Researchers: Tiger mom's wrong about her theory that character/culture determine success

[pnwmom]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/opinion/sunday/how-not-to-explain-success.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

The theory:

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.

What the research showed:

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.

Professors 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.”

[wildeyed]

1. I hated both those books.

The arrogance of the authors was breath taking, and they were clearly not based on any type of real research.

[Bonobo]

2. I totally agree.

It really was breathtaking that she attributed that success to attitude as if having two Ivy League parents and all the things money could buy were not the actual relevant factors.

[wildeyed]

3. They were just trying to justify

being total a-holes, as best I could tell. They do not reflect well on Yale, either.

[Bonobo]

4. And as parents, I give them a "D".

Their cruelty to their child will come back and bite them in the ass.

[Recursion]

5. Laotian and Hmong immigrants have the highest high school dropout rates in the US

higher than Native Americans even. And unfortunately the "model minority" stereotype that most Asian immigrants benefit from hinders most attempts to get more resources to those kids ("they're Asian; what would they need help with?&quot