How Your Situation Shapes You (with Angela Duckworth)

Welcome and introductions

0:00Welcome to EconTalk, conversations for the curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.

0:36Today is October 5th, 2026, and my guest is author and psychologist, Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania. This is her third appearance on the program. She was last year in March of 2022. Her latest book is Situated, Find the People and Places that Bring Out Your Best, which is our topic for today. Angela, welcome back to EconTalk. Russ, it's good to be with you again.

The main idea of Situated

1:02What's the main idea of Situated?

1:05The main idea of Situated is that the power of the situation, the forces that are exerted on you as an individual agent are more pervasive than you think, and that therefore you should be intentional about the situations in life that you put yourself in. It's an old idea, Russ, from social psychology that the situation shapes you, and maybe a slightly new idea, or at least my take on it,

1:39that you can, before the situation shapes you, shape the situation.

1:46You know, this, to me, I add this to my list of, I think that's true, by the way. I think the situation does shape us. You're going to agree with me? Of course. Right off the bat? Yeah, right off the bat. In fact, I'm going to do more than that. I'm going to talk about how uneasy my agreement makes me, which is, you know, when I think about classical economic methodology, which is we have preferences, and we have constraints, and we face prices, and we make our choices to, quote, maximize our utility, meaning to be as satisfied as possible.

2:20It can include many things that are not traditionally the sources of pleasure, but they can be sources of meaning. It can include charity. But inherent in the economist's perspective on the world is an idea that we're in control.

2:38Right. The very word agent, by the way, right? Yeah. Like, you're an economic agent, so, you know, agent to act. And you have agency. You have the ability to take action in the world and do so according to what you see as best for yourself. And more than the view that this is important for economics, it's also, of course, important for political philosophy. It's a justification for freedom. And yet, over the years as the host of this program, I've come to listen to a number of ideas

3:09that challenge that. To pick one, one would be mimesis. You know, you think you're doing what you want or what's in your own best sense. You're just imitating the people around you. And your book gets at that, as did a recent episode with Megan O'Giblin, that this whole willpower thing, which is the essence, in a way, of the economic way of thinking, doesn't maybe exist. At least not the way we think of it. So, indict, I'm going to challenge you now,

3:40indict your earlier work, which you do in this book to some extent, your work on grid. Explain what your worldview was then. Explain how it's evolved into this book. And then use that to talk about what's wrong with me, the economist.

3:57And then bring it to the most important question, which is what's wrong with Russ Roberts?

From studying grit to situational psychology

4:01Exactly. Well, let's do this storytelling style. I started out my career as a psychologist a little later than some. I went to graduate school at 32, not 22. I had observed as a classroom teacher, mostly as a high school math teacher, that people differed considerably in their motivation. And it struck me that what people accomplish in life is very much a product of the quality and quantity

4:32of time on task. I think that was an intuition that only sharpened in the first half of my career. And I continue to believe that the quality and quantity of time on task is what gets you up any learning curve for anything. You know, you want to like play tennis better, you want to be better at chess, you want to be a better public speaker, a better parent, a better citizen. You know, it's a learning curve. How much time are you going to spend and what's the quality

5:03of that time? And that, of course, led me to study grit. I say, of course, maybe not of course, but for me, the distinction between the quality and quantity of time on task and whether you were a natural, you know, like whether the rate of change was just like for you a really steep learning curve because I'm talented at chess, I'm talented at public speaking. To me, that distinction was very important personally because I don't think, Russ, I've actually ever been like the fastest learner

5:34in any room. I mean, going back to the small rooms of elementary school homerooms and so forth. But I've always identified as somebody who, you know, was a striver. I guess the kids say a tryhard. I think that's the vernacular for Gen Z, maybe with negative connotations, but I always pridefully considered myself a tryhard. So for the first half of my career, I looked at high achievers, I did longitudinal research at West Point in the spelling bee, and I confirmed, I think, a pretty common sense

6:05intuition, which is that the people who are willing to sustain high quality, high quantity effort are not always the most talented by any measure. They don't always have the highest SAT scores, certainly don't always have the highest IQ scores. We're talking about West Point. They don't have the best scores on physical ability, a sort of like physical talent test that they administer as part of the admissions process. So sticking with things and working really hard

6:35in a consistent way is what occupied me as a researcher for the first half of my career. It was important to me to try and understand where it came from. So topics that I know you're interested in, like, you know, whether you have a growth mindset, you know, the belief that abilities can change, well, that determines how likely you are to be gritty, etc. The habit of doing the kind of practice that real experts do,

