Hello, and Welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is part of the best of series, where we highlight some of the most exciting and enthralling and enlightening episodes from the archives of the Psychology Podcast. Enjoy Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior,
and creativity. I'm doctor Scott Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation with a guest who will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast.
Today.
It's a real honor to have Carol Dweck on the podcast. Doctor Dwek is a leading researcher in the field of motivation and is the Lewis and Virginia Eden Professor of Psychology at Stanford. Her research examines the role of mindsets and personal achievement and organizational effectiveness. Doctor Dewek has also
held professorships at Columbia and Harvard Universities. Has lectured to education, business and sports groups around the world, has addressed the United Nations has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and has won twelve Lifetime Achievement Awards for her research. Her best selling book, Mindset, has been widely influential and has been translated into over twenty five languages. Doctor Dewek, so great to chat with you today, Scott.
It's great to chat with you.
Oh boy, there's so much to talk about.
I was thinking about starting with your earliest sort of dissertation research because I remember two thousand and three. I remember I was studying intelligence. I was reading a book I really enjoyed reading of yours. It was one of these. It was an academic book. It was short, it was short, and it went through It didn't use the language mindsets. This is like back in the day, it was incremental versus entity, right.
Can you tell us a little bit about this earliest research.
Well, yeah, I'd love to tell you about it. When I was in graduate school, I was kind of gripped by a question, why did some kids shy away from challenges and crumble at the first sign of failure while other kids no smarter or more able at the task. Seemed to relish, taking on challenges, and thrive in the face of obstacles. And pretty soon I found the question was a little bit wrong. It wasn't just that some kids thrived, want to challenge or coped with obstacles. I
found out that some of the kids loved setbacks. They said things like, I love a challenge. I was hoping this would be informative, and I thought, I'm giving them failure problems, and they're thinking this makes it worth their while. I couldn't relate to them at all. I thought they were from another planet. But I thought, I'm going to figure out their secret. I'm going to bottle it and I'm going to take a few healthy swigs of it myself because I thought I have a lot to learn
from these ten year old kids. That's how I got started on this research.
Wow, so it sounds like the original observation was more a behavioral finding than a cognitive mindset finding. The way you described it, that's so interesting.
I wanted to figure out the cognitive underpinnings of it, and my reason was it was personally relevant my sixth grade teacher. I kind of figured this out later that it was me as we say, research, not just research.
Oh my gosh, that's what we all do, right, Yeah.
And I recommend it because you never get enough of it. My sixth grade teacher had seated us around the room in IQ order. We were already the top IQ class in the sixth grade of five classes, and yet she thought every IQ point was monumentally important in not only telling you how smart you were, but whether you had good character, could be trusted, and essentially what you were worth in her eyes. Spending a whole year in that classroom, I was really influenced. Now you might oh, I felt
downtrodden and unappreciated. No, I was in the first row, first seat. You would think, oh, I won that IQ prize. But as I looked back, I realized I never wanted challenges again, and I arranged my life to be purely successful, not to topple from my height. So I wanted to figure out what goes on in people's minds that can allow them to risk taking on challenges, and that can give them the fortitude to keep going when things seemed rough.
It's such a great question. An important question was the opposite I was. I was in special education as a kid. I don't know if I ever told you that for an auditory an auditory processing disability. So people thought I was really slow, slow earner because I was having trouble hearing things in real time and sort of the impact of expectations can certainly have an effect on mindsets, I'm sure,
and the way we think about things. I'm wondering when did the shift from entity and incremental become fixed versus growth?
That was when I wrote the book Mindset. I realized nobody can remember entity and incremental.
I always had to rearing that myself, which is.
That if they couldn't remember entity and they couldn't remember an incremental. So when I came to write the book Mindset, I said, well, I have to find some more user friendly terms. But kind of a prior question is how if we just call it mindsets? Now? How did we get to the point of thinking that mindsets could play a role?
Absolutely?
And I asked this because correct if I'm wrong, But wasn't entity and incremental They were called beliefs in your language, your original language, there were beliefs, not mindsets.
Is that right?
Yeah? But I kind of mean the same thing.
Okay, I'd love to hear more about that.
