research has been extended or exaggerated beyond its evidence.
The fact that cadets are selected based on their Whole Candidate Score leads to what statisticians call a “restriction of range.” That is, because cadets were selected precisely for their Whole Candidate Score, a group of people who are very alike on Whole Candidate Score measures were siphoned from the rest of humanity. When that happens, other variables that were not part of the selection process can suddenly look much more important in comparison. To use a sports analogy, it would be like conducting a study of success in basketball that included only NBA players as subjects; the study might show that height is not an important predictor of success, but determination is. Of course, the NBA had already selected tall men from the wider population, so the range of height in the study was restricted. Thus height appears not to matter as much as it truly does.* Similarly, the relative predictiveness of grit and other traits in West Point cadets and spelling bee competitors may not look quite the same in less restricted populations. If a truly random sample of high school graduates was assessed for Whole Candidate Scores, not just those who were accepted to West Point, physical fitness, grades, and leadership experiences may well predict their Beast persistence, and perhaps more so than grit. Duckworth and her coauthors, to their credit, point out that by studying highly preselected groups, “we have necessarily limited the external validity of our investigation.”
The vast majority of plebes complete Beast, no matter their grit scores. In the first year Duckworth studied them, 71 out of 1,218 dropped out. In 2016, 32 of 1,308 plebes dropped out. The deeper question is whether dropping out might actually be a good decision. Alums told me that cadets drop out for varied reasons, during Beast and beyond it. “I think for the kids that are more cerebral and less physical, the short length makes it easy to just fight through to get to the academic year. For the more physical kids, Beast will be one of the best experiences they have,” Ashley Nicolas, an ’09 alum who worked as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan, told me. Some of those cadets make it through Beast only to realize that the academy was not the right place for their abilities or interests. “I remember a lot more leaving during first semester when they realized they could not hang academically. The ones who left earlier were either very homesick or just realized they were not a good fit. Most of the latter seemed to be kids who were pressured into coming to West Point without any real desire themselves.” In other words, of the small number of cadets who left during Beast, rather than a failing of persistence, some of them were simply responding to match quality information—they weren’t a good fit.
Similarly, some people might start memorizing root words for the National Spelling Bee and then realize it is not how they want to spend their learning time. That could be a problem of grit, or it could be a decision made in response to match quality information that could not have been gleaned without giving it a try.
Carnegie Mellon economics and statistics professor Robert A. Miller modeled career matching—and a decision to attend a military academy is a major career choice—as a “multi-armed bandit process.” “One-armed bandit” is slang for a slot machine. A multi-armed bandit process refers to a hypothetical scenario: a single gambler is sitting in front of an entire row of slot machines; each machine has its own unique probability of reward with each pull; the gambler’s challenge is to test the different machines and try to figure out the best way to allocate their lever pulls to maximize rewards. Miller showed that the process for match quality is the same. An individual starts with no knowledge, tests various possible paths in a manner that provides information as quickly as possible, and increasingly refines decisions about where to allocate energy. The expression “young and foolish,” he wrote, describes the tendency of young adults to gravitate to risky jobs, but it is not foolish at all. It is ideal. They have less experience than older workers, and so the first avenues they should try are those with high risk and reward, and that have high informational value. Attempting to be a professional athlete or actor or to found a lucrative start-up is unlikely to succeed, but the potential