@Grittymadness yes I think you’ve hit on something here. This can happen quite a lot with psychological concepts, they get highlighted by some study or other as being “something interesting, worth considering” the concept gets picked up in pop science writing, or the author of the original research turn it into a book and flesh out the theory. It takes off.
Then it gets adopted by lay people and institutions, this is usually the point where the “specialist” meaning of the term or concept becomes a more lay understanding and loses it’s academic definition. Then its significance in achievement or whatever (maybe mental health, maybe physical health, maybe further educational attainment) seems outsized due to sloppy reporting in the media, convenience for institutions, and/or novelty.
Invariably, the idea gets over applied and usually in a fairly inexpert way, so often it will enter curricula or staff training programmes etc not via experts in the field where it comes from but by a range of generalists who come across the idea and improvise around it and incorporate elements of it into what they do. Or it can be on a more official level via expert consultation but gets watered down over time because there’s not enough funding to implement training properly.
A few years later, it fails to deliver on what seemed like it’s promise in the way people expected. If may even have become low-key weaponised by institutions to to paper over fundamental cracks in core delivery of its function or service, or to shame staff into using low intensity interventions (5 minute relaxation techniques) for complex problems (E.g burnout, exhaustion, depression, sleep deprivation).
So with grift and resilience, rather than these being seen as sets of skills, learned over time with effort, which can help a student make the most of a variety of traits, advantages, and cog ability they have already- they sometimes become seen as more stable traits that students are implored to have, or admonished for not having, despite the requisite training not really being in place.
Some other examples of this were/are: the self-esteem movement of the 80s and 90s -praise and positive reinforcement can be good, but offered indiscriminately it can remove intrinsic motivation, and increase emotional fragility in the face of criticism; Mindfulness- evidence is good for mindfulness but it’s a fairly challenging and subtle skill to acquire and in the original studies training in mindfulness skills were delivered by lifelong Zen practitioners who were often also psychologists- not so much the casewhen it got out into the wild; Positive visualisation- turns out is useful but you need to visual process that can achieve a goal rather than the achievement of the goal itself as this is counter productive; random nudge techniques also had their day in the sun, like publicly committing to a goal to help ensure you complete it, turns out this can backfire because getting the “good feeling” of achievement up front by telling people can undermine the reward of actually doing it.
Its not just psychology though, other fix all fads include things like high intensity interval training for improving health/mental health, using BMI as a proxy measure for assessment of physical health (this one is very controversial); encouraging the use of complimentary medicine in place of effective pain management (e.g. aromatherapy in childbirth instead of evidence based pain relief); training non clinicians to screen for signs of specific psychiatric disorders or cognitive disability (not a bad idea but can blur boundaries in unhelpful ways);
The list goes on and on. It’s usually not that these things are without value, it’s just that they often get denatured and distorted in their application and can become an unhelpful dogma that undermines more holistic and well established approaches which can often be applied more effectively.