Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

by Vaillant, George E.

  Remember, I was limited to data provided by the Study itself. The “nature” part was easy. In the 1940s, the Grant Study researchers were betting that a muscular, classically “masculine” body build could predict future success, and they had amassed a huge amount of information about the men’s physiques. It was a cinch to tell which men nature had favored, at least with regard to physical constitution. But the “nurture” part was a different story altogether. As I’ll detail in the next chapter, the Study originators weren’t thinking about tenderness and warmth as shapers of human lives. Personality researchers today give short shrift to physiognomy, and in the 1940s they didn’t ask about relationships. Environmental considerations were barely on their radar at all, let alone the nuances of family atmosphere. So it was much harder to discern which of those children had been lucky in love.

  That was one problem. Another was obvious from the way the Australian Financial Review had responded to my venture: there are more opinions than one on what “matters.” Persuading twenty-first-century Wall Street types that love is all you need was going to be a hard sell.

  But my appetite was whetted. Now I really did want to see what light the Grant data could shed on the nature/nurture battles, which meant reframing the issues (identifying success and identifying love) in terms that the available data could address.

  So I devised a new question: Which best predicts successful old age: physical endowment, childhood social privilege, or early love? Then I set about defining explicitly the terms that would allow me to answer it. The problem raised by the Australians was the first one to tackle: what counts as success? High school football stars are usually considered successful adolescents. But do the traits that make good quarterbacks also make good grandparents?

  Eventually it occurred to me that while people can wrangle endlessly over whether the 400 meters or the high jump is the more challenging event, almost no one will deny that a person who scores high in a decathlon is a fine athlete. So instead of incurring the wrath of the Financial Review and who knows who else by settling on any single criterion, I established a Decathlon of Flourishing—a set of ten accomplishments in late life that covered many different facets of success. Then I set out to see how these accomplishments correlated, or didn’t, with my three gifts of nature and nurture—physical constitution, social advantage, and a loving childhood.

  This exercise, as I pursued it, proved an elegant demonstration of the power of prospective longitudinal material in general, and of the long-term perspective that gives it meaning. It also brought to the fore, and put into a larger context, many of the specific individual issues that the Study had been dealing with, and that I’ll be addressing in detail in coming chapters. It served as a giant telescope, quickly bringing the big picture into focus, and clarifying decades worth of theoretical assumptions and disagreements. It’s an ideal introduction, therefore, to this biography of the Grant Study.

  THE DECATHLON

  We all have our own definitions of what “flourishing” means, and of what makes life well lived and worth living. I covered as many of these as I could in my Decathlon of ten rewarding late-life outcomes—in accordance with my Olympic metaphor I’ll call them events—that could be measured with some objectivity. I avoided abstractions like virtue, happiness, and self-actualization, and focused instead on concrete behaviors and achievements. Many readers, I’m sure, will object to at least some of the criteria I chose. But they were pragmatic choices, not dictated by taste, political correctness, or even principle. I had to be able to score the men’s capacity to survive, to work, to love, and to play, and I had to be able to do it with data that were already on hand, so as to assure that I was exerting no control over the predictor variables of my three childhood conditions. I picked my ten events (that is, measurable achievements) as outcome variables because they were available. I had no advance knowledge of how they would correlate with the predictor variables. Some overlaps among the events, and some of the age limits that defined them, may seem arbitrary, but these too were enforced by the way the available data were collected and assessed, sometimes many years ago. As we go along, you’ll become familiar with the kinds of questions we asked and the way we handled the answers. In the meantime, examples of our interview protocols are available for reference in Appendix A, and of our adjustment assessment schedules in Appendix D. The scales we used to assess childhood temperament and environment are in Appendix C. The background on how all this developed is in Chapter 3, which recounts the history of the Study.

  Table 2.1 defines the Decathlon—the set of ten outcomes that I used to denote “flourishing.” The first two Decathlon events reflected occupational success: inclusion by age sixty in Who’s Who in America and earned income in the top quartile of the Grant Study sample. I chose the former admittedly elitist criterion because almost all the men in the Study enjoyed high-prestige professions, and I needed a documented way to distinguish levels of achievement among them. Only 21 percent of the men were included in Who’s Who. I recognized immediately that this distinction would favor writers, educators, politicians, and businessmen over doctors and lawyers. It took me longer to realize that the Decathlon did not adequately reflect the achievements of creative artists, however successful.

  Table 2.1 A Decathlon of Flourishing, from Age 60 to Age 80*

  * The Decathlon was conceived to assess the men’s success from 65 to 80, but all but one of the events could be estimated for the 14 men who died between 58 and 64 years of age, and therefore they were included. Men who died before their 58th birthdays, however, were excluded.

  ** The men were coded for the highest Eriksonian psychosocial task they had mastered (see Chapter 5).

  The next four events reflected mental and physical health. Men who didn’t need psychotherapy to cope with life’s problems, or psychopharmaceuticals to relieve life’s pains, were rated low for psychological distress. Event number four measured the men’s enjoyment of work, love, and play between the ages of sixty-five and eighty (see Appendix D for how we measured this).