7:06it's goal-directed, there's feedback. I mean, those things, I think, are of enduring fascination. But the reason why I, I guess you could call it a pivot, I feel like there's this, like, too easy narrative, you know, frequently used in TED Talks about, like, I used to think X and now I think Y and here's my story. I don't think it's quite that. I think it's more of a widening of the aperture. I mean, the reason why my interest is expanded to try to understand

7:36what's around a person is because it's not only your individual psychological agency, it's not only what's going on inside your mind that determines your behavior and your outcomes, but also the people that you are standing next to, happen to be standing next to, chose to stand next to. It's the culture of your zip code. I mean, Russ, I'm in Las Vegas and let me tell you, Las Vegas is a different culture. Like, the things that people do here

8:07are different than 19103, my home zip code, right? Certainly different from where you are, right, in Jerusalem. So, these things matter and even, just to take the most trivial, but I think the most accessible example, like, what is within my reach and my view? The inanimate objects, right? These like inanimate objects that are within my reach and my view are going to exert their own gravitational pull on my attention, on my thoughts,

8:39my behavior, and therefore my life outcomes. And so, it's an expansion. I know that sounds like a politician saying like, I don't know, something that they got media training for, but it's not a contradiction. I mean, I didn't write the word willpower into grit, the book. I searched for it and I didn't. I want to have a conversation, a nuanced conversation about what has changed about the science of willpower, which I know you're very curious

9:09about that I've worked in. But I also want to say that people who stay on a learning curve, who exemplify passion and perseverance, are not paragons of willpower. So, it's a nuance that I think is hard to communicate in a soundbite, but very important. Well, I think they're somewhat related. They're both related to forms of self-control, but it could be it's just part of one's nature or one's nature

9:40plus nurture and you're gifted with grit. Sorry to interrupt, but I think everything about us is nature and nurture. I know the mind loves category, but I also don't think that's what I mean by grit versus willpower. It's really about the source of motivation. So, willpower, which we all use every day, I mean, you don't feel like flossing your teeth, you get yourself to floss your teeth, you don't feel like getting up when the alarm

10:10clock goes off, you get up anyway, you feel like telling the guy who just ran the red light what you think, you use a little willpower not to say that because you don't want to get shot. Those are the daily hourly acts of willpower that a human being is able to do because we have a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We have a part of the brain which is able to suppress or elevate impulses at will. And it's a thing, and some people have more, some people have less, it's partially genetic, it's partially environmental.

10:41But it's not the same thing as willpower. If you are Katie Ledecky or Michael Phelps getting into the pool at five in the morning, staring at a black line and swimming at the edge of your aerobic and anaerobic capacity, it is not because you are forcing yourself using your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex the whole time. Yes, there is some amount of your body is screaming and you don't want to do it, but the deep motivation, I think, of people who become great at what they do is intrinsic. They have

11:12to be interested in what they're doing and it has to feel important to them in terms of their values and feeling interested in something and feeling like it is an expression of your values is a different motivation than I ought to do this, I should do this, I need to do this. you know, they're both obviously goal directed, but I don't think you become a Katie Ledecky or a Michael Phelps or a great anything if you're

11:42going to have to will yourself like white knuckled through those thousands of hours of practice. So I totally agree with that. I guess I'm trying to say something that they have in common that I see in your book, which is, it's not easy to say, I don't like what's happening now, so I will just fill in the blank, say try harder. I will be grittier, I will have more self-control,

12:13and I think that I will exert my willpower more often. This, what I took from the first part of your book is that that is tempting, but ultimately quite frustrating. And I thought maybe That I agree with. That I agree with. I just want to say that the hallmark of a great performer is just that they have an excess of this capacity. That's all. And it's hard for those who don't to acquire it, is what I would also say.

12:45Oh, that willpower is very difficult to acquire if you don't happen to have prodigious amounts of iron will, for example. Yeah, well, that's largely true, right? People are not very good at going to the gym for their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. There's probably a little bit of plasticity there, but no neuroscientist or psychologist would recommend it anyway. But we can, you know, obviously you can improve your habits, you can build habits, but what I want to talk about, which I think is more

13:16helpful, is your three-box metaphor for, and use the Thanksgiving example that you give, the Thanksgiving dinner perhaps, or exercise as a way to help listeners realign how they think about getting better at something.

