About

Angela Duckworth is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor in the Operations, Information and Decisions Department at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Her research interests include motivation, personality, and the psychology of effort. She is a faculty co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative and Wharton People Analytics. A 2013 MacArthur Fellow, Duckworth has advised organizations such as the World Bank, NBA, NFL teams, and Fortune 500 CEOs on capabilities beyond innate ability that influence achievement. Her academic background includes an undergraduate degree in Advanced Studies Neurobiology from Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude, and an MSc in Neuroscience from Oxford University with Distinction, supported by a Marshall Scholarship. She completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania as a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow. Duckworth is renowned for her book "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance," a #1 New York Times bestseller, and her TED talk, which is among the most-viewed of all time. She also co-hosts the podcast "No Stupid Questions" with Stephen Dubner. Prior to her research career, she founded a summer school for underserved children, which was profiled as a Harvard Kennedy School case study, and has experience as a McKinsey management consultant and a public school math and science teacher.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Medicine
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Nursing
• Virology
• Pedagogy
• Artificial Intelligence
• Family medicine
• Advertising
• Applied psychology
• Epistemology
• Medical emergency
• Engineering
• Environmental health
• Internet privacy
• Business
• Medical education
• Mathematics education
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• The Creative Link Between Words and Ideas is Weakening in the AI Era

  2026-02-05

  articleOpen access

  Concerns that AI homogenizes human thinking appear at odds with findings that LLM writing is perceived as more creative than human writing. We propose that LLMs enhance superficial semantic diversity while simultaneously homogenizing underlying ideas. Four large-scale natural experiments tested this preregistered “disjunctive homogenization” hypothesis in 372,793 personal statements written in high-stakes college admissions contexts. Comparing before-versus-after ChatGPT’s release revealed increasing word-level diversity simultaneous with decreasing conceptual diversity at sentence and whole-document levels. Controlled experiments provided causal evidence of AI’s influence and identified a plausible mechanism: a positive association of word-to-idea diversity in humans was reversed in GPT. Despite conceptual homogenization, raters perceived post-ChatGPT essays as more creative due to increased word-level diversity, even when considering multiple essays. Disjunctive trends were strongest among minoritized applicants.

  PublisherDOI

• William James and Literary Studies

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2026-02-19

  book

  Why does William James matter for literary studies? And what can the practice of literary criticism bring to our reading of James? While James is widely credited as a founding figure for the fields of psychology, philosophy, religious studies, and progressive education, his equal significance for the field of literary criticism has been comparatively neglected. By modelling a variety of literary critical approaches to reading James and investigating James's equally various approaches to literature, this book demonstrates how his work historically informs and prospectively transforms the way we think about the bedrock premises of literary study – namely, style, influence, and method. The volume's diverse contributions unfold and elaborate these three facets of James's literary critical paradigm as they manifest in the rousing character of his sentences, in the impactful disseminations of his formative relationships, and in his uniquely programmatic responsiveness to the urgent issues of his time.

  PublisherDOI

• Keeping It Together: Hourly Dynamics of Children’s Behavioral Regulation at School in a Decades-Long Cohort Study

  2025-03-28

  preprintOpen access

  Though theoretical accounts describe self-regulation as dynamic, empirical studies typically rely on static measures that fail to capture changes in self-regulation from day to day or moment to moment. As a result, little is known about how or why children’s self-regulation may vary within-person, despite clear relevance for educators. In this paper, we capitalized on repeated observations from wearable devices to test the idea that daily increases in activity (DIA) across the school day could reflect a school-age child’s inability to regulate their physical activity to be appropriate to the school setting. In a national sample followed from birth to age 26 (N = 747; 49% female, 76% White, 13% Black, 6% Hispanic, 5% Other), children showing greater DIA in third grade, objectively measured using actigraphy at school and charted across hourly intervals, were rated as more impulsive and disruptive by teachers and classroom observers, had lower academic achievement in high school (β = -0.11), and completed fewer years of education as adults (β = -0.05). These findings reveal a temporal dimension to children’s behavioral regulation at school. Findings suggest that children’s behavioral regulation, proxied by the ability to inhibit motor activity, deteriorates across the school day and that children who can sustain behavioral regulation for longer go on to greater educational success long-term. Findings also reveal temporal patterns of behavior in third grade that motivate future investigations into daily experiences that could restore children’s behavioral regulation.

  PublisherDOI

• Does Q&A Boost Engagement? Health Messaging Experiments in the U.S. and Ghana

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Open-mindedness predicts racial, political, and socioeconomic diversity of real-world friendship networks

  Group Processes & Intergroup Relations · 2025-04-03 · 3 citations

  article

  Even in environments offering ample opportunities to interact with people from diverse backgrounds, people differ in their tendency to form intergroup friendships. Whereas some develop intergroup friendships, others prefer befriending ingroup members, contributing to prejudice and polarization. We identify open-mindedness—an inclination to engage with and understand different perspectives—as an individual difference predicting the racial, political, and socioeconomic diversity of real-world friendship networks. In a longitudinal study of 1,423 eighth–ninth graders, more open-minded adolescents developed more racially diverse friendship networks over 2 years. Two additional studies (total N = 1,585 adults) replicated and extended this finding: Open-mindedness predicted greater racial, political, and socioeconomic diversity of friends, and was more consistently associated with friendship diversity than Big Five openness to experience. The associations between open-mindedness and friendship diversity were partly explained by open-minded individuals’ lower avoidance of interaction with outgroup members. Building open-mindedness may be one individual-level approach to promote friendships across divides.