  Events five and six reflected different aspects of biological success over time: being physically active (subjectively) at age seventy-five, and being physically and mentally healthy (both subjectively and objectively) at eighty. To meet the criteria for event number six required: that a man survive in good subjective and objective physical health to his eighty-first birthday; that at eighty he be without alcoholism, depression, chronic anxiety, or social isolation; and, finally, that he find subjective joy in many facets of his life.

  Some readers may question my use of physical health as a Decathlon benchmark. Certainly longevity is not in itself a guarantee of flourishing. And while most of us would consider a happy and productive long life to be desirable, it is debatable whether an unhappy long life is better than a happy and productive short one. It’s also true that a few vibrant and loving men received low Decathlon scores because they died young from genetic illnesses or chance events, while several inhibited men scored higher because they took few chances and lived a long, long time. Nevertheless, mental and physical well-being are integral to each other, and the challenge I had set for myself had to do with predicting success in old age.

  The next four events reflected good relationships. The first was the achievement of Eriksonian Generativity (that is, the capacity for empathic nurturing of adolescents and adults other than one’s own children; more on this in Chapter 5). The others were a happy marriage in late life, close father-child relationships in late life, and good social supports (friends, confidants, people to play tennis and bridge with, and so on) between the ages of sixty and seventy-five.

  Some definition was necessary here, too. A man who had been happily married for most of the years between sixty to eighty-five was scored as having achieved this event even if there were five unhappy years and a divorce in the middle. In contrast, an intact thirty-five-year marriage was called “unhappy” if most of the time was spent in discord. (On these issue
s wives were consulted as well, separate from their husbands.)

  Construing a variable as complex as good marriage as “present” or “absent” sounds simplistic, but in fact it was a pragmatic and useful device. It’s very difficult to rank the relative happiness of marriages—your siblings’, for example, or your three best friends’. But if both partners maintain over twenty years that their marriage is happy (which we scored as a 1), or if the state of their happiness is unclear to them during that time (scored as 2), or if their marriage is consistently rocky or they get divorced and never remarry (scored as 3), a three-point scale of marital happiness becomes plausible.

  Throughout this book you’ll see us transforming value judgments into science this way. What makes it possible is the availability of repeated measurements over time, one of the great strengths of longitudinal studies. And if these assessments can be defined and systematically derived with rater reliability—that is, if independent raters come to virtually identical scores—then it becomes possible to codify value judgments in a way that can be examined and tested statistically years or decades later, without the risk of their being altered or otherwise reinterpreted to suit an investigator’s whim.

  However annoying my sins of omission and commission, therefore, I hope my readers will agree that taken as a whole, doing well in the Decathlon is preferable to the alternative.

  Although the ten variables that I employed to reflect flourishing appear disparate, they turned out to be, in fact, highly correlated with each other—that is, they tended to appear together—and up to a point this makes intuitive sense. Maintaining a high income and good social supports requires a certain amount of empathy and social intelligence; so does maintaining close family relations. Of forty-five possible correlations among the ten variables (that is, the forty-five different ways that ten variables can be paired) in Table 2.1, twenty-four pairs were very significantly correlated. Twelve more pairs were significantly correlated, and only nine pairs of correlations were not significant.

  Please note, by the way, that throughout this book the word significant is used only in its statistical sense. Very significant (VS) refers to correlations for which the probability of their occurring by chance is less than one in a thousand; significant (S) refers to correlations for which the probability of occurring by chance is less than one in a hundred. Correlations significant at a level of p <.05—that is, occurring by chance fewer than one time in twenty—are conservatively called not significant (NS).

  SCORING

  It’s important to keep in mind that even though the Decathlon itself was not conceived until 2009, the data pertaining to the ten events I targeted for study were collected long before then, and usually during the time when the events were actually taking place. This is a prospective study, remember. The information that went into the Decathlon assessments came from the men’s initial intake processing in 1938–1942, and from the extensive follow-up that succeeded it, up through the year 2009. All of these records were available to the scoring process, so judgments were made about a man’s status based not on the fluctuating conditions of a single moment, but on information amassed over decades.

  For every Decathlon event in which a man was in the top quartile of the Study sample, he received a point. If he had died before the assessment could be made, he received a zero in that event. Total scores, therefore, ranged from 0 to 10. A full third of the men scored 2 or 3; they were considered average on the flourishing scale. If we accept that this Decathlon does address, however imperfectly, several vital aspects of flourishing in late life, then the one-third of the men who received fewer than 2 points from most raters were living less desirable lives than the one-third of the men who scored 4 points or more. A cast of protagonists and their Decathlon scores can be found at the front of the book. Adam Newman received a midlevel Decathlon score of 2; Godfrey Camille, whom I will introduce shortly, received a 5. Of course, judgments about the “good life” can be very annoying. I had an academic partner once who challenged me for saying that Jack Kennedy was mentally healthier than Lee Harvey Oswald. Tastes differ.

