We're Teaching Grit the Wrong Way - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views
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Good self-control has also been shown to be a key component of grit — perseverance in the face of educational challenges. It’s no wonder, then, that colleges have placed great emphasis on teaching students better self-control.
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But the strategies that educators are recommending to build that self-control — a reliance on willpower and executive function to suppress emotions and desires for immediate pleasures — are precisely the wrong ones. Besides having a poor long-term success rate in general, the effectiveness of willpower drops precipitously when people are feeling tired, anxious, or stressed. And, unfortunately, that is exactly how many of today’s students often find themselves.
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Efforts to emphasize willpower and executive function to achieve self-control are largely ineffective in helping those students.
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ortunately, there is a solution. For millennia, what ensured long-term success was cooperation. Strong interpersonal relationships were necessary to thrive. But to be identified as a good partner, a person had to be trustworthy, generous, fair, and diligent. She had to be willing to sacrifice immediate self-interest in order to share with and invest in others. In short, she had to have good character.
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When a person feels grateful, he’ll work harder and longer to pay others back as well as pay favors forwar
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For example, in adaptations of the marshmallow test for college students — in which differing amounts of cash were used instead of sweets — we found that leading people to feel grateful doubled the value they placed on future gains, and thereby doubled their willingness to wait for larger amounts of money in the future rather than take smaller amounts of money in the moment. Feelings of pride and compassion work in a similar way.
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The upshot is that by increasing the value the mind places on future rewards, these emotions enable people to cooperate more with their own future selves as well as with others.
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It matters what path people use. As one example, grit combined with gratitude is a strong predictor of resilience with respect to lowered suicidal thoughts among college students. On its own, however, grit isn’t associated with this buffering effect.