Grit Trumps Talent? An experimental approach

Leonie Gerhards () and Christina Gravert
Additional contact information
Leonie Gerhards: Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University, Denmark, Postal: 8210 Aarhus V, Denmark

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University

Abstract: Perseverance to accomplish long-term goals, also know as grit, is a crucial determinant for success in life. In the present study we introduce an innovative laboratory design to elicit grit in an incentivized and controlled way. Subjects work on a computerized task to solve anagrams. By observing their decision not to shirk, we measure their grittiness experimentally. We find that the original questionnaire measure of grit developed by Duckworth et al. (2007) is significantly correlated with our new experimental measure - even when controlling for ability and a questionnaire measure of self-control. Moreover, subjects' earnings increase in their experimentally elicited grit

Keywords: Grit; perseverance; laboratory experiment; real-effort task (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 M50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23
Date: 2015-10-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.econ.au.dk/repec/afn/wp/15/wp15_18.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Grit Trumps Talent? An experimental approach (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aah:aarhec:2015-18

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().