverty—he would in all probability do just as well at the Simon competition as the rich kid. And why does a low Simon score matter? Because in high school, college, and the workplace, life is filled with tasks where working memory is crucial to success.

To achieve better equality in economic outcomes, the key is to ensure that children in low-income situations do not undergo the stresses that arise from financial insecurity. Of course, just because there is isn’t any financial woes dosen’t mean that children would have perfect, stress-free childhoods. However, financial insecurity is the biggest factor we hvae now and if more effort could be put in place to help families in poverty, we can give these kids a much better chance in the future and increase social mobility.

At age twenty-two, Heckman found, just 3 percent of GED recipients were enrolled in a four-year university or had completed some kind of post-secondary degree, compared to 46 percent of high-school graduates. In fact, Heckman discovered that when you consider all kinds of important future outcomes—annual income, unemployment rate, divorce rate, use of illegal drugs—GED recipients look exactly like high-school dropouts, despite the fact that they have earned this supposedly valuable extra credential, and despite the fact that they are, on average, considerably more intelligent than high-school dropouts. From a policy point of view, this was a useful finding, if a depressing one: In the long run, it seemed, as a way to improve your life, the GED was essentially worthless. If anything, it might be having a negative overall effect by inducing young people to drop out of high school. But for Heckman, the results also posed a confounding intellectual puzzle. Like most economists, Heckman had believed that cognitive ability was the single most reliable determinant of how a person’s life would turn out. Now he had discovered a group—GED holders—whose good test scores didn’t seem to have any positive effect on their lives. What was missing from the equation, Heckman concluded, were the psychological traits that had allowed the high-school graduates to make it through school. Those traits—an inclination to persist at a boring and often unrewarding task; the ability to delay gratification; the tendency to follow through on a plan—also turned out to be valuable in college, in the workplace, and in life generally. As Heckman explained in one paper: “Inadvertently, the GED has become a test that separates bright but nonpersistent and undisciplined dropouts from other dropouts.” GED holders, he wrote, “are ‘wise guys’ who lack the ability to think ahead, persist in tasks, or to adapt to their environments.”

We tend to put too much emphasis on intelligence as the key factor that would lead to success. In this book, Paul Tough talks about how several pyschological factors are even more crucial, such as the ability to focus, delay gratification and follow through. These are attributes that, when developed while young, have a far more siginficant impact on future success than cognitive ability.

Many innovations, for all their progress, leave a sailboat of forgotten goodness behind. And in our race to innovate, we instinctively reject people who hold on to the past. We can’t know that they don’t have a point. Perhaps they’ve pointed out something timeless that we didn’t think about. Is there an innovation that can replace a hug from your mom? Ice cream on a summer day? Is a strip mall a worthy substitute for an open meadow, or the latest Gehry office tower for the Chrysler Building? The passion of creation leaves us partially blind; we’re focused so intently on what we’re making that we forget the good things already here, or that our innovations might leave behind. And while we laugh at groups who reject innovation as a concept — the Luddites, the Amish, or our technophobic friends — we are all just as resistant as they are, but in different ways. We follow conventions in our dress, speech, diets, and work schedules. We drive on the same side of the road, put socks on before our shoes, and eat dinner with knives and forks. Even the greatest innovators of all time, the big revolutionaries and radicals, followed the traditions of their day. No one innovates in all ways all the time; in fact, the biggest, baddest innovators in history followed more conventions than they broke.

The final passage from this book. Its good to constantly think about how to improve things. However, sometimes, we do need to take a step back and focus on the good things we already have. It will also do us good to help those whom got left behind in this world of constant change.

The factors that spread innovations, from the personal ones listed in Chapter 4 to the broader ones listed above, are largely about ease of adoption. The reason why Internet and cell phone usage climbed faster than previous technologies isn’t because things happen faster today. (Nor is it because these technologies are bigger leaps forward than previous ones.) It’s simply because the barriers of entry were low. People already had PCs and phone lines, making Internet use cheap and easy (economics). For cellular phones, the population already had daily experience with personal telephone usage and cordless phones, and their frequent use was accepted social behavior (culture). If you think about it, the cell phone isn’t more than a cordless phone with unlimited (well, sometimes) range. The Internet and World Wide Web, for all their wonders, were an extension of the PCs and modems already in use — AOL had trained millions to use email, and word processors were popular applications on those computers. The goodness/adoption paradox surfaces if, for fun, we separate goodness (from the expert’s point of view) from the factors that drive adoption. From the expert view of goodness, better technologies existed for publishing and networking than Berners-Lee’s Web. Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart had talked about and demoed them for decades. But those “better” ideas were demanding in ways that would have raised barriers to adoption in 1991. At best, they would have cost more to build and taken more time to engineer. We can’t know whether those additional barriers would have prevented the Web from succeeding or merely have changed its ascension. It’s also possible these alterative web designs might have had advantages that Berners-Lee’s Web didn’t have, that would have positively impacted ease of adoption.

When we view things that we have adopted, it is not always the case that the best ideas win out. Usually, it is the case where the ideas with the best ease of adoption (i.e lowest barriers to entry) win out. Low barriers also enable fast adoption, hence speeding up innovation and new technologies.

Yet somehow when people bring a new idea to their manager, they forget the fallibility of prediction. It’s easy to assume that the manager has a better perspective on the viability of an idea, perhaps from her superior experience and knowledge of the industry. But these are exactly the factors that also work against innovation: high experience and confidence make people the greatest resistors to new ideas as they have the most to lose (see “The innovator’s dilemma explained” in Chapter 4). The managers of propeller aircraft design were the last to adopt jet engines. Same for graphic user interfaces vs. command lines, telephones vs. telegraphs, and — as hard as it is to admit — for whatever we’re using now vs. whatever is coming next.

Experience can be a double-edged sword. It might help you prevent pitfalls and obstacles that you might have faced before, but it will naturally also constrict your thinking as you already “think” you know what is possible. The key is to always be open-minded, as the ever changing trends might prove your experience wrong. Thus this myth was mentioned by the author, “that your boss knows more than you about innovation”.