Yeah, In my earliest work, I looked at attributions kids made for their successes and failures. Did they think the failure measured their ability or did they think the failure meant try a new strategy, seek advice, just keep going. But eventually we said, why does failure have such a negative meaning for some kids and kind of an informative
meaning for other kids? And in the early nineteen eighties, working with Mary van door Albander is a daughter, I was going to ask you, we suddenly realize, you know, when you think you're being measured and that judgment is really important, doesn't that kind of imply that you have this fixed thing that's being judged, And if you think it's just a failure it is just a clue for changing your strategy or trying harder, or getting input and then learning more. Doesn't that kind of imply that you
think your ability can be developed? And suddenly we looked at each other. It just bowled us over. What if people have fundamentally different ideas about intelligence and they're charting them around with them and it's affecting how they view challenges, how they view setbacks. Well, you know, there was no stopping us at that.
Point, Hi, everyone, just wanted to take a quick break and talk about my new book that's coming out April seventh. It's called Transcend The New Science of Self Actualization. Really excited to present this book to you all. It represents the culmination of many, many years of hard work and synthesis. What I've been what I've done in this book is I've taken Maslow's classic hierarchy of Needs and I've revised it for the twenty first century, trying to bring back
humanistic psychology. I think that the field of humanistic psychology in the fifties and sixties really got a lot right about humanity and the creative possibilities of humans as well as the humanitarian and spiritual possibilities. Really hoping this book can present a vision of humanity that transcends us all and helps us connect deeper with each other, but also
help us reach our greatest potential individually and collectively. So if you want to check out this book, you can actually pre order it right now on Amazon as well as other there's independent bookstores I think you can pre order it from and then on April seventh. Starting April seventh, that should be in bookstores a lot of people in wondering throughout the years how they can support me and
the Psychology podcast, And here's the time. You know, you're always welcome to contribute money to the podcast, help support it. If you're a longtime listener or even short time listener, you want to not only support the podcast but dive deeper into a lot of the concepts and ideas we talk about constantly on this show. This is a great way to do that by buying this book. So please check the book out and let me know what you think.
There was a influence of research around that as well, because I remember my colleague josh Ronson was also doing some research that I think contributed to that. This overall idea of the malleability of our beliefs fact.
Joshua Aaron's and his colleagues Catherine Good, Mickey Insulict, Carrie Free. They they did some of the first mindset interventions. Yes, before we published any interventions, we had published mindset experiments where we measured or changed people's mindsets within an experimental situation to look at the impact. But Joshua Aronson, Catherine Good and their colleagues did the first actual interventions where they changed students mindsets and compared to a control group.
They taught a growth mindset, the idea that abilities can be developed, and looked at what happened to grades or achievement test scores over time. Those were the first, I would say, landmark studies that took some of the ideas we had developed and really put them to the test. Really for the first time, fulfilled my dream of bottling it, what were these kids' secrets and delivering it. So that was very exciting research, and we followed it with some
these were in person interventions. We followed it a few years later with a study Blackwell, Tresnievsky, and Wack two thousand and seven, and we were very excited that we that others and we could do these in person interventions that could have an impact on grades or achievement test scores. This was very, very exciting, but it was limited. It was limited because it costs a fortune. For the Blackwell studies, we had a big grant from the William T. Grant Foundation.
We had something like a dozen research assistants that went out to the school several times a week, and you can't scale that up, so that posed a big problem.
I could see that.
I could see that, you could validate the ideas, but you couldn't really scale it up. Then two kind of big things happened. One was that Dave Penescu stand for PhD created a platform for delivering educational interventions online to schools. Of course, then we had to create interventions that were amenable to that. We had to kind of distill the mindset interventions.
Can you describe one of the interventions, like, what if I was one of the kids, what would I see?
Well, i'll tell you what we do now. We built upon We built upon these interventions, and the early ones had a lot of this, but i'll tell you what we do now. The mindset interventions are aimed at adolescents because they're self administered ninth graders.
You've done a lot with ninth graders, right, yes, yeah, okay.
Ninth graders and older. So first, the downfall of a lot of adolescent interventions is that people say to them, hey, we're grown ups, and we know how you should think, Well, you've already lost them, right, That's not what teenagers are.
Going to start there. I wouldn't start there.
