Angela Duckworth

Angela Lee Duckworth (born 1970) is an American psychologist and author who studies why some people persist toward long-term goals. She is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder and former chief executive of Character Lab, a not-for-profit that works to advance the science and practice of character development. Raised in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, she studied neurobiology at Harvard, neuroscience at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and took a doctorate in psychology at Pennsylvania, and she taught mathematics at a San Francisco high school before turning to research. Her best known idea is grit, defined as passion and perseverance for long-term goals, which she measures with the Grit Scale and presented to general readers in her 2016 book Grit. Her work has shaped debate about character education, and it has drawn criticism, including a meta-analysis that found grit only moderately related to performance, and her own later acknowledgement that she had misread the psychometric properties of the scale.