  PublisherDOI

• Does Q&A Boost Engagement? Health Messaging Experiments in the U.S. and Ghana

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Call Me A Jerk: Persuading AI to Comply with Objectionable Requests

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 4 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Does Q&A Boost Engagement? Health Messaging Experiments in the United States and Ghana

  Management Science · 2025-08-28

  articleOpen access

  Effective information sharing is critical for the success of organizations and governments. Because information that is easy to access is more likely to be adopted, leaders often minimize friction in information delivery. However, one type of friction may increase engagement: piquing curiosity by posing relevant questions prior to sharing information. To test this, we shared identical information about COVID-19 in either question-and-answer format or via direct statements across two preregistered field experiments in Ghana and Michigan (total n = 49,395). Q&A-style communication increased information seeking about directly related topics (e.g., how to wear a mask properly) by 1.0 percentage point (216%) in Ghana and by 1.1 percentage points (19%) in Michigan (p’s < 0.001) and increased self-reported behavior change by 1.3 percentage points (4%) in Michigan (p = 0.002). However, sharing information in Q&A format did not increase interest in general COVID-19 information in either setting, suggesting that the impact of Q&A-style messaging on information seeking may be issue specific. In Michigan, both Q&A-style and direct statement messaging produced less information seeking than sending no informational messages, likely because of differential attrition: the more texts participants received, the more likely they were to opt out of receiving messages, which made it impossible for them to seek more information via text. In a follow-up implementation experiment with social media ads (a messaging strategy without attrition challenges), Q&A-style ads generated 9%–11% more unique clicks to the CDC website per dollar spent than ads that directly stated information about vaccines (p < 0.001). We speculate that Q&A-style information delivery may stimulate curiosity, driving its benefits. This paper was accepted by Marie Claire Villeval, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: The authors thank the National Science Foundation [RAPID Grant 2033321], the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Northwestern University’s Global Poverty Research Lab, Stanford University’s Golub Capital Social Impact Lab, Harvard Business School, the University of Pennsylvania, the AKO Foundation, John Alexander, Mark J. Leder, and Warren G. Lichtenstein for funding support. This work was also supported by Grand Challenges in Global Health. Supplemental Material: The supplementary materials and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.04405 .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A national megastudy shows that email nudges to elementary school teachers boost student math achievement, particularly when personalized

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-03-24 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In response to the alarming recent decline in US math achievement, we conducted a national megastudy in which 140,461 elementary school teachers who collectively taught 2,992,027 students were randomly assigned to receive a variety of behaviorally informed email nudges aimed at improving students' progress in math. Specifically, we partnered with the nonprofit educational platform Zearn Math to compare the impact of 15 different interventions with a reminder-only megastudy control condition. All 16 conditions entailed weekly emails delivered to teachers over 4-wk in the fall of 2021. The best-performing intervention, which encouraged teachers to log into Zearn Math for an updated report on how their students were doing that week, produced a 5.06% increase in students' math progress (3.30% after accounting for the winner's curse). In exploratory analyses, teachers who received any behaviorally informed email nudge (vs. a reminder-only megastudy control) saw their students' math progress boosted by an average of 1.89% during the 4-wk intervention period; emails referencing personalized data (i.e., classroom-specific statistics) outperformed emails that did not by 2.26%. While small in size, these intervention effects were consistent across school socioeconomic status and school type (public, private, etc.) and, further, persisted in the 8-wk post-intervention period. Collectively, these findings underscore both how difficult it is to change behavior and the need for large-scale, rigorous, empirical research of the sort undertaken in this megastudy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Coach not crutch: Evidence that AI can improve writing skill despite reducing effort

  ArXiv.org · 2025-02-05 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  In a series of highly-powered empirical studies, we examine the intuition that by sparing effort, using AI inevitably hinders learning. First, in a nationally representative survey of young adults, the majority expressed the view that using AI makes people lazier and less capable. Next, in a random-assignment experiment, we gave participants a tutorial on best practices in professional writing, then provided one group with access to an AI writing tool and asked another to practice writing on their own. Those who practiced with AI indeed exerted less effort while practicing -- yet wrote better cover letters in no-AI writing tests. In a second experiment with more rigorous control conditions, access to AI improved writing more than either googling cover letter examples and tips or receiving personalized feedback on their practice letters from experienced human editors. A third experiment explained these learning gains by showing that AI can teach by example: participants who viewed a cover letter that had been revised by the AI tool but did no further practice improved their writing as much as those who practiced writing with the original AI tool. Collectively, these pre-registered experiments suggest that AI can exert opposing effects on effort and learning rate -- making it possible in at least some cases to work less and learn more.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Research Network on the Determinants of Life Course Capabilities and Outcomes

  NIH · $1.2M · 2014–2023

• NIH Grant K01AG033182

  NIH · $500k · 2014

• NIH Grant K01AG03318202

  NIH · $127k · 2014

Frequent coauthors

• James J. Heckman

  140 shared

• Lex Borghans

  Maastricht University

  129 shared

• Bas ter Weel

  129 shared

• Katherine L. Milkman

  California University of Pennsylvania

  45 shared

• Dena M. Gromet

  University of Pennsylvania

  40 shared

• Eli Tsukayama

  University of Hawaii–West Oahu

  37 shared

• Silvia Saccardo

  Carnegie Mellon University

  33 shared

• Megan M. McClelland

  31 shared

Labs

• Operations, Information and Decisions DepartmentPI

Education

• PhD, Psychology

  University of Pennsylvania

  2006

Awards & honors

• 2013 MacArthur Fellow