So we start with, hey, we're developing these programs. We study learning. We're experts in that, but you are the experts, say in the in high school or the transition to high school, whichever is appropriate, and we need to learn from you what it's like and how we can change our program in the future to take advantage of your knowledge. We respect them in so many other ways. First, we explain the growth mindset in terms of the neuroscience of learning, with graphs and so on, in a way that really
treats them like the intelligent people they are. We have quotes from older students who have been through a version of the program before. We have quotes from esteemed figures in the world. We just found them on social media or the internet. And we all so have exercises originally created by Joshua Aronson to internalize a growth mindset. We said, Hey, suppose there's a ninth grade student next year and this
student is struggling. Could you write a letter to this student and giving them encouragement in terms of the growth mindset principles you've learned, and we kind of list those principles and then they write a personal letter to the student. These letters are really kind of heartwarming. We also tell them why they'd want to have a growth mindset. Now, to us nerds, why they didn't want to have a growth mindset and grow a stronger brain? To us earns,
that's obvious. Give me more of those IQ points. I want a stronger brain. That's kind of the coint of our realm the brain, a strong brain, a smart brain. But that may not be true for everyone. And so now we say we ask them to think about how a stronger brain can help them with their goals in life. So, what are your goals in life? What would you like to contribute? And how can a stronger brain help you? These are so this is the kind of intervention that
we've developed. And in our big, biggest study to date, we worked about two years to hone it. Two years of honing the program and piloting, rehooning and repiloting.
Is that the National Study of Learning Mindsets? Yeah, that's the big mama.
Yes, we had a pre registered, large scale study before that, But this was the big mama of prestirred that the hypotheses were pre registered, the analyzes who were pre registered. But let me back up and say, sure, this was a wacky idea, which was what was the national study?
Okay, not growth mindset there.
That's pretty wacky. But in around twenty fifteen, David Yaeger, professor at the University of Texas, now had this wacky idea. He can meaned a White House conference to kind of air the idea. I would say the idea was foolhardy, but he's kind of visionary. So we all went along with it and we all worked super hard on it. But it is kind of wacky that you can think about delivering a growth mindset intervention to a large national sample of ninth graders, making that travision.
Was it nationally representative?
Yes? Wow, okay, was nationally representative one of the first psychological interventions or maybe the to be done with a nationally representative sample. David engaged a series of several research firms, one to constitute the sample and conduct the intervention, supervise the interventions, one to harvest the data, so it was really hands off. He also engaged a group of Baysian statisticians to analyze the data blind to make sure that
our analyzes were entirely seaworthy. Yeah, so across the nation went out our two sessions total of fifty minutes Growth Mindset Intervention versus a control intervention that looked very much the same but just taught about the brain and its functions but didn't teach a growth mindset.
I see, And.
I think one of the most wonderful parts of this study was this we over sampled sites where we thought it wouldn't work. I think it's unusual formal searchers to seek their own non replication.
Well, you're curious what contexts it might not work?
Right, Yes, so where doesn't it replicate? No, psychological anything works everywhere? And what could we learn from that in order to improve our results and the results for kids in the future. We always want to know where are we wrong and what can we learn from And we have a whole history of being somewhat wrong and learning from it. And I can enumerate that if you'd be interested. But first I probably should finish the national Yeah.
I'd love to hear that though, and we'll have time to talk about that. But yeah, tell me about the results that you found to just finish up the thread on this big study.
Yeah. Absolutely. The first thing we found was that there was a meaningful increase in grade point average for the lower achieving kids who were in the growth Mindset Intervention group. They were the pre registered group of targeted kids for the increase in grades.
You know what the effects size was.
The effects size was something that sounds small, all zero point one one.
That's like you're talking about like seven seventh for the fourteen and thirty? Was it something like that the end?
Yeah, depending on which analysis something like that. Okay, and with grades could be matched up.
And wait, so that the effect size you just said, was that for the the well achieving group in particular or okay? Yeah, so it was even smaller for the average of everyone.
Yes, there was no effect as we had predicted for the higher achieve Now we went into the literature because that's about what we were getting in our pilot. And you could say, whoa, that's negligible. Look at Cohen's effect sizes or Hatties effect sizes. For education. You would need like a microscope.
I was going to say that. Yeah, I was gonna say.
We went into oh, well that you have.
A microscope on your desk right there. It's what I call that out.
That's pretty like you do that against I could take a screen capture of that. I love that, Okay, God, I love that.
