The research is novel for its approach of using big data to evaluate cultural differences in the real world, said Xingyu Li, a doctoral student at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) and lead author of the study. It also compares a wider range of culturally diverse societies than previous studies examining the link between passion and achievement.
The study’s findings suggest a blind spot among gatekeepers in U.S. education and employment, who frequently rely on “passion” as a major metric to pluck out top applicants, Li said.
That means they risk “passing over and mismanaging talented students and employees who increasingly come from sociocultural contexts where a more interdependent model of motivation is common and effective,” Li and her co-authors write. Those include many low-income European Americans and also first-generation immigrant communities in the United States.
“We need to make our admission and hiring processes fair to people from diverse backgrounds,” Li said.
Different models of motivation
The researchers analyzed three years of results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the only exam widely taken by students across the world. The data – which encompass scores from 1.2 million high school students across 59 countries – also include students’ ratings of their interest, enjoyment and self-efficacy in science, reading and math, which the researchers used to gauge the students’ level of passion.
Those who felt passionately about math, science or reading were more likely to post better scores in each subject – but much more so in cultures with an “individualistic” orientation such as the United States and Australia, than in collectivist societies such as China, Thailand and Colombia, where the students felt that having family support for their interest was just as important.