Grit(74)
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Like Robert Putnam, Geoffrey Canada is a Harvard-trained social scientist.
Geoff is about as gritty as they come. His passion is enabling kids growing up in poverty to realize their potential. Recently, Geoff has become something of a celebrity. But for decades he toiled in relative obscurity as the director of a radically intensive education program in New York City called the Harlem Children’s Zone. The first kids to make it all the way through are now in college, and the program’s unusually comprehensive approach, coupled with unusually successful results, has attracted national attention.
A few years ago, Geoff came to Penn to deliver our commencement speech. I managed to shoehorn a private meeting into his busy schedule. Given our limited time, I got straight to the point.
“I know you’re trained as a social scientist,” I began. “And I know there are things we have tons of evidence for and aren’t doing in education, and there are things we have no evidence for and keep doing anyway. But I want to know, from all you’ve seen and done, what you really think is the way to dig kids out of poverty.”
Geoff sat forward and put his hands together like he was about to pray. “I’ll tell you straight. I’m a father of four. I’ve watched many, many kids who were not my own grow up. I may not have the random-assignment, double-blind studies to prove it, but I can tell you what poor kids need. They need all the things you and I give to our own children. What poor kids need is a lot. But you can sum it up by saying that what they need is a decent childhood.”
About a year later, Geoff gave a TED talk, and I was lucky enough to be in the audience. Much of what Harlem Children’s Zone did, Canada explained, was based on rock-solid scientific evidence—preschool education, for instance, and summer enrichment activities. But there’s one thing his program provided without sufficient scientific evidence to justify the expense: extracurricular activities.
“You know why?” he asked. “Because I actually like kids.”
The audience laughed, and he said it again: “I actually like kids.”
“You’ve never read a study from MIT that says giving your kid dance instruction is going to help them do algebra better,” he admitted. “But you will give that kid dance instruction, and you will be thrilled that that kid wants to do dance instruction, and it will make your day.”
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Geoffrey Canada is right. All the research I talked about in this chapter is nonexperimental. I don’t know if there’ll ever be a day when scientists figure out the logistics—and ethics—of randomly assigning kids to years of ballet class and then waiting to see if the benefit transfers to mastering algebra.
But, in fact, scientists have done short-term experiments testing whether doing hard things teaches a person to do other hard things.
Psychologist Robert Eisenberger at the University of Houston is the leading authority on this topic. He’s run dozens of studies in which rats are randomly assigned to do something hard—like press a lever twenty times to get a single pellet of rat chow—or something easy, like press that lever two times to get the same reward. Afterward, Bob gives all the rats a different difficult task. In experiment after experiment, he’s found the same results: Compared to rats in the “easy condition,” rats who were previously required to work hard for rewards subsequently demonstrate more vigor and endurance on the second task.
My favorite of Bob’s experiments is among his most clever. He noticed that laboratory rats are generally fed in one of two ways. Some researchers use wire-mesh hoppers filled with chow, requiring rats to gnaw at the food pellets through small openings in the mesh. Other researchers just scatter pellets on the floor of the cage. Bob figured that working for your supper, so to speak, might teach rats to work harder on an effortful training task. In fact, that’s exactly what he found. He began his experiment by training young rats to run down a narrow plank for a reward. Then, he divided the rats into two groups. One group lived in cages with hopper feeders, and the other in cages where food pellets were scattered about the floor. After a month of working to obtain food from the hopper, rats performed better on the runway task than rats who instead merely wandered over to their food when they were hungry.
Because his wife was a teacher, Bob had the opportunity to try short-term versions of the same experiments with children. For instance, in one study, he gave pennies to second and third graders for counting objects, memorizing pictures, and matching shapes. For some children, Bob rapidly increased the difficulty of these tasks as the children improved. Other children were repeatedly given easy versions of the same tasks.
All the children got pennies and praise.
Afterward, the children in both conditions were asked to do a tedious job that was entirely different from the previous tasks: copying a list of words onto a sheet of paper. Bob’s findings were exactly the same as what he’d found with rats: children who’d trained on difficult (rather than easy) tasks worked harder on the copying task.
Bob’s conclusion? With practice, industriousness can be learned.
In homage to the earlier work of Seligman and Maier on learned helplessness, where the inability to escape punishment led animals to give up on a second challenging task, Bob dubbed this phenomenon learned industriousness. His major conclusion was simply that the association between working hard and reward can be learned. Bob will go further and say that without directly experiencing the connection between effort and reward, animals, whether they’re rats or people, default to laziness. Calorie-burning effort is, after all, something evolution has shaped us to avoid whenever possible.