The three boxes framework

13:38There's a framework, I've simplified it into three boxes with two arrows. I want to give credit where credit is due, Russ. I met a psychologist named James Gross, as you know, since you read about James. Yeah, it was very important to me that as soon as possible I tell the world that I am not the author of a framework that I think is so simple, so beautiful, and so encapsulating of pretty much

14:09anything you would want to understand about human behavior and emotion. That psychologist James Gross at Stanford came into my life in November 2008, 2011, we were at a conference at Yale, and the topic of the conference was human behavior change, and at the top of the agenda it said, how do we change, and James was the very first speaker, and when he got up, he, in his short amount of time, said, look, I've been studying emotion my whole life, say you're at Thanksgiving dinner, and you're having

14:39the emotion of anger toward a brother-in-law who clearly does not see the current political situation emotion the way you do. Your teeth are on edge, you feel you're getting a little hot under the collar, literally, you're having difficulty enjoying this once-a-year tradition, so you've got emotion, right? And James, as a pioneer in emotion regulation, asked the question, well, what do you do? As you point out, Russ, maybe the first thing that comes to mind is don't be angry,

15:11calm down, right? Like, you know, like, don't lose it. And that is an act of willpower, right? You can actually force yourself to calm down, you know, it doesn't work very well, but it's not completely ineffectual. But James says, look, let's consider that the last possible thing you can do. What happens before you feel that emotion? Well, one box earlier, if you're looking at a PowerPoint slide, one box earlier, there are your thoughts, right? If you think, like, what an idiot, right?

15:42Like, you know, like, does he have any empathy, right? Then that's going to make you feel angry. If you have other thoughts, like, oh, you know, I wonder what my brother, you know, experienced this year that would make him think this way. Or you could have completely benign thoughts, like, God, you know, pecan pie is amazing, right? Like, whatever thoughts you have, they will shape that emotional response. And then one box earlier, so this gets to box one out of

16:12three, is the objective situation. Like, are you sitting next to your brother-in-law? It's like, are you, you know, in the kitchen with your, you know, with your aunt, like, washing dishes? Are you, you know, are you in a situation that gives you the thoughts that give you the emotional behavioral response that you want? So box one is your objective circumstances, your objective situation. Box two is your mental, you know,

16:43reality, right? The thoughts that go, those are subjective. And then finally, there's your emotion and your action. And the reason why I find this to be like the E equals MC squared of human behavior, this sort of like, oh, it's all there, is that you can understand why it is that just trying to calm yourself down at box three, like, don't feel that way, is so ineffectual. Like, why not, you know, go upstream? Like, why not think about your brother-in-law a different way?

17:13And why not put yourself in some situation where you will have the thoughts that you want to have? And by the way, if it's Thanksgiving, you know, it might be that you do want to think about the pecan pie and not your brother-in-law at all. And therefore, you should probably, like, sit by the desserts and not where he is or, you know, volunteer to wash the dishes. So James was presenting this at this meeting at Yale as a way of trying to understand the many tactics that people use to regulate their emotion. And I'm sitting in that

17:44darkened auditorium thinking about achievement, which is my specialty, right? The psychology of achievement, of succeeding in approaching your goals. And I'm thinking, he's also just given me the blueprint for that. Because when people say, I want higher quality and quantity effort, like, I want to practice the way Michael Phelps or Katie Ledecky practices, they very often tell themselves, you know, I'm going to do it. I'm going to will myself to do it, right? I'm going to use willpower to do it.

18:14What they're missing is that the thoughts that lead a Katie Ledecky and a Michael Phelps to practice, and here I'd love to get into what those thoughts are, because I don't think they are thoughts that sound like, oh, just forcing myself. And then finally, they navigate in very deliberate ways into social and physical situations that give them those thoughts. So that's the three boxes framework. I think it is deceptively simple. It's like, oh, how could it not be?

18:45But if you understand that, you can understand the psychology of habit. You can understand cognitive therapy. You can understand Skinner. And yeah, I think you can understand economic theory and these notions of preferences and constraints in a way that is much richer than is sometimes appreciated. And we've talked on the program about alternative ways of self-control, meditation, and self-awareness. That's box two. And self-awareness. Right, box two, right? Self-awareness.

19:16For me, it's also in box three, because when I'm in that mood and I'm on the edge of doing something I know I don't want to do, I might, in certain times in my life, take a deep breath, pause, before I jump and yell back, calm down, put on, as some people tease me, put on my EconTalk host hat. And people see me outside of this program, they say, you are so animated and passionate. I say, well, yeah, that's because I'm not wearing my

19:46EconTalk hat. My EconTalk hat, I try to be calm. I try to not get worked up. I try to be respectful of the guest. I try to say about my brother-in-law, well, maybe he's right. That's another variation. Let me take his perspective. That's box two. But having said all that, what I love about, what I think is the incredibly important insight of this so-called simple framework is, and you point this out, not my interpretation of your

20:17book, most people don't think about that first box. They are only thinking about what's happening inside their head and inside themselves, and they're either berating themselves, fight a war with themselves, and you're saying, you know, sometimes you just change your seat, and that's a metaphor. It's not literally, it doesn't just apply to Thanksgiving dinner. It's a profoundly important insight that I think you are correct, that most people, it doesn't cross their mind.

