The politics of dynamic groups: Why immigrants do better – for a while.  “The Triple Package,” February 14, 2014.

AMY CHUA, John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law, Yale Law School; Author, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother; Co-author, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America

JED RUBENFELD, Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law, Yale Law School; Co-author, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America

In conversation with
JEFFREY BRAND, Professor and Chairman of the Center for Law and Global Justice, University of San Francisco Law School

 

JED RUBENFELD: It’s really a great pleasure for us to be able to come out and try to say to you what we think our book is really about, which is the rise and fall of groups. It’s a book about three qualities that propel individuals and groups to success, but not only about that. It’s also about the very predictable ways that those traits get eroded over time, in part by success and in part by a process of creative destruction that occurs when these traits interact with American culture.

The starting point for our book is a seemingly un-American fact about America today, which is this striking phenomenon that for some groups, much more than the rest of the country, people are experiencing exceptional rates of upward mobility. We hear a lot about the death of upward mobility – tough economy, shrinking opportunity – and yet for some groups, much more than the rest of the country, rates of success and upward mobility are really quite astonishing.

Indian Americans’ household income is about $90,000. That’s about twice the national household income, which is about $50,000. Lebanese Americans and Iranian Americans – their income’s not far behind that. The Asian-American kids score 140 points higher, on average, on their SATs than the rest of the country. Asian Americans, who make up about 5 percent of the population, are now about 20 percent of the Ivy League student body, and a lot of people think that number is artificially depressed by a bias against Asian Americans in the Ivy League.

What explains this striking disproportionate success? I want to tell you – and I can’t emphasize this enough – just to say that some groups are doing better in these conventional ways, in education and income, obviously that’s not the same as saying they are better or that they are culturally or innately superior. On the contrary, we prove in our book that that’s just not so.

When researchers dug into the data about Asian-American academic performance, you know what they found? Third generation Asian Americans’ academic performance is no different from [that of] the rest of the country. Now think about that. That proves that it’s not innate; that proves it’s not racial; that proves it’s not biological; that explodes the whole model minority myth. It’s an example of how these successful traits change over time. Twenty years ago, the groups would have been different. Twenty years from now, the groups will be different.

I know what a lot of you are probably thinking. You know what the explanation is? It’s probably class and immigrant selectivity. It’s probably a phenomenon of wealthy parents passing on advantages to their kids, or of immigrants coming over with high levels of education or high skills. That would be the most comforting explanation, and those are important factors. But they’re just not as important as people think they are. 

But the best-studied community of all may be Asian Americans, particularly Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese Americans. People have studied this, and [these] kids are succeeding and achieving the highest grades and scores, regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic status and educational background. The kids of restaurant workers and dry cleaners, poorly educated [people], are doing just as well as the kids of the Asian Americans who are better educated, and all of them are doing better than their white, more privileged, better-educated peers. That’s the phenomenon that needs to be explained. It’s not class. It’s not immigrant selectivity.

AMY CHUA: We looked at the groups that are disproportionately successful today, at least some of these groups. I want to stress again that these groups change very quickly over time. America’s most successful groups include African Americans and Hispanic Americans, which actually just debunks racial stereotypes. It shows it has nothing to do with skin color or racial background, and the fact that Jed pointed out that Asian Americans become just like the rest of the country after two generations shows that there’s nothing innate about it. It’s not intrinsic to a culture. There’s something much more wrapped up with the immigrant experience. So we looked at these groups. You know what they do have in common? What do Nigerian Americans, Mormons and Indian Americans have in common? What we found is that for all their enormous diversity, they shared three qualities or cultural commonalities. We call these the triple package.

The first [quality] is a sense of exceptionality, of being special in some way. The second is almost the opposite of that – just a dash of insecurity, a feeling that you haven’t done enough yet, that you’re not good enough yet. And the third is impulse control, essentially self-discipline, the ability to resist temptation and to persevere.

It’s really the combination of those first two qualities that are almost contradictory that fascinates us. That’s what’s at the heart of this book. How does somebody simultaneously feel insecure and superior? It is precisely that combination that generates this goading drive, a chip on the shoulder, the feeling of “Why are you looking down on me? I need to prove myself. I need to gain your respect. I need to show the world.”

Anyone can have these qualities. But our research showed – this is just a snapshot [of] 2013 – some groups in America instilling these qualities in their members, in their kids, in their families more than others. Those groups are disproportionately succeeding. In the book, we explore the fascinating, totally different ways that these qualities manifest themselves.

For example, I was talking about a superiority complex. This sense of exceptionality in a group can be rooted in religion, as in the case of the Mormons, who have a very strong chosen-people narrative very much borrowed from the Jews. Mormons also have a sense of enormous pride in their strong families and clean-cut values. They see themselves, in one historian’s words, as “an island of morality in a sea of decay.”

Iranian Americans have a very strong sense of ethnic exceptionality too. They’re very proud of their ancient civilization. They identify as Persians, distinct from Arabs. They speak Farsi. Similarly, Cuban Americans see themselves as distinct from other Hispanic Americans. I mention those two [groups] because this highlights one of the great dangers of the superiority complex. This sense of ethnic pride can easily shade into intolerance –“We’re not like those other groups.” That’s why we chose this term – superiority complex – to highlight the dangers of it.

This is also part of the generational arc. The first generation, the immigrants, are outsiders. We feel this strong identity. Immigrants’ children are imbued with America’s greatest value – the norm of equality. They don’t quite like or get their parents’ sense of exceptionality. They feel like, “Wait. I want to intermarry, maybe. I don’t get what you’re saying about exceptionality.” And they challenge their parents and that’s part of this dynamic that’s part of the greatness of America.

