TOW #23: "How Not to Explain Success"

This article was found at nytimes.com.

          There are many ways to define one's success. One individual might believe they are successful for the rest of their life if they win a basketball trophy in the seventh grade, while someone else bases their conclusion on raising a healthy family and avoiding divorce. The author of this article was looking at another book that said success depended on a certain combination of three specific traits: a belief that their group was superior to others, a sense of personal insecurity, and a high degree of impulse control. Christopher Chabris and Joshua Hart then made this their own personal argument and tried to figure out a way to prove it without including all of the anecdotes and stereotypes that were in the original book.
          One way they were able to create some specific evidence and avoid stereotypes was through two online surveys. They surveyed 1,258 adults in the United States where the participants had to complete a variety of standard questionnaires to measure his or her impulsiveness, ethnocentrism, and personal security (all of the components of success). After this, the participants completed a test of their cognitive abilities, so they reported their income, occupation, education, and other achievements that could have defined their success. After the data was analyzed by the authors, it was found that more successful people, based on these standards anyway, had parents that were more educated, made more money, and had higher cognitive ability. Also, it was seen that more successful participants did not possess greater feelings of ethnocentrism or personal insecurity, and actually the opposite was true.
          The authors of this article had an argument that they tried to prove right through an experiment that actually showed the exact opposite of what they were trying to prove true. So, they obviously didn't pick good enough evidence for their topic and actually disproved their argument. This might have been their purpose, to abolish a theory that seemed weird to them, and I believe it to have been achieved. Their evidence didn't help their argument, but it allowed them to show this interesting theory and disprove it. They could've helped their argument by including other types of evidence like more statistics or personal stories that could've further explained what they were trying to say.