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I'm not an expert in psychology (just a mental health care consumer trying to navigate the ridiculous minefield of snake oil), but I think it's long past time to retire "grit" as a construct. Like way too many things in psychology, it originated as the hobby-horse-cum-personal-brand of an individual luminary who started giving TED Talks and writing pop science books about how important it is. It's not clear that it has any predictive power that the Big Five personality dimensions didn't already have, and it's even less clear that we know how to increase it.

▲ karmakaze a day ago | parent [-]

I'm no expert nor practitioner, but at least 'grit' has some meaning I can relate to. Each of the Big Five don't mean anything specific to me:

  - Openness to Experience (curiosity, creativity, willingness to try new things)
  - Conscientiousness (organization, dependability, discipline)
  - Extraversion (sociability, energy, positive emotions)
  - Agreeableness (compassion, cooperation, trust)
  - Neuroticism (emotional stability, anxiety, moodiness)

Even the parenthesized clarifications don't seem specifically related. It's like a grouping of characteristics for further detailed investigations.

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0xcde4c3db a day ago | parent [-]

> It's like a grouping of characteristics for further detailed investigations.

That's basically what it is, because the dimensions were found through statistical analysis of personality surveys. They lack conceptual neatness because they weren't constructed in "concept space", unlike a lot of models in psychology. The thing is, this model has generally held up pretty well to a wide variety of empirical tests (also unlike a lot of models in psychology). I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's the leading model of personality for a reason.

	▲	karmakaze 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This could be a good application of machine learning to do more fine-grained clustering. The clusters won't have names but we could at least see where our coarse-grained ones were over-generalized. It's like what's happening with autism-spectrum that has gotten so broad to be less useful.