There is another form of exceptionality in the case of Asian Americans. There are many different Asian Americans in this country. We focus on Chinese Americans and Indian Americans. The exceptionality of Chinese Americans and Indian Americans is rooted not so much in Middle Kingdom or Confucianism, but in the sense that we are better at working hard; we are better at excelling academically.

Now by itself, a superiority complex doesn’t generate drive or success – just the opposite. If you feel superior, you’re more likely to be complacent and sit on your laurels. It’s only when that sense of superiority is combined with a little insecurity that you get this goading drive that I refer to, this need to prove yourself.

Just to be an immigrant is to be insecure. You’re the ones with the funny accents. People look at you funny. You’re the ultimate outsiders. At a personal level, in some ways, this book is about how to turn being an outsider into a source of strength.

Equally important, and maybe more startling – this part is controversial – there’s a different kind of insecurity that we write about. This is an insecurity created inside the family. Basically, parents are making their children feel like they are not good enough yet. This idea of deliberately making a child feel that way is practically anathema to mainstream thinking. The groups that we look at, that are so disproportionately successful, do it in very different ways.

In Asian-American immigrant families – again I’m talking mostly about Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, South-Asian – these parents famously impose exorbitantly high expectations on their children. Hundreds of studies bear this out. So the proverbial, “Why just a 99 not 100? That’s not good enough.” Studies also show that  East-Asian parents especially are much more likely than other parents to make comparisons with other successful kids – “I heard that so-and-so’s kid just got into Harvard,” or, “Your cousin just got valedictorian.” Again, [they are] instilling that feeling that everyone else is doing better. To pile on. In these families, academic success is often tied to family honor. If you don’t do well, you’re going to disgrace the whole family.

This is not just Asian Americans. In a study of over 5,000 immigrant children – this is from all backgrounds – the children repeatedly said they felt an acute anxiety that if they didn’t succeed academically, they would be failing their parents and wasting all the sacrifices their parents had made. This mentality is the exact opposite of what parents focused on self-esteem are trying to generate.

RUBENFELD: How many people in this room know about the marshmallow test? This is the most famous social psychology test ever performed. About 30 years ago, they put three, four and five-year-old kids at a table and they put a marshmallow in front of them. They said, “You can eat the marshmallow right now, but if you wait 15 minutes you’ll get a second marshmallow.” Most of the kids ate the first marshmallow, just ate it right up. About a third of them waited the full 15 minutes and got the second marshmallow.

The amazing thing was that, almost by accident, the researchers at Stanford who conducted that experiment tracked the kids 20 years later. They weren’t intending to, but they did. To everyone’s surprise, it turned out that the kids who had waited were wildly more successful on all the conventional metrics. They were educationally outperforming the others; they were occupationally outperforming the others; they were earning more money; their families were stronger; [they experienced] less jail time, less substance abuse. And this finding has now been replicated over and over all over the world.

That ability – and that’s impulse control – that ability is a stronger predictor of success than IQ. Now in some cultures, in some groups, something is going on in the family that is strengthening that ability, and studies also show that this is an ability you can strengthen. You can strengthen this ability in kids. What we wrote about in the book is, if that’s true – if we’re beginning to understand this information – immigrants’ kids have been doing great in America for wave after wave of immigrants. You see the same story [with] the Italian Americans, the Irish Americans. Kids of immigrants have this charge packed into them. They do better. Why? It’s not magic. Something’s going on in those families. If we could understand that formula, isn’t that something maybe we could all benefit from?

I want to tell you about another twist on the marshmallow test we were talking about before. One of the most fascinating things we found was called the “reverse marshmallow test.” What they did was, they reran the marshmallow test but first, with half the kids, they lied to them. They promised them some art supplies if they would just do something or other. The kids did that something or other, but then they didn’t deliver the art supplies: broken promise. Then they ran the marshmallow test. All the kids that were lied to grabbed that marshmallow. That’s just rational.

If you don’t trust the system, if you think the system’s a fraud and unfair, if you don’t believe that people like you can make it, if you don’t believe that hard work and working within the system is going to be rewarded, why should you try to do that? Why don’t you just grab that marshmallow? Ironically, some of these immigrant groups may believe in American institutions more than we Americans do. They may even have an artificially inflated sense of the fairness and equity of American institutions.

JEFFREY BRAND: If [The Triple Package] is so data-driven and so based on scientific findings, how do you account for the reaction that you’ve gotten?

CHUA: It’s a strange genre. I think some of the criticisms or observations are correct. It’s not an academic article; it’s just clearly not. A lot of people want to take it as a how-to guide. I like the Financial Times review: It’s a meditation on success, including its dark side and its costs. It’s an honest view of what generates drive in some groups. Then, let’s debate it.

BRAND: I want to read [something] from your book that struck me. It says that everyone should have two educations, one about how to make a living and the other about how to live. Triple package success, with its emphasis on external measures of achievement, does not provide the latter education. If that’s the case, what does happiness have to do with it and why is this a good thing?

CHUA: That explains what this book is about. It’s a view, trying to think through these issues. You can also romanticize not being successful. It would be very easy if it were that you do whatever you want.

It’s not that happiness-producing to not get the job that you want. It’s not that happiness-producing to have a goal and find that no one wants to hire you for that goal. We treat this fairly complexly.