The Grit Meta-Analysis Found r = .18 With Grades and .84 With Conscientiousness
The 2017 grit meta-analysis by Credé, Tynan and Harms pooled 66,807 people: grit correlates .18 with grades and .84 with conscientiousness. What that means.
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Two questionnaires, 18,826 people, a correlation of .84. That is the number in Credé, Tynan and Harms (2017, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 492-511) that matters most for anyone who has been told that a shortage of grit explains their stalled projects. The meta-analysis pooled 584 effect sizes from 88 independent samples and 66,807 people, and its central finding is that grit, as measured by the Grit Scale, is mostly the trait psychologists already called conscientiousness.
What did the grit meta-analysis find?
Grit is a modest predictor of performance that overlaps heavily with an older trait. The figures below are the paper’s corrected correlations (rho).
| Relationship | rho | Samples (k) | People (N) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overall grit and academic performance | .18 | 39 | 13,141 |
| Perseverance of effort and academic performance | .26 | 11 | 5,221 |
| Consistency of interests and academic performance | .10 | 11 | 5,221 |
| Overall grit and conscientiousness | .84 | 22 | 18,826 |
| Overall grit and cognitive ability | .05 | 21 | 11,513 |
For comparison, the authors cite a correlation of about .50 between cognitive ability and performance, and note that some other predictors, study habits and academic adjustment among them, correlate with grades at more than twice the size of grit. Conscientiousness itself predicts college GPA at about .23 in Poropat’s 2009 meta-analysis, against .17 for grit.
Which part of grit does the work?
The two halves of the scale do not behave alike. Perseverance of effort, the finishing-what-you-start half, carried nearly all the prediction. Consistency of interests, the not-chasing-new-things half, managed .10, and the authors conclude that adding the two into one grit score loses predictive power. Perseverance also added a small increment over conscientiousness for grades (.04), which is the one result in the paper that works in grit’s favor.
What did Duckworth say in reply?
Anya Kamenetz of NPR put the critique to Angela Duckworth on 25 May 2016. By email she granted that “some of the points are correct,” said she was considering revising the passion items, and preferred to call grit “a member of the conscientiousness family” with predictive power of its own. She also disputed how far the paper’s press release stretched its findings.
What does this mean if you are never finishing anything?
Probably that the explanation lies outside a personality score. A correlation of .18 leaves most of the variation in outcomes to other things: how practice is structured (the famous 10,000-hour figure is shakier than its reputation), whose goal it is, and what surrounds you. The marshmallow test went a similar way: its link to later outcomes weakened once family background was controlled (Watts, Duncan and Quan, 2018). A far larger childhood-to-adulthood dataset, the Dunedin cohort, found a graded but probabilistic link between childhood self-control and health, income and convictions by age 32.
The paper’s limits cut both ways. Most studies measured grit and grades at the same moment, everything was self-report, and the authors could not correct for range restriction.
One practical use of the facet split: when a project stalls, check which kind of stalling it is. If you stop when it gets hard, the evidence supports scheduling fixed work sessions in advance. If you keep switching targets, the paper says little, and the self-concordance model asks a better question: are these goals yours?