So we went We went into the literature on educational interventions and we found something pretty startling. The most successful interventions with adolescens, even large scale, expensive ones, seem to top out at about point two. It's and when we're talking about long term outcomes like grades not on a test a few days later for what you just taught, but grades over time point two. When you look at adolescens, what's the effect of a year of schooling on achievement
test scores? Point two? What's the effect of an excellent teacher versus an average teacher for adolescents point two? And a big study that was done funded through i EES on the most promising educational interventions, they too topped out at point two. When they were subjected to a rigorous test, they topped out at about point two two point two three. So the fact that we got half of that with a five to zero minute intervention that costs like twenty
five cents fifty cents really just the minimal, minimal. We are excited. And then when we looked into the Munge literature, their most aside from opt in opt out, which has huge effects, most of the famous effects are between point one and point two.
My gosh, there's just there's nothing that really like is dramatic.
Yeah, and many medical effects that we can cite are kind of like that. So that was really eye opening.
It's eye opening in a number of ways.
One way, I'm more shocked that how come no one's been able to develop an educational intervention that is striking, you know, above point five point six.
Yeah, yeah, a lot of things work better with younger kids. It's hard to reach adolescens. One on one tutoring with great tutors can get you more. But these kind of whole sale, large scale interventions, it's just so multiply determined. There are so many reasons kids aren't achieving. There are so many reasons they may reject or not profit from an intervention.
So yeah, and I would even say that, you're I've actually seen larger effects than even that. With the twenty eighteen meta analysis, they they found it effect size I think of point three four for low sees from students from low sees homes benefited from the mindset programs. I've seen effect size of point three four, So that's even yeah bigger.
Yeah, that's even bigger.
But that's not very weak effects for you know, just like you found for other, you know, higher achieving or highest higher s students.
Yes, yes, And so those that larger effect size include some of the face to face ones that did get larger. The blackwell, they aaron since those did get larger effect sizes. But when you scale up and condense the program and you're not tailoring it or you're not really interacting with particular kids, and also the large scale are intent to treat, You've got kids in there who can't read, who can't pay attention on their own, so that deflates the effect sizes.
But it was just so eye opening to see how hard it is to do anything. So we were pretty happy with what we could do. And also the fact if you multiply it by all the kids who are ninth graders, that could you know, reorient some of them. The second finding was.
I'm like on the edge of my seat here.
On gosh, we were on the edges of our seats. So the second finding was because you might say, oh, gross, mindset interventions are not for higher achieving kids, They're just for lower achieving kids, but that wouldn't be true. Across
the achievement levels. We saw an increase in advanced math course taking that electing of an advanced math course a year later in tenth grade, and this was even slightly greater among the higher achieving kids, probably because there were more advanced math courses in their schools or because they had more of the found but yes, more advanced math taking a year later. We were very excited about this. And again, although this was a few percentage points, that's
what they get. And actually Danny Kahneman, reviewing the Nudge studies, says, hey, in the real world, a few percentage points, you know, again, multiplied by a lot of people at a low cost, that's pretty good.
I think that is a fair point. Absolutely, you know, Matthew, effects are important. You know, the rich get rich or poor get poor kind of idea. These these things can snowball, especially if you start really really young.
Yes, they can stable. And another way you can think of them over time is you do a little better a little choices along the way. It's not just one time or so, you do a little better overall. You take an advanced math course, you graduate from high school, you choose to seek higher edgy, so just little if you can shift enough of those little choices, you're having an impact.
Yeah, I'd love to hear more about the conditions which it didn't work, because I think that would be really useful to educators to hear. One thing you told me or that is in the paper as well, is that it didn't work when peer norms weren't favorable.
Is that right? Can you elaborate what that means for teachers who are listening.
So at the end of the second session of the mindset intervention and the control group, we asked kids whether they wanted to work if there was enough time, whether they wanted to choose some problems that were easy and they'd be sure to get right, and we showed them that on a math worksheet that was keyed into their math curriculum, or challenging problems that they might that were
hard but they could learn something useful. So for each school, just zeroing in on the control group, we could see was this a school full of challenge loving peers or challenge denying peers. What we found was that when a child in the growth mindset condition dwelled within a challenge rejecting school, we saw that the kids in the growth mindset condition were themselves choosing more challenging problems than their peers.
But the question was could they take their growth mindset out into the real world now and have it take root and flourish and turn into higher grades. And the answer was, when you have peers, if you take your kind of new or enhance growth mindset learning and you look interested in school work and you work harder, and you ask the teacher for input or you start answering questions in class and your peers don't like that, you're not going to do it.
