dinal Study has amassed an estimated 18,000 pieces of information on each of the remaining 107 participants. “It’s our life’s work,” says Allen cheerfully. “We’ll take it to our grave.”
The Gottfrieds believe one of the study’s most significant findings centers on motivation. Kids who scored higher on measures of academic intrinsic motivation at a young age—meaning that they enjoyed learning for its own sake—performed better in school, took more challenging courses, and earned more advanced degrees than their peers. They were more likely to be leaders and more self-confident about schoolwork. Teachers saw them as learning more and working harder. As young adults, they continued to seek out challenges and leadership opportunities. If there’s a secret sauce to winning at life, the motivational kids seemed to have found it.
About 19% of the babies selected at random for the Fullerton study later scored 130 or higher on an IQ Test —a widely accepted standard for intellectual giftedness. But, with a few exceptions, the Gottfrieds’ “motivationally gifted” cohort didn’t overlap with the intellectually gifted ones. In other words, these highly motivated kids excelled even when controlling for differences in intelligence or ability.
“[Motivation] in itself is accounting for a certain amount of variance in achievement that goes above and beyond IQ,” Adele explains. As the Gottfrieds watched the highly motivated kids thrive and grow, they started to look for clues about how they got that way.
The massive volume of information in the Fullerton study offered an unusual window into the home lives of the study kids. Along with colleagues, the Gottfrieds undertook the laborious task of parsing their voluminous data to tease out “pathways”—environmental influences that did or didn’t nudge kids toward intrinsic motivation when it came to learning.
The results validated some bits of conventional wisdom and deflated others. Parents who read to their kids helped them develop a love of reading, which indirectly led to higher reading achievement. But the number of books in the house had no effect on that achievement. Eight-year-old kids who were encouraged to be curious tended to like science and take more challenging science courses in high school.
Overall, parents who encouraged inquisitiveness, independence, and effort, and who valued learning for its own sake, had kids with higher levels of intrinsic motivation and achievement. Further, the effects of these practices lingered as the kids grew older. “So what you are doing at age nine not only has an immediate impact but also a follow-up impact over time,” Adele notes.
The findings echo those of other experts. In study after study, external rewards like money or status tend to lower people’s enjoyment of an activity, even if they previously liked doing it. So in order to set kids up for genuine success in life, they need to be intrinsically motivated—that is, to see learning and taking on new challenges as its own reward. “Teaching the desire to learn,” the Gottfrieds wrote in 2008, “may be as important as teaching academic skills.”
“Why are we hung up on IQ tests?”
The idea that success depends on qualities other than intelligence has gone mainstream in recent years. Psychologist Angela Duckworth popularized the concept of grit—sticking to a goal despite obstacles—along with research about its predictive qualities for success. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has spent years documenting the impact of a “growth mindset,” wherein people value hard work and dedication over innate ability. Still, these concepts are in many ways pushing against history. “The whole century of research, when you see giftedness, it’s intelligence. And we said, you know, giftedness can come in many forms,” Allen says with impatience. “Why are we hung up on IQ tests?”
The blame rests, at least partially, on Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman, who developed the test used for measuring intelligence known as the Stanford-Binet. In 1922, he and his researchers plucked children out of California schools based on teacher