How not to explain success
Do you remember the controversy two years ago, when Yale law professors Amy Chua (author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) and Jed Rubenfeld published The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America?
We sure do. As psychologists, we found the book intriguing, because its topic – why some people succeed and others don’t – has long been a basic research question in social science, and its authors were advancing a novel argument. They contended that certain ethnic and religious minority groups (among them, Cubans, Jews and Indians) had achieved disproportionate success in America because their individual members possessed a combination of three specific traits: a belief that their group was inherently superior to others; a sense of personal insecurity; and a high degree of impulse control.
But we also found the book frustrating. Though it contained page after page of stories about successful people and anecdotes (or stereotypes) about different groups’ supposedly success-driving habits and practices (e.g., Chinese parents make their children study hard), it offered no rigorous quantitative evidence to support its theory. This, of course, didn’t stop people from attacking or defending the book. But it meant that the debate consisted largely of arguments based on circumstantial evidence.
Rather than join the fray when the topic was hot but nobody seemed to have anything definitive to say, we took the time to empirically test the triple package hypothesis directly. Our results have just been published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. We found scant evidence for Chua and Rubenfeld’s theory.
We conducted two online surveys of a total of 1,258 adults in the United States. Each participant completed a variety of standard questionnaires to measure his or her impulsiveness, ethnocentrism and personal insecurity. (Chua and Rubenfeld describe insecurity as “a goading anxiety about oneself and one’s place in society.” Since this concept was the most complex and counterintuitive element of their theory, we measured it several different ways, each of which captured a slightly different aspect.)
Next, the participants completed a test of their cognitive abilities. Then they reported their income, occupation, education and other achievements, such as receiving artistic, athletic or leadership awards, all of which we combined to give each person a single score for overall success. Finally, our participants indicated their age, sex and parents’ levels of education.
We analyzed the data several ways, and three findings consistently emerged. First, the more successful participants had higher cognitive ability, more educated parents and better impulse control. People scoring in the top half on our intelligence measure whose parents had college degrees earned more awards, made more money and were more educated than those scoring below average whose parents lacked college degrees.
This finding is exactly what you would expect from accepted social science. Long before “The Triple Package,” researchers determined that the personality trait of conscientiousness, which encompasses the triple package’s impulse control component, was an important predictor of success – but that a person’s intelligence and socioeconomic background were equally or even more important.
Our second finding was that the more successful participants did not possess greater feelings of ethnocentrism or personal insecurity. In fact, for insecurity, the opposite was true: Emotional stability was related to greater success.
Finally, we found no special “synergy” among the triple package traits. According to Chua and Rubenfeld, the three traits have to work together to create success – a sense of group superiority creates drive only in people who also view themselves as not good enough, for example, and drive is useless without impulse control. But in our data, people scoring in the top half on all three traits were no more successful than everyone else.
To be clear, we have no objection to Chua and Rubenfeld’s devising a novel social-psychological theory of success. During the peer-review process before publication, our paper was criticized on the grounds that a theory created by law professors could not have contributed to empirical social science, and that ideas published in a popular book did not merit evaluation in an academic journal.
We disagree. Outsiders can make creative and even revolutionary contributions to a discipline, as the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman did for economics. And professors do not further the advancement of knowledge by remaining aloof from debates where they can apply their expertise. Researchers should engage the public, dispel popular myths and even affirm “common sense” when the evidence warrants.
In this case, our studies affirmed that a person’s intelligence and socioeconomic background were the most powerful factors in explaining his or her success, and that the triple package was not – even when we carefully measured every element of it and considered all of the factors simultaneously.
Chua and Rubenfeld created a provocative theory, and they spun around it an intricate web of circumstantial evidence, but it did not stand up to direct empirical tests. Our conclusion regarding “The Triple Package” is expressed by the saying, “What is new is not correct, and what is correct is not new.”
The controversial ‘ Triple Package’ theory of why some people thrive is finally rigorously debunked
Christopher Chabris, a co-author of ‘The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us,’ and Joshua Hart are associate professors of psychology at Union College.