Emotion and Motivation
Psych in Real Life: Growth Mindsets
Learning Objectives
- Explain how different praise and mindsets can lead to different levels of performance
How Mindset Influences Performance
Imagine that you are a parent and your child has just brought home a report card from 4th grade that is really good. This report card is great! You __________”
- are so smart!
- must have worked so hard!
- have some jelly on your nose!
We hope you didn’t choose the jelly statement. Between the other two options, which one would you be more likely to blurt out?
It turns out that your choice could matter.
Carol Dweck, who is now a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, has been studying factors that promote or interfere with achievement since the 1970s. Over this time, and especially since the mid-1990s, she came to realize that our ways of dealing with the world and particularly our behaviors in trying to achieve our own goals are influenced by what she calls “self-theories”: beliefs we have about our own abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and potential. These self-theories affect decisions we make about what is possible or sensible or reasonable to do in order to achieve our goals.
Before we discuss Carol Dweck’s work, please answer a few questions about your own beliefs. Try to answer based on your real ways of thinking. The questions are a bit repetitive, but answer each one without regard to your previous answers.
Take the 8-question Mindset Quiz here or here
Dr. Dweck and her colleagues have used questions like the ones you just answered to sort people into groups based on their beliefs about intelligence (and other abilities and skills). She has found that people tend to adopt one of two general set of beliefs about intelligence. People with a fixed mindset tend to think of intelligence as an “entity”—something that is part of a person’s essential self. According to people with this belief, intelligence does not change much regardless of what we do or what we experience. Other people have a growth mindset, and they tend to think of intelligence as being “incremental”—a quality that can change for better or worse depending on what we do and on the experiences we have. Some people are strongly committed to one or the other end of the fixed vs. growth mindset scale, while others fall in-between to varying degrees.
Study 1: Mueller & Dweck (1998)
If Prof. Dweck is right, our mindset has a big impact on how well we achieve our potential—in school and in many other areas of our lives (for example, in sports, music, and business). But where do these different mindsets come from?
There can be many reasons that a person comes to believe that intelligence is fixed or changeable, but one obvious influence on our way of thinking about ourselves is the messages we hear from adults as we grow up. Dweck and her then-graduate student Claudia Mueller wanted to see if they could influence the mindset of children, if only for a brief period of time,