A Theoretical Model for Grit in Pursuing Ambitious Ends
Avrim Blum, Emily Diana, Kavya Ravichandran, Alexander Williams Tolbert
Abstract
Ambition and risk-taking have been heralded as important ways for marginalized communities to get out of cycles of poverty. As a result, educational messaging often encourages individuals to strengthen their personal resolve and develop characteristics such as discipline and grit to succeed in ambitious ends. However, recent work in philosophy and sociology highlights that this messaging often does more harm than good for students in these situations. We study similar questions using a different epistemic approach and in simple theoretical models -- we provide a quantitative model of decision-making between stable and risky choices in the improving multi-armed bandits framework. We use this model to first study how individuals
BibTeX
@inproceedings{aaai2026_atheoreticalmode,
title = {A Theoretical Model for Grit in Pursuing Ambitious Ends},
author = {Avrim Blum and Emily Diana and Kavya Ravichandran and Alexander Williams Tolbert},
booktitle = {AAAI 2026},
year = {2026}
}