Angela Duckworth

Angela Duckworth (born 1970) is an American psychologist and author who is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies grit and self-control. She studied neurobiology at Harvard, neuroscience at Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship and took her doctorate in psychology at Pennsylvania in 2006, after working as a management consultant and a school mathematics teacher. She developed the Grit Scale, a measure of passion and perseverance for long-term goals, and argued that grit predicts achievement among high performers independently of IQ. Her 2016 book Grit became a bestseller, and she founded the nonprofit Character Lab. Meta-analyses have found grit only moderately related to performance and hard to separate from conscientiousness, and she has since acknowledged she misread some psychometric properties of her scale. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013.