Duckworth's Misleading Meaning

Angela Lee Duckworth has been getting a large amount of fame for her work on grit these past few years, but some people are wondering if what she’s claiming is in reality duplicitous. Marcus Crede, an Assistant Professor of psychology at Iowa State University, claims that grit isn’t as important or effective as everyone thinks. In an article, Anya Kamenetz summarizes Crede’s refutation into three points. One piece of Duckworth’s evidence on the power of grit is that there is a higher percentage of people who have grit that achieve their goals. While it is plausible, the percentage is not as high as it is interpreted. Kamenetz writes that Crede states, "Cadets who scored a standard deviation higher than average on the Grit–Scale were 99% more
likely to complete summer training… sounds like a big win for grit. But, as Crede points out... 95 percent of all cadets make it through Beast Barracks, while 98 percent of the very "grittiest" candidates made it through… to simplify, it's the odds of making it through that improved by 99 percent. Most laypeople, though, would interpret "99% more likely" as meaning that your chances of getting through bounced, say, from 40 percent to 80 percent.
Not by 3 percentage points.”. In other words, Duckworth uses misleading wording to make the 3 percent change seem more significant than it really is. Another key point Crede made against Duckworth is that he calls grit a case of “old wine in new bottles”. He claims grit is basically something we’ve already discovered being re-glorified. Crede states, “The search for a scientific way to describe personality traits goes back at least to the 1930s… psychologists have settled on a group of personality dimensions... conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion, neuroticism and openness… conscientiousness scores and grit scores are very highly correlated — between 80 and 98 percent… This matters, because a major implication of Duckworth's work is that grit is a skill… But, psychologists say conscientiousness isn't a skill. It's a trait...”. Grit has already been studied as a personality trait and since personalities are not subject to change, Angela Duckworth’s research had been proven to be wrong. Crede’s evidence is incredibly effective because it showed what most people missed because of Angela Duckworth’s
wording. Her wording gave the reader the impression that grit was a recently discovered skill that is extremely important for achieving your goals and could be improved through hard work. Crede, however, proved that her ‘findings’ were indeterminate with his three points.