Reading List

Authors Like Angela Duckworth

Grit came out in May 2016 and became one of the most influential books ever written about effort. Ten months later a meta-analysis of 88 samples and 66,807 people found that grit correlates with plain old conscientiousness at .84 — more closely than two different conscientiousness scales correlate with each other — and adds almost nothing to what conscientiousness already predicts. That finding has since been replicated by an independent team. It is worth being precise about what it means, because nothing here has been retracted and there is no misconduct: the honest word is overstated, not debunked, and Duckworth has conceded significant parts of it in public since 2016. Her second book, Situated, arrived on 1 September 2026 and argues the other half — that environment does much of what we credit to character. The ten writers below cover both sides of that argument.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Psychology · Grit · MacArthur Fellow 2013 · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Angela Duckworth, the closest match is Katy Milkman, who co-directs a Penn research initiative with her and whose How to Change Duckworth wrote the foreword to — and which asks what circumstances you can arrange rather than what kind of person you are. Paul Tough is the best single bridge: he popularised the character framing in 2012 and spent the next decade documenting what it underrates. For the mechanism behind sustained effort, read K. Anders Ericsson. For the strongest disagreement, Alfie Kohn, who got there two years before the meta-analysis did.

10 authors like Angela Duckworth

01
The documented partner · Closest match

Katy Milkman

American · How to Change (Portfolio, 2021)

Milkman is a behavioural scientist at Wharton who studies why people fail to do the things they have already decided to do. How to Change is organised by obstacle rather than by virtue — impulsivity, procrastination, forgetting, low confidence — and matches an evidence-backed tactic to each: temptation bundling, the fresh-start effect, commitment devices. Much of it rests on her own field experiments run at scale in gyms, pharmacies and workplaces. She hosts the Choiceology podcast.

The strongest documented connection on this page and the most useful contrast. She and Duckworth co-direct the Penn-Wharton Behavior Change for Good Initiative, and Duckworth wrote the foreword to this book. Where Grit asks what kind of person you are, Milkman asks what circumstances you can arrange — which is precisely the move Duckworth herself makes in Situated five years later. Read together they bracket her whole shift.

— Lisanne
02
The arc of the argument

Paul Tough

Canadian-American · How Children Succeed (2012), The Years That Matter Most (2019)

Tough is a journalist who reports on childhood, poverty and education in America. How Children Succeed is the book that carried the non-cognitive-skills research out of the journals and into the national conversation; its subtitle is literally “Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character”. Then he changed his mind in public. The Years That Matter Most investigates American higher education as a sorting machine that reproduces advantage, and locates the problem in institutions and money rather than in children. It was reissued in paperback as The Inequality Machine — the same book under two titles.

The best single bridge here, because he is the whole argument inside one career. He popularised the character framing in 2012, before the meta-analyses landed, and then spent a decade documenting the structural conditions that framing underrates. Read both of his books in order and you have the last fifteen years of this debate without reading a single journal article. Worth knowing that the 2012 book transmits the research at its most confident, and that his own later work is the correction.

— Lisanne
03
The mechanism underneath

K. Anders Ericsson

Swedish, worked in the United States · Peak, with Robert Pool (2016)

Ericsson spent his career studying how experts become expert — chess players, violinists, surgeons, memory athletes — and his answer was deliberate practice: effortful, structured, feedback-driven work at the edge of current ability, which is not the same as doing something a lot. He was both the source of the ten-thousand-hour rule and its most persistent critic, pointing out that ten thousand hours was the average his violinists had done by twenty, at which point they were nowhere near mastery. His own findings were cut down by a 2014 meta-analysis finding deliberate practice explains around twelve per cent of variance overall; he disputed its definitions until his death in 2020, and the argument was never settled.

The intellectual ancestor. Grit is downstream of him: the claim that sustained effort beats talent rests on the deliberate-practice literature, and Duckworth discusses it directly. He is the right choice for a reader who wants the mechanism rather than the trait — not “how gritty are you” but “what does the effort actually have to consist of”. Note that his replication story mirrors hers almost exactly, which is itself instructive.

— Lisanne
04
The productive disagreement

Alfie Kohn

American · Punished by Rewards (1993), The Myth of the Spoiled Child (2014)

Kohn has spent forty years arguing that the machinery of motivation used in schools and workplaces — grades, praise, rewards, competition, homework, standardised tests — is counterproductive, and that extrinsic incentives reliably erode the intrinsic interest they are meant to encourage. He is a progressive-education polemicist working from constructivist learning theory, he argues about values as openly as about evidence, and he reads like it. Present him as the opposing case rather than a neutral referee.