So that's a really int really interesting finding. And then another thing you said you're writing up right now is potentially the role of teacher mindset, like whether if a teacher has a fixed mindset, does that have an effect on the teaching.
Yes. So we in the study we studied math teachers in particular. That's a subject that kids find really hard, and yet we know that the future world is really wanting kids to be savvy and math tech, et cetera. So we found that if you're math teacher, and now we're focusing on math grades, if your math teacher had more of a growth mindset reported having more of a growth mindset, you showed enhanced as you know, as a group, on average, you showed enhanced grades in math at the
end of the year. But if you're math teacher reported having a fixed mindset, the growth mindset intervention did not work. It did not take root. Again at the end of the second session, these kids want to challenge it, but again you kind of take it out into the world, your new or enhance growth mindset, and you say, does it work here? So maybe you try a little harder. Does the teacher notice and respond? Maybe your grade goes
up a little, Does the teacher notice and respond? Maybe you look for opportunities to revise your work and get credit. Are there those opportunities? So we look at it now as the teachers creating either opportunities in the classroom or reactions in the classroom that support the nascent or newly increased growth mindset, or that kind of nip it in the bud.
Are the good? Are they good coaches?
Or not?
In a sense?
Oh, so, here's this child coming off of growth mindset intervention, maybe willing to work harder, willing to get more instruction, wanting to be recognized and appreciated by the teacher. And it is or isn't there.
H all just a quick break to let you all know that this episode is sponsored by Learning and the Brain. Learning in the Brain's mission is to connect educators to the latest research and the science of learning through education conferences, summer Institute's one day seminars, and on site professional development. I've had the great pleasure of speaking at several of their conferences already, and they always have an amazing array
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Brain's upcoming events, please go to Learningendebrain dot com. That's Learning and TheBrain dot com. Okay, now back to the show. I have a question. I was thinking as you were talking, there is such a focus in this research on academic achievement as the dependent variable. Have you looked at like
the relationship between growth mindset interventions? And you know there are other things in life, right, so like meaning in life or well being or personal growth or whole or you know, so so many other things that you know, social relationships, other things that are important in school as well. Has anyone ever looked at other outcomes? Yes, yay, okay, I dine here what they've found.
But interesting, why do we focus on grades, testkers, et cetera. Well, first of all, they are important, and they become more and more important in the modern world too. But we and let me just stay in that domain for a minute. We things that a growth mindset gets you to the grades because of a greater desire for learning and a greater interest in errors and neuroscience work by Moser, Schroeder and College shows different brain responses to error. So we're
really in the business of creating more engaged learners. What is the world gonna listen if it doesn't lead to higher grades? We weren't so sure.
Well, that's so sad.
I know it's sad.
What if it leads to higher self actualization? No one cares about that.
Not yet. You've got to measure that self actualization in some way, right, higher income?
No, that's not how I would.
But what do personal.
Fulfillment doesn't personal fulfillment matter anymore these days?
Did it ever matter me?
To me? Personal fulfillment and contribution that's the be all and end all, and or personal fulfillment through contribution that is the be all and the personal growth that's everything to me. But we also want to show the world that it does both.
So you have there are studies then that go beyond academic achievement. I'd love to see those studies.
Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, so right, So David Jaeger has a whole line of research on changing mindsets about personality. He started it when he was a PhD student at Stanford.
He's been very prolific in his career.
I know, he's fantastic and yeah, he he's visionary and the amount energy he has is extraordinary. So anyway, he teaches key, did the groundwork and then did interventions teaching kids that personality is not fixed, personal skills, social skills need not be fixed. That everybody is capable, everybody has the potential for change. By the way, we don't say change is likely or inevitable or infinite or infinite.
Not everyone can be you know, intellectually gifted, right.
Open question. Yeah, but we don't know who can or who can't. Let's just but everyone has the potential for growth. The reason I say we don't know is we don't know what anyone's asymptoe is. We don't know what anyone's high point on their trajectory is. I don't want to be in the business of deciding in advance who can be brilliant and who can't, because I take as my expert Albert Einstein. He says I really was a slow learner.
He says, everyone thought they understood light and mess and speed and energy, and I just kept saying I don't get it. Well, he ended up reconceptualizing the whole thing.
I've read that his early I read that some of that was over overplayed. His early difficulties were when you actually look into it. He actually was a good student.
