Scholars have long debated the reasons underlying Asian Americans’ exceptional educational outcomes. Psychologists emphasize individual cognitive ability and the effects of stereotypes on performance (1). Culturalists point to values, beliefs, norms, and behavioral patterns unique and intrinsic to ethnicity (2). Structuralists focus on socioeconomic status within and beyond the family, including a group’s position in a society’s status hierarchy (3, 4). Data limitations and quantitative modeling constraints, combined with contentious ethnic politics, have rendered social scientists at an intellectual stalemate. This standstill has consequences: The lack of a strong social science voice in the debate has lead pundits to liberally evoke culture to explain poor or exceptional group outcomes (5, 6); the simplistic framing of group culture has fanned fury, pitted groups against each other, and led Civil Rights activists to advocate for group interests to promote a political agenda. Meanwhile, the general public has remained deprived of knowledge generated from rigorous scientific research. However, Amy Hsin and Yu Xie propel the debate forward with their refreshing analyses and insight in their PNAS report, “Explaining Asian Americans’ academic advantage over whites” (7). Based on nationally representative cohort longitudinal surveys, Hsin and Xie (7) use sophisticated statistical techniques to develop multilayer decomposition models that simultaneously test three competing hypotheses: psychological (individual cognitive ability), cultural (belief in academic effort), and structural (family socioeconomic background). The authors use Asian–white gaps in educational outcomes (rather than outcomes per se) as their dependent variable, and control for factors that differ across schools. Hsin and Xie find a persistent Asian–white gap in educational outcomes. They also find that the difference in academic effort, rather than in cognitive ability or socio-demographic characteristics, explains the Asian–white gap. Hsin and Xie then press forward to address why Asian American students put more effort into their schoolwork … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ZhouMin{at}ntu.edu.sg. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1