The designated dissenter, and he got there first. His “Ten concerns about the ‘let's teach them grit’ fad” ran in the Washington Post in April 2014, two years before the meta-analysis, and attacks the framing rather than the statistics: that persistence is only worth as much as the goal it serves, that knowing when to quit matters, that the research is partly circular, and that the more we focus on whether children have persistence the less likely we are to question the policies around them. Reading him against Grit is the most productive argument available.

— Lisanne
05
The other pillar

Carol Dweck

American · Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Random House, 2006)

Dweck's research distinguishes fixed from growth mindsets — beliefs about whether ability is malleable — and argues that believing ability can grow changes how people handle failure. Mindset turned four decades of laboratory work into one of the most widely adopted ideas in British and American schooling. Its replication record is if anything harder than grit's: a 2018 pair of meta-analyses found weak overall effects, and a 2019 trial in 101 English schools found no additional progress in literacy or numeracy. The largest well-designed test, published in Nature in 2019 with Dweck as a co-author, did find a real effect — roughly a tenth of a grade point, concentrated in students who were already struggling. Dweck also publicly acknowledged errors found in a 1998 study of hers, which her critic praised her for.

The closest neighbour in the story. Grit and growth mindset are the two pillars of the non-cognitive-skills turn in education: popularised together, adopted by the same schools, and criticised together in the same papers by the same researchers. Read her to understand what Grit was arguing alongside, and read the replication record for both at once — it is the same record.

— Lisanne

Every book by Carol Dweck →

Authors like Carol Dweck →

06
The colleague, the warmer version

Adam Grant

American · Think Again (2021), Hidden Potential (2023)

Grant is an organisational psychologist at Wharton, its youngest tenured professor at twenty-eight, who writes about work: who succeeds by helping others, where original ideas come from, why rethinking is a skill. Hidden Potential is the closest to Duckworth's territory — it argues that character skills and growth trajectories matter more than starting talent and attacks the idea that early ability predicts adult achievement. His method is hers: synthesise the personality and organisational literature into narrative chapters built around individual stories.

They are Penn colleagues, she in Arts and Sciences and he at Wharton, and they have appeared in public conversation together more than once. Hidden Potential asks the same question Grit asks — how far effort and character carry someone past their apparent ceiling — in a warmer, more organisational frame, and it is the easiest next book if you liked the tone and want more of it rather than an argument about it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Adam Grant →

Authors like Adam Grant →

07
The corrective

Daniel Kahneman

Israeli-American · Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Noise (2021)

Kahneman, with Amos Tversky, founded the study of cognitive bias — the systematic ways human judgement departs from probability — and their model of how people weigh risk and loss won the Nobel in Economic Sciences in 2002. Thinking, Fast and Slow organises fifty years of that work around fast automatic thought and slow effortful thought. The book's chapter on social priming did not survive the replication crisis, and in 2017 he said so himself, writing that he had placed too much faith in underpowered studies and had failed to internalise the lesson of his own paper on small samples.

He predates this genre and set its terms: every book on this page is written in the form he legitimised, an academic presenting a research programme to general readers without dumbing it down. He is also the corrective a Grit reader most needs, because his subject is the unreliability of introspection and Grit rests largely on people answering questions about themselves. His handling of his own bad chapter is the standard everyone else on this page gets held to.

— Lisanne

Every book by Daniel Kahneman →

08
The experiment, run on herself

Maria Konnikova

Russian-born American · The Confidence Game (2016), The Biggest Bluff (2020)

Konnikova took her psychology PhD at Columbia under Walter Mischel of the marshmallow test, and writes narrative nonfiction built on immersion. The Confidence Game is about why intelligent people fall for con artists. The Biggest Bluff is the standout: she set out to learn poker from scratch in order to study the boundary between skill and chance, was coached by the professional Erik Seidel, won a major open event in 2018 and a World Series of Poker bracelet in 2024. The book is the experiment and the report on it at the same time.

Two overlaps rather than one. Her doctoral supervisor was Mischel, whose self-control tradition is the one Duckworth's work grows directly out of. And The Biggest Bluff is a first-person test of the deliberate-practice thesis under conditions where luck is actually measurable, which is the question Grit leaves open. She is also simply the better storyteller of the two, if that is what you were missing.