Oh, I'm not talking about whether he was a good student. He was. He says, I was slow to understand. Others understood it faster than I did. But it turns out they didn't understand it as deeply as he did.
Did He Like, you know, he was sitting in the classroom and he was able to just imagine what it would be like being on a beam of light. Through space. I mean that seems like that came easier to him than others that that visualization.
But the point I'm trying to make is that there were there have been many students who didn't seem promising to their teachers who went on to do great things really colleagues. Ever, and the late Anne Brown was labeled retarded when she was teenager in England because she hadn't yet learned to read. In my book, I talk about a scientist who I think a Nobel Prize winner but some a great scientist. He later in life found his school records and found out he had a pretty low
or IQ, or a lower IQ than he thought. He says he might not have tried to be a scientist. So I just I don't like deciding in advance.
I think that is a really good point. I've heard some thoughts from the giftedness gift education community. Some of them have drawn on your work as suggesting that you're denying the existence of intellectual giftness at any point in time, and I was wanting to want to hear some of your thoughts on that.
Oh no, I do not deny, and it's it should be clear from some of my writing and even in the book Mindset, I don't deny that some kids are precocious and should be supported. Every child should be challenged. Every child should be taught to love challenge and not allowed to be bored in school if they want to take a college course and they're nine years old. I am so totally in favor of that. I favorite of parents pushing the kids constantly. But when that Ellen Winner calls it the rage to learn?
Is there to master? Yeah?
Age to master? Yeah, go with it. A lot of educators have wrongly interpreted so again in Mindset, I talk about these incredibly precocious kids, people have said, oh, cut out gifted and talent in my name have said cut out gifted and talented programs have said, you know, homogenized kids, and in ways that don't challenge the kids who are more advanced. I don't agree with that.
You're not saying that for the record, you're not saying that, Okay, cool. I think that'll really make a lot of people in the gift education can be really happy to hear that.
I don't say there aren't things to change and learn. I thinks kids who are are way advanced must be kept engaged in learning, not just being gifted and talented. Must love challenges again, rather than thinking, oh, if I make mistakes, maybe they won't think I'm a genius. Don't make them into who I was in Missus Wilson's class, learn from what almost happened to me.
That's interesting, you know, when you think of the rook you've done on the importance of praising effort, you could see how a child who is very, very precocious, who things do come very easy for them, and they can just quickly memorize things and ace tests without studying. If you apply that theory of teaching them praising them for their effort, that will feel quite inauthentic to those students, don't you think so?
We we say more than praising the effort. It happened in that series of studies. We chose one form of process praise, but growth mindset has sometimes been oversimplified to say it's about effort and praising effort, and as you say, it would be inauthentic to praise their effort.
And also, I am wondering is it really bad to praise intelligence?
Is that bad? In a minute, Okay, we'll get to that.
Back to this precocious child. If they're challenged, they should sometimes be struggling and working hard. You can encourage them to try different strategies. If they're stock, you can show their progress over time, and you can show how the effort yielded some results over time. If they're only doing stuff that is quick and easy, then you don't get a chance to keep them loving and respecting and appreciating
the process. So kids at every level of current ability should be shown that challenges are interesting, easy is boring that when they're stuck trying new strategies, enlist aid, ramp up the effort and see the progress. All kids should be doing that.
Good.
I'm really glad that we talked about that. I saw an interesting study by Iaan Bates from twenty seventeen that I don't think was published. I emailed Timothy Bates about this and he doesn't respond yet to my email, so I want to sell on the record. It was just a preprint I found. But they found an interesting thing. They found that children's mindsets showed no relationship to IQ,
so it's uncorrelated to IQ. School grades are changing grades across the school year, with the only significant result being in the reverse direction better performance and children holding a fixed mindset. I wonder from a causal perspective, if you do genuinely have an extraordinarily high IQ, and some kids do at certain points in time. And I'm right there with you, by the way, Carol, we should write off kids, you know, with the lower IQs or kids with lower achievements.
I'm right there with you.
But there are kids who do have extraordinly high IQs. You could see from a cultural perspective that they could actually rightfully develop a fixed mindset if things are coming that easily to them, that actually matches their reality more than lower IQ students. And I wanted to see what you thought about that.
I'm I'm really interested in that.
Cool a fixed if you have.
If you have a fixed mindset and you say to your so it's fixed, and I've got it, and you never doubt it.
