How Not to Explain Success

The New York Times:

DO you remember the controversy two years ago, when the 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.

Read the whole story: The New York Times