Angela Duckworth

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
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Nursing
• Family medicine
• Virology
• Artificial Intelligence

Selected publications

• A megastudy of text-based nudges encouraging patients to get vaccinated at an upcoming doctor’s appointment

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 348 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  = 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via text message and designed to boost adoption of the influenza vaccine. Our findings suggest that text messages sent prior to a primary care visit can boost vaccination rates by an average of 5%. Overall, interventions performed better when they were 1) framed as reminders to get flu shots that were already reserved for the patient and 2) congruent with the sort of communications patients expected to receive from their healthcare provider (i.e.…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Teacher Mindsets Help Explain Where a Growth-Mindset Intervention Does and Doesn’t Work

  Psychological Science · 2021 · 330 citations

  hypothesis)? The present analysis (9,167 student records matched with 223 math teachers) supported the latter hypothesis. This result stood up to potentially confounding teacher factors and to a conservative Bayesian analysis. Thus, sustaining growth-mindset effects may require contextual supports that allow the proffered beliefs to take root and flourish.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science

  Nature · 2021 · 254 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A 680,000-person megastudy of nudges to encourage vaccination in pharmacies

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 191 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Encouraging vaccination is a pressing policy problem. To assess whether text-based reminders can encourage pharmacy vaccination and what kinds of messages work best, we conducted a megastudy. We randomly assigned 689,693 Walmart pharmacy patients to receive one of 22 different text reminders using a variety of different behavioral science principles to nudge flu vaccination or to a business-as-usual control condition that received no messages. We found that the reminder texts that we tested incr…

  PublisherDOI

• The Future of Women in Psychological Science

  Perspectives on Psychological Science · 2020 · 137 citations

  There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field's investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we consider 10 topics relevant for women's career advancement in psychological science. We focus on issues that have been the subject of empirical study,…

  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

Similar researchers at University of Pennsylvania

• Lyle Ungarh-87
• Christian Terwieschh-51
• Lorin M. Hitth-49