— Lisanne
09
Why this keeps happening

Stuart Ritchie

Scottish · Science Fictions (2020)

Ritchie took his PhD in Edinburgh, lectured at King's College London and is an intelligence researcher by training, so he writes about science's failures from inside the field rather than as an outsider. Science Fictions treats fraud, bias, negligence and hype as four distinct mechanisms with worked examples from psychology, medicine and nutrition, explains p-hacking and underpowered studies in plain language, and proposes reforms. It was shortlisted for the Royal Society science book prize in 2021. He co-hosts The Studies Show with Tom Chivers.

He is the instruction manual for reading every other book on this page. If you have just discovered that grit, growth mindset, power posing and deliberate practice all shrank under scrutiny, the question you want answered is how that keeps happening, and he answers it directly. He has written specifically on the decline of growth mindset, which is the nearest neighbour of the grit story. To be precise about the limit: he does not discuss Duckworth or grit himself. He explains the mechanism that the grit story is an instance of.

— Lisanne
10
The chapter about grit itself

Jesse Singal

American · The Quick Fix (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)

The Quick Fix is a reported history of six behavioural-science ideas that were oversold to policymakers and the public: the self-esteem movement, the superpredator theory, power posing, positive psychology, grit, and the Implicit Association Test. Singal's argument is structural rather than personal — that media incentives, funding pressure and political appetite reliably convert a modest finding into a national programme before the evidence is in. He is also a polarising figure, chiefly for his reporting on transgender youth: his 2018 Atlantic cover story drew substantial criticism and GLAAD listed him in its 2021 Accountability Project. That is a dispute about journalism rather than a finding about research, and it has nothing to do with this book.

The only book on this list with a chapter about grit itself, which makes it the obvious place to read the other side. It is also the fair version of the other side: reviewers note that he finds Duckworth considerably more candid and transparent than the other researchers in the book, and records her frustration at having lost control of the grit narrative. That framing — the idea got away from the scientist — is the most accurate summary of what happened, and it is not one you would expect from a sceptic.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Angela Duckworth

If you want the closest match, read Katy Milkman.

How to Change, with a foreword by Duckworth. Circumstances instead of character.

If you want to know what happened next, read Paul Tough.

How Children Succeed, then The Years That Matter Most. He changed his mind in public.

If you want the mechanism, read K. Anders Ericsson.

Peak. Not how gritty you are, but what the effort actually has to consist of.

If you want the argument against, read Alfie Kohn.

He published ten objections in April 2014, two years before the meta-analysis arrived.

If you want to know why this keeps happening, read Stuart Ritchie.

Science Fictions. The machinery that turns a modest finding into a national programme.

If you want more psychology

My psychology shelf has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Angela Duckworth

Who should I read if I love Angela Duckworth?

Katy Milkman is the closest — she co-directs a research initiative with Duckworth at Penn, Duckworth wrote her foreword, and How to Change asks what circumstances you can arrange rather than what kind of person you are. Paul Tough is the best bridge, because he popularised the character framing in 2012 and then documented what it underrates. K. Anders Ericsson gives you the mechanism behind sustained effort. Alfie Kohn gives you the strongest disagreement, and Adam Grant, her Penn colleague, gives you more of the same thing done warmly.

Has grit been debunked?

Not debunked. Overstated, and specifically so. A meta-analysis by Marcus Credé, Michael Tynan and Peter Harms, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2017 and online in 2016, pooled 584 effect sizes from 88 samples and 66,807 people. It found that grit correlates with conscientiousness at .84 — higher than two different conscientiousness scales typically correlate with each other — and that overall grit adds essentially nothing to what conscientiousness already predicts about performance. An independent team, Ponnock and colleagues, replicated the finding in 2020 using different methods. Nothing has been retracted, there is no misconduct finding, and this is not comparable to the fraud cases in behavioural science. What failed is the claim that grit is a separate trait that outperforms the things psychologists already measured.

Is any part of grit still standing?

Yes, one specific part. The grit scale has two halves: perseverance of effort and consistency of interests, sometimes described as the passion half. Both the original meta-analysis and the 2020 replication found that perseverance of effort does predict academic performance over and above conscientiousness, with meaningful effect sizes. Consistency of interests explains almost nothing. So the useful finding survived and the packaging did not: the recommendation from the researchers is to stop combining the two into a single grit score, and to keep the perseverance measure.