  ANTECEDENTS OF SUCCESS

  Having established my criteria for success and scored the men on their achievement of them, I could now test statistically which of the myriad variables and traits that the Study had documented when the men were young—variables of nature and variables of nurture—could predict a good life in their later years.

  In fact, to uncover the antecedents of flourishing had been one of the avowed purposes of the Study at its inception. Furthermore, the early years of data collection coincided with the early years of World War II, when efficient officer selection was very much on the minds of the investigators. Typical of the time, the original Study staff expected that the gift of leadership could be predicted by a particular constellation of constitutional endowments; this meant a mesomorphic (that is, athletic) and “masculine” (that is, narrow-hipped and broad-shouldered) body build. The staff used a study of ROTC recruits to justify this expectation retrospectively in 1945; in that study, 41 percent of the men with a strongly masculine physique were considered “excellent officer material,” while not a single man who was considered weak in the so-called masculine component was equally valued.3 However, there was no follow-up to document that these men actually made good officers, and as P. D. Scott implies in the epigraph of this chapter, that left this fine theory very much an open question. My intention was to pit the hard-nosed, body-build, nature values of the early Study investigators and the money-centered preoccupations of the modern business world against my own sentimental twenty-first-century values about the power of love. Which—constitution, money, or tender care—had the greatest power to predict success in the Decathlon of Flourishing? It’s better to know than to believe, at least in matters of science, and it was time for conflicting beliefs to be resolved by facts.

  Section A of Table 2.2 depicts ten characteristics, some physical and some not, that I chose to test as potential constitutional predictors of a rewarding late life. The first six had been thought likely suspects by the original Study staff, especially for predicting future officers and store managers. (This was a high priority of William Grant, the chain-store impresario who funded the Study and gave it his name; more about Grant and the first four characteristics in Chapter 3.) They were: vital affect (a rich, exuberant social presence), sociability, masculine body build (narrow hips, broad shoulders), mesomorphy (muscularity), treadmill endurance, and athletic prowess. To these I added four other constitutional or biological factors: childhood temperament (see Chapter 4), hereditary loading for (that is, family history of) alcoholism and major depression, and longevity of parents and grandparents.

  I also included three variables to test the effect of socioeconomic status on the men’s future. Parental social class was assessed by paternal income, occupational status, neighborhood, and a home visit. The education of each parent was also assessed.

  That done, the Australian challenge could no longer be avoided. And this brought me straight back to my initial problem, the one that had foiled my simple group-to-group comparison and driven me to Olympic elaborations. Namely, there were no data available—the Study had collected no data—that directly addressed the amount or quality of the love that the College men had received as children.

  Table 2.2 What Variables Predict a High Decathlon Score at Age 60–80?

  Very significant = p<.001; Significant = p<. 01; NS = Not significant.

  * “Items” refers to the number of Decathlon events predicted significantly by the antecedent variable.

  ** See Chapter 8.

  I had to find a way to test definitively my impulsive assertion that warm intimate relationships are the most important contributing factor in the establishment of a good life. Relational warmth is tough to measure even in the twenty-first century, and we’ve been working on it for a long time. In 1940 no one had even put forth the concept of attachment, certainly not the biometric psychologists
or the Freudian psychoanalysts to whom the Study first gave ear. But more on that later. What matters here is that only four objective measures of relationship skills had been gathered before the measures of Decathlon success were obtained, so I had to content myself with those. They became my third set of predictors.

  The men and their parents were not accessible to the Study until the men were in college, at which time both men and parents were interviewed in depth. These interviews were the first indicators the Study had of the men’s early home life, and of their relationships with their parents and siblings—obviously important predictive variables. Yet the men’s childhood environments were not assigned nuanced numerical scores at the time they were assessed; that was done only after I joined the Study. (I will describe our after-the-fact scoring of the men’s childhoods in Chapter 4.)

  The second relational predictor was the Study staff’s consensus rating (as the men finished their senior years at about age twenty-one) of the men’s overall “soundness.” That rating had been based on a 1-to-3 scale as follows:

  1 = A man seen as without “serious problems in handling problems that might confront them.”

  2 = A man seen as “lacking in warmth in his touch with people,” or too “sensitive.”

  3 = A man seen as “markedly asocial,” or manifesting “marked mood variations.”

  The third predictor was the maturity or immaturity of the men’s involuntary coping style (perhaps better known as defensive style) between ages twenty and thirty-five. This was assessed by me retrospectively when the men were forty-seven from information provided earlier (retrospective data analyses are permissible in a prospective study; retrospective data are not). This too will be explained more fully (in Chapter 8); keep in mind that this chapter is a sketch, a roadmap of terrain that we will cover in more detail later on. For now, what matters is that our defensive styles influence our relationships. Mature coping (sometimes called defense) mechanisms like humor and patience tend to attract other people; immature coping mechanisms like projection and hypochondriasis, while temporarily soothing to their users, appear self-centered to other people and tend to alienate them.