20:48It's just, and it's, it's the David Foster Wallace example that you give. You're in the water, you're a fish. The fact that the water you are in is too hot or too cold or whatever it is, doesn't, you don't think about it. Flowing in the direction you want to go, not flowing in the direction you want to go. Exactly. Better way to say it, you're just in the water, and the idea that you might go to a different stream with different kinds of fish is not a common thought.

Why our situations are invisible

21:12So, why do you think it is, Russ, that the situations we're in are so invisible to us? You know, obviously, I've been thinking about this for, well, depending on your count, like 10 years, five years. I mean, I took five years to write this book, in part because I think a book about the situation is much harder to apprehend, certainly to write, than a book about, like, what's inside your head, your mindset, and so forth.

21:43Why, if you just had to armchair speculate here, is it that we don't think about the waterways women? Well, this is also an underlying theme in your book.

21:57I think we have a lot of fear of change. So, when we look at our situation, and the possibility that it might be the problem, is so appalling. Because if it is the problem, I have to move. I have to quit my job. I have to move to a different city. I have to find a different circle of friends. Here's a trivial example without any baggage. My desk, which you can't see over here, is, maybe you can't see it, I can't tell, but it's a mess, usually. It's usually a horrible

22:27mess. And if someone said to me, which they sometimes do, you know, you ought to clean that up. You'll be more productive. Productive. I laugh. Clear-minded. I laugh. I don't need my environment. That's childish. Don't tell me about feng shui and the harmony of the colors. That's nonsense. I can read a book, have a deep thought, write a great essay on a bus, you know, that's moving through a bad neighborhood. So, I think that's not

22:58true, right? And yet, I want it to be true. Because if it is true, I've got to clean my desk, and I might have to move, and I might have to have different colleagues, right? In fact, here's another example. You're a great collaborator. Most of my career, I didn't collaborate at all, and it's a form of armor. It's a form of protection, right? Oh, maybe you should have different people. How so? Well, because maybe, you know, maybe you'd be more productive, you'd have deeper thoughts, if you talk intently with someone as smart or smarter about

23:30your ideas. And it's like, are you kidding me? Do you think I need the pitiful, you know, it's like you talk about in the book sometimes about our inherent unease with taking drugs sometimes to improve our situation, whether it's depression or other problems we're facing. I am the master of my fate. Don't tell me I need to... The captain of my fate, the master of my soul. Yeah. Yeah. I am the captain of my... Don't tell me that the ocean waves are like, you

24:01know, take me where I set sail for the port that I want. You know, Russ, I think there are probably various reasons for why we are oblivious to the situation. I think where you began, I think, is some form of status quo bias, right? Like that, like I, you know, as they say, you know, I yearn for change, but I cling to the familiar, maybe because change is almost always costly in the short run, right? Like moving sucks, right? Like, you know, I'm not sure. I think it might be

24:32apocryphal that like in the list of stressors, you know, moving is at the top. I can actually think of a lot of... Yeah. I'm not sure that's true. Those are people who haven't done much other than move, I sometimes think. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, ah, it depends on what's on your list. Clearly there are things that happen in life that are more stressful than moving, but it's incredibly stressful and it's probably like stressful in ways that are just like surprising. Like, you know, not knowing where to like mail a letter or to like, you know, pick up a quart of milk is probably like, it's just like the friction is, it seems

25:04trivial, but okay. But it is changing your job. Also there's uncertainty with all this, right? You know, you're making a bet. It may or may not pay off even if the probability suggests that the expected value is higher. I think there are other people though for whom the resistance to thinking about their situation comes from another place. Like the idea that you mentioned, which is like, I don't want to be the sort of person who, you know, needs the perfect situation for them to concentrate, to be

25:35productive, to like eat a healthy diet, to, you know, control their temper. Like you would like to be the sort of person who in fact doesn't depend, doesn't like float on the waves like a cork. Um, uh, so, so there is a kind of self-concept, like a kind of like, I don't want to be that kind of person. And my research, um, I find that that is, uh, actually the most common reason why people don't do the trivial things like, well, Russ, you

26:05have a desk, um, that might be in need of cleaning up. I have for a long time continued to put my phone near my laptop computer when I have to do something really hard, like, you know, work on a New York Times op-ed or, uh, or, or this book manuscript. And I know given my own research findings that the temptation of a phone that is like at hand is very different from the temptation of a phone that is across the

26:36room or in another room altogether. And yet I persist. And why is that?