What did Angela Duckworth say about the criticism?

More, earlier and more openly than most authors in her position. In March 2016, before the meta-analysis appeared, she published an op-ed in the New York Times arguing against grading schools on grit, writing that we are nowhere near ready to use character feedback as a metric for judging teachers and schools. In May 2016 she responded to Credé directly in an NPR interview, conceding his statistical point, saying she was already considering revising the scale — specifically the passion items the meta-analysis found worthless — and adding that she aspires to be a scientist who stays open to criticism. She is also a co-author on a 2019 study of West Point cadets showing that cognitive ability, not grit, is the strongest predictor of academic grades there.

Did Angela Duckworth write a second book?

Yes, and it is eight days old at the time of writing. Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best was published by Scribner on 1 September 2026. It argues that the objects within arm's reach, your peers and mentors and even your postcode do much of the work we usually credit to willpower. It is not a sequel to Grit so much as the other half of the argument, and it lands directly on the criticism above. She told the Pennsylvania Gazette in August 2026 that she had always agreed with the critics on this point, and that the two books are a complement rather than a contradiction. She has explicitly refused the tidier story in which the critics were right and she has now seen the light.

What is the difference between grit and conscientiousness?

Statistically, much less than the book implied. Conscientiousness is one of the five personality traits psychologists have measured for decades: being organised, dependable, disciplined and persistent. Grit was proposed as something distinct — perseverance plus passion for very long-term goals. The meta-analysis found the two correlate at .84, which in practice means the grit questionnaire is close to a conscientiousness questionnaire under a different name. Researchers call that a jangle fallacy: giving an existing thing a new label and mistaking it for a discovery. The one genuine addition is the perseverance half, which does predict school performance beyond conscientiousness.

Which books are like Grit but hold up better?

Katy Milkman's How to Change is built on her own large field experiments and is organised around obstacles rather than virtues. Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow rests on prospect theory, which is Nobel-grade and intact, though he himself disowned the book's social-priming chapter in 2017. Stuart Ritchie's Science Fictions is about the replication problem itself and so cannot fall to it. Paul Tough's later reporting is journalism rather than a single research claim. Be aware that Carol Dweck and K. Anders Ericsson, the two most natural companions to Grit, have replication records of their own — which is worth knowing rather than a reason to avoid them.

Is there a book that argues against grit?

Two, from different directions. Alfie Kohn has been making the case against the character framing since well before the statistics arrived; his ten objections ran in the Washington Post in April 2014, and the political one is the sharpest — that the more attention goes to whether children have persistence, the less goes to the institutions around them. Jesse Singal's The Quick Fix (2021) is the only book on this page with a chapter on grit specifically, and it is notably fair to Duckworth herself, presenting her as a researcher who lost control of her own idea rather than as a villain.

Does Angela Duckworth still host No Stupid Questions?

No. The podcast ran on the Freakonomics Radio Network from May 2020 and ended on 14 December 2024 after 223 episodes. She launched it with Stephen Dubner, but he was replaced as co-host early on by Mike Maughan, who was her partner for most of the run. The archive is still available, so you can listen to all of it; she just is not making new episodes. Character Lab, the education nonprofit she co-founded in 2013 with Dave Levin and Dominic Randolph, also closed in June 2024, although some university pages still describe it in the present tense.

Where should I start with Angela Duckworth?

Grit (2016) is still the book people mean, and it is worth reading with the meta-analysis in mind rather than instead of it — the stories are good, the argument for effort over talent is sound, and only the strong version of the claim failed. If you would rather start with the current thinking, Situated (2026) is the newer book and the one that answers her critics. Reading them in order, with Paul Tough in between, is the best way to see how the whole field moved between 2016 and now.

Sources

List last reviewed 5 September 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

More from the shelf

Reading list

Best Psychology Books

The psychology that holds up.

Reading list

Best Nonfiction Books

The nonfiction worth the time.

Author index

Books by Author

Every writer on the shelf.

Author index

Every Author Guide, A–Z

The full alphabetical directory.

From the bookshelf

“I aspire to be a scientist who remains open to criticism because I can't possibly be 100% right about everything!”

— Angela Duckworth to NPR, 25 May 2016, responding to the meta-analysis of her own work.

If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.

Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations

Read next

Every book by Angela Duckworth, in order →

Start Typing
Dummy Image

Hi, there.

Home

About

My Bookshelf

Weekly’s

Stay tuned: sign up for the newsletter!