Growth Mindsets

Recently, I have been fascinated in how psychology can tackle the classical question of whether talent is bred or born with. I’d like to inspect this question in context of psychologist Carol Dweck’s¹ work on student motivation and her studies on growth mindsets.

Fixed versus Growth Mindsets 🧠 #

Dweck splits student mindsets into two categories:

• Fixed minds tend to focus on how they are judged and perceived by others. They worry about grades a lot more and value natural talent over hard work. 📏

• Growth minds tend to care about intrinsic factors of learning, i.e. the joys of discovering new things. They embrace struggles and enjoy challenges, and often capitalize on mistakes to better their craft. Students with growth mindsets value effort and see work as a path to mastery. 💪

Empirical effects 📃 #

At this point, it might be unsurprising to the reader that people with growth mindsets tend to do progress better academically ². But there are two interesting consequences of the Dweck and Blackwell’s studies ^{3 4}:

• First, praising students’ intelligence tended to prime students for a fixed mindset, whereas praising students’ effort tended to put them in a growth mindset.

• Second, it seems that growth mindsets can be learned. When students were exposed to articles and studies on growth mindsets, they seemed to be more motivated to work harder on their academics. The Blackwell study also showed improvements in grades and higher enjoyment of schoolwork in the growth mind-set intervention, compared to the control group.

Although these studies don’t directly address our initial question, whether talent is innate or can be acquired later in life, there seems to be positive effects in recognizing that effort does lead to tangible improvements!

Why should (and shouldn’t) we care? #

It’s important to note that this work is not a silver bullet; the studies were carried out in certain contexts and don’t claim to fix mental health, cure depression, or even bring world peace.

But I think the thought that effort leads to improvement is insightful. It gives our life purpose and agency to do things we wouldn’t naturally do. Even if we can’t solve world hunger with this, we can take comfort that we can always make progress to a better tomorrow 😊

Notes #