Oh, that'll be tricky when they actually do face challenges someday, right, babe.
But in the moment until that happens, they could be fine.
They could be fine.
Yeah, they could be fine.
Dix.
Mindset's not always a necessarily a detrimental thing.
Until you start thinking, oh, I don't want to do this, and maybe I'll look dumb. Oh I made a mistake. Maybe I'll look them. But if you're super secure in your fixed mindset, you can look good and not until later when other people start catching up with you. Or the other thing is the Lea and Bates studies were done in China, and you just found out something really important. There's this PISA test that is a worldwide achievement test that's given to hundreds of thousands of fifteen year olds
in seventy across seventy nine countries. Guess how many countries in how many countries a growth mindset was at some level positively related to PISA Achievement test scores?
How many countries?
How many countries that are seventy six out of the seventy nine?
Oh and China was one of that didn't. Yes, well, that's well, that is very interesting.
I'm so intrigued by that. And this is going to address a couple of things.
You add, Oh, that is interesting. Okay.
Now I'm in touch with a really fantastic young researcher in China and he said a few things that were illuminating. One of them goes back to something you said before. He gave a growth mindset intervention to you know, typically high achieving Chinese kids. It got them more intrinsically motivated, engaged with learning, It lowered their anxiety. But because it didn't raise their achievement, because they were they already apparently worked more than fifty hours a week on school work
out of school, nobody cared. So he's upset about that, as you are. And I am that no one cares about the well being just the grades.
But why was I'm glad I'm not the only one, not.
The only one. But also why wasn't the Chinese score positively related to achievement? The growth is it?
What is it about the Is it something about the culture?
And yeah, even negatively related to achievement direct correct?
Because they found in their study that those were the fixed mindset actually had higher performance.
Yes, and that that's what we're seeing in China in the PISA results, and I'm working with the PISA people to figure that out. It could be that when you're in such a high pressure called you know, they're heading toward the big high stakes test for getting into college, it's really high pressure. If you have a gross mindset, maybe you have a more sane attitude about some of the things. Maybe you think errors you can learn from
WHOA instead of errors are not permissible. So it's possible that under certain circumstances, having learning goals and thinking errors are informative and valuing progress rather than immediate achievement. Maybe you're a saner, happier kid, but maybe you're not at the top of the achievement distribution anymore.
Well, that's really would be really interesting for further research. Yeah, cross cultural patterns of fixed first growth, mindset, intervention effectiveness.
And what did it mean?
Yeah, that would be really truly interesting. So I want to talk about you know this this this quote unquote replication crisis that have been happening in other fields. There's this paper I know you love and I'm being sarcastic by Alexander Burgone at all in two thout that just came out recently, and they really you know, they take you to task on saying that you've overclaimed and overhyped
with some of your prior quotes. Would you still say things like the view you adopt yourself profoundly affects you lead your life. And they also take your task for saying mindset creates different psychological worlds for students and forms the core of their meeting systems. So would you would you say that those things are in light of the most recent effects sizes too dramatic?
What would you say? Because they really take it into this, as you know.
I know, and I appreciate that they're interested in mindsets and they challenge us and we get better. I think, given what I said before, how hard it is to change grades, achievement tests, scores, anything in the real world, I think our effects are striking. The fact that it's a fifty minute program that changes achievement for lower achievers and changes the course taking a year later. The fact that it can be distributed widely at incredibly low costs.
I think that's striking. I stand by striking.
Well, well, maybe we can distinguish between striking. It sounds like you're saying striking given the noisiness of the real world and all the other things that could have depressed the effect. I mean, how do we know objectively what is striking isn't without looking relative to other kinds of interventions and the goals and the outcomes.
And I mean I've seen some higher effects.
Well, I've seen some self efficacy interventions, don't they They're they're quite higher in terms of effect size.
Well, you have to have the benchmarks. I don't know the self efficacy literature or self efficacy interventions. It's possible that they're higher. We view gross mindset as one path to efficacy and then the maintaining of efficacy over time in the face of challenge.
I'm looking at okay, so, and thank you for being so open. This is a credit to you to be so have such open, honest, intellectual honesty to discuss these things with me.
So, first of all, I want to say thank you. I'm looking at this. Hey.
