High IQ: Not as good for you as you thought
IQ has been the subject of hundreds, if not thousands of research studies. Scholars have studied the link between IQ and race, gender, socioeconomic status, even music. Discussions about the relationship between IQ and race and the heritability of IQ (perhaps most notably Steven Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man) often rise to a fever pitch. Yet for all the interest in the study of IQ, there has been comparatively little research on other influences on performance in school.
Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman estimate that for every ten articles on intelligence and academic achievement, there has been fewer than one about self-discipline. Even so, the small body of research on self-discipline suggests that it has a significant impact on achievement. Walter Mischel and colleagues found in the 1980s that 4-year-olds’ ability to delay gratification (for example, to wait a few minutes for two cookies instead of taking one cookie right away) was predictive of academic achievement a decade later. Others have found links between personality and college grades, and self-discipline and Phi Beta Kappa awards. Still, most research on self-discipline has achieved inconsistent results, possibly due to the difficulty of measuring self-discipline. Could a more robust measure of self-discipline demonstrate that it’s more relevant to academic performance than IQ?
To address this question, Duckworth and Seligman conducted a two-year study of eighth graders, combining several measures of self-discipline for a more reliable measure, and also assessing IQ, achievement test scores, grades, and several other measures of academic performance. Using this better measure of self-discipline, they found that self-discipline was a significantly better predictor of academic performance 7 months later than IQ.
How did they arrive at this result? They studied a group of 8th-graders at the beginning of the school year. They used five different measures of self-discipline: the Eysenck Junior Impulsiveness scale (a 23-question survey about impulsive behavior), the Brief Self-Control Scale (13 questions measuring thoughts, emotions, impulses, and performance), two questionnaires in which parents and teachers rated the student’s self-discipline, and a version of Mischel’s delay of gratification task. Students were given an envelope containing $1, and were told they could spend it immediately or bring it back in a week for a $2 reward. The students were also given an IQ test (OLSAT7, level G).
At the end of the school year, students were surveyed again and several measures of academic performance were taken. The data included final GPA (grade point average), a spring achievement test, whether they had been admitted to the high school of their choice, and number of hours they spent on homework. All except two measures correlated more strongly to self-discipline than to IQ. Scores on spring achievement tests were correlated both to self-discipline and IQ, but there wasn’t a significant difference. Duckworth and Seligman suggest that this could be partially due to the fact that achievement tests are similar in format to IQ tests. The other area where there was no significant difference was in school absenses.
Most impressive was the whopping .67 correlation between self-discipline and final GPA, compared to a .32 correlation for IQ. This graph dramatically shows the difference between the two measures:
Both IQ and self-discipline are correlated with GPA, but self-discipline is a much more important contributor: those with low self-discipline have substantially lower grades than those with low IQs, and high-discipline students have much better grades than high-IQ students. Even after adjusting for the student’s grades during the first marking period of the year, students with higher self-discipline still had higher grades at the end of the year. The same could not be said for IQ. Further, the study found no correlation between IQ and self-discipline — these two traits varied independently.
This is not to say this study will end the debate on IQ and heredity. The study says nothing about whether self-discipline is heritable. Further, the self-discipline might be correlated differently with achievement for different populations; this study covered only eighth graders in a relatively privileged school. Perhaps self-discipline has a different role at other ages, or in more diverse populations (though the study group was quite ethnically diverse — 52% White, 31% Black, 12% Asian, and 4% Latino). Perhaps the most important question which remains is how best to teach children self-discipline — or whether it can be taught at all.
Duckworth, A.L., & Seligman, M.E.P. (2005). Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents. Psychological Science, 16(12), 939-944.