Hattie, Biggs and Perty nineteen ninety six found metaanatic average effect sides for the typical educational intervention on active performance be point five to seven. It looks like the average intervention is actually point five to seven. All met aanatotic analytic effects of mindset interventions and actual performance, like in the SISCMA analysis are less than point three to five, and most were nol as in that. That's what the cisc at all in twenty eighteen paper, and you found
that as well. So would I mean you could see also, could you could see ALSOE could say striking is over absolutely yeah.
But it turns out that many of the studies in the Hattie interventions were the cheating of particular information in class and then the testing of that information in class, which is very different. We don't teach anything of content, We change a mindset and then we look at grades in the real world over time, very different from teaching particular content and testing it. And I know John Hattie, he's looking into this now and he's a big fan of our work. I think he now agrees that you
have different benchmarks for different kinds of interventions. But you know, Scott, the one thing I want to emphasize, we're not perfect, and no intervention works everywhere. I think what I want to emphasize too, is we're not done. We consider our
intervention work to be in its infancy. I want to look back one day when we learn how to create growth mindset sustaining environments, and I want to look back and say, Wow, we have much bigger effect sizes now, which we think we will have when we learn how to teach teachers to create growth mindset producing and sustaining environments. We don't know how to do that yet. We call this our next big mount Everest. It's hard to change teachers,
it's hard to change contexts. But we feel strongly that we will not understand the power of mindset to change children's trajectories until we can help create those contexts.
Thank you for elaborating that.
You know, some educators might get this idea that they should be focusing on growth mindset interventions at the cost of actually teaching skills and abilities and knowledge. You're not talking about the Secret here, right, you know the book The Secret where whatever you believe is going to be true.
I mean I can't.
I mean, if you have really, really like no talent, Like when I was a kid, I could have all the growth mindset in the world about being in the NBA, and trust me, I wanted to be a great basketball player. But I don't think all the growth minds in the world would have really gotten me there.
So can you kind of put this in context? I guess as what I'm trying to.
Say, absolutely, mindset is not a miracle maker. Mindset is a growth mindset, is something that supports your being a learner, And what we want to do is help teachers understand how to integrate it into their teaching and teaching practices effectively to support students self advocacy about learning as well as they're learning. I think we underestimated how easy it would be to identify the practices that really worked and
to teach the practices that really work. In fact, in the beginning, I thought it was going to be just intuitive for teachers. I got after I published the book Mindset. I got all these emails where teachers said, I did these four things and here's what happened in my class, And I thought, wow, that's amazing. And I still believe they did that, But now I think they already had kind of a growth mindset and understanding of how to apply it, and the book kind of crystallized it and
allowed them to kind of run with it. But after that, aided by my Australian colleague Susan Mackie, who said, you know, I'm seeing a lot of false growth mindset in classrooms, she really opened my eyes to the fact that it's really hard to deeply teach what a growth mindset is and how to apply it. And again, that's our next big mount Everest. We don't know how to do that yet.
That's exciting to me.
To hear about your your most excited what you're most excited for in terms of future directions.
So that's that's the big mount. And do you want to leave today?
I'm so I'm so respectful of your time and and and and excited that you spent so much time with me. But what sleep, Here's anything else you want to say directly talking to to all the educators that are listening to this who really are excited about growth mind so they want to apply in their classroom, but they want to they.
Want to do it the right way. You know, anything you can say to them?
Yes, perts dot net p e r t s dot net founded by David Dave pound Escu I mentioned earlier give some tips, but stay tuned because over the next few years we hope to collaborate intensely with teachers who create classrooms full of students with growth mindsets. We hope to collaborate with many other researchers to climb that Mount Everest.
And at the end of that, when we're at the summit, we would like to give you all the gift of a growth mindset curriculum that teachers can truly effectively implement.
Well.
The stakes are high here and we have children's lives, you know, at Stakecare. So I wish this research very well, and I wish you very well, and I want to thank you. I want to end by saying I put a call on my Twitter.
Are you on Twitter?
You probably didn't even see this. I said, I'm so excited. I'm telling you with Cayle due anything you want me to ask you to ask And I got so many questions to ask you today, but one thing, and I wanted to leave you with. Someone just wrote, oh MG, just tell her thank you. So I just want to end on that note. So thanks for all the work and energy you've put into this research over the years, and your willingness and openness to seeing how the research evolves in the future.
Thank you, Scott. This it was just great talking.
To you, so exciting. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at Thusycology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more are on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.