I study mindsets mindsets are our beliefs about the nature and workings of human
attributes we're going to look at this when it comes to curiosity intellect and
achievement then we're going to look at it in terms of adjustment and mental
health and then we'll look at it in briefly in terms of physical health so
let's start with mindsets about intelligence in our work we find that
children and adults can have different perspectives on intelligence some favour
the view that intelligence is just a fixed trait you have a certain amount
and that's it some people are lucky they have a lot they're the chosen few and
others are not so lucky but nothing much you can do about it however others favor
what we call a growth mindset it's the view that whatever intellectual
abilities you have they can be developed through effort but not just effort and
hard work learning good strategies and lots of help input and support and
instruction from others now in a growth mindset you don't believe everyone is
the same or anyone can necessarily be Einstein but you believe that everyone
has the capacity for growth an important thing to keep in mind is it's not one or
the other as you'll see we can have different mindsets in different domains
you can think your intelligence is fixed but your personality can become ever
more wonderful or vice-versa also we can at different times have
different mindsets in this even in the same domain I may in general believe
that intelligence can be developed but they
maybe triggers in the environment that sometimes make me doubt that if I'm
facing a big challenge if I'm having a setback struggling and not making
progress if if I see someone who's much better and more successful than me it's
something I thought I was great at these are times that can trigger me into a
fixed mindset and then the idea is how do I get back so let's keep them in to
that in mind and come back to it later now people often say to me
so which mindset is true maybe it's good to have a growth mindset but what's the
truth now as with every dichotomy it's know some of both but what's so exciting
is that neuroscience is showing us on a daily basis practically the tremendous
plasticity of the brain much greater than we ever believed some
of my favorite findings in recent years is how research by two cow hench and
others reopening critical periods incredible periods art our sensitive
periods our time when Lara particular kinds of learning are privileged and we
think that the we used to think the window just closed or almost closed
after that period and yeah through genetic pharmacological and even
behavioral psychological means we're learning how to reopen some of those
critical periods to promote growth and learning again so let's look at how
mindsets work in the domain of achievement recently a few years back we
have the privilege of studying all the 10th graders in the country of Chile 168
thousand students and what we found in this study we were able to by the way
assess the mindsets that they favored whether
they believed intelligence was basically fixed or instead could be developed and
then we checked in on their achievement and what we found was that at every
level of family income there was a significant gap between those students
who endorsed a growth versus fixed mindset and the advantage was for the
kids who endorsed the growth mindset that gap was particularly large among
the poorest students and a growth mindset was least prevalent among the
poorest students so in no way are we saying oh you know forget poverty just
give them a mindset no way poverty obviously has so many pernicious
effects but we're beginning to think that maybe one of the ways that poverty
has a negative effect on achievement is by making the idea of growth the growth
of intellectual abilities less available and this is something we're following up
on we also have had a lively program of research I'm changing students mindsets
on seeing whether if we can promote and instill more of a growth mindset whether
this would help kids thrive over academic challenges so we've looked at
kids making the transition to junior high school or high school or college
and seeing whether they are more successful academically if they approach
that transition in a growth mindset in one study we did really the first study
that we did students were given the control group and the experimental
group were given eight sessions of something good the control group learned
eight sessions of study skills we worked with the teachers to find out what kinds
of learning skills would be useful for kids that year that transition to
seventh grade and that's what we taught in a lively and effective way to the
students in the control group but in the experimental group we combined the
learning skills with growth mindset with the idea that every time you work hard
on something challenging the neurons in your brain form new or stronger
connections and over time you can get smarter
we made the analogy the brain is like a muscle when you exercise it it gets
stronger and we taught them how to put this into practice in their schoolwork
we then checked in on them months later at the end of the year and we found the
red line the students who had just gotten the study skills continued to
show declining grades but the students who had gotten the study skills with
growth mindset showed a rebound in their grades by the end of the year David then
went on to look at whether a growth mindset online intervention or self
administered intervention could potentially prevent some clinical levels
of depression as kids made the transition to high school that's the
year that depression really shoots up and he wondered
if you don't judge yourself as harshly as you think about it if you think about
it as a time of growth and learning rather than a time when you're finding
out permanent terrible things about yourself could this help and what he
found was that there was across three studies and in each study a significant
reduction in kids reporting depression that reached a clinical threshold so
learning people can change people can grow and develop you know everyone's
trying to do what they have to do to cope they're not doing it just to be
mean they're doing it for their own motivated reasons it doesn't mean
they're always going to be that way it doesn't mean you're always going to
be and feel this way led to reductions in reports of depression David and his
colleagues have also gone on to study stress and anxiety among adolescents
finding that a growth mindset intervention makes them well let's think
about it so you're in high school and you're always looking around
it's a threatening environment for many they're on edge how am i doing am i oh
whoa whoa what was that look am I being excluded am i the next one to be Boyd
what's going on what's happening also I'm struggling with schoolwork for the
first time what does that mean about me I thought I was smart does it mean I'm
not smart should I avoid challenges so I won't look not smart so you have
all these choices going on all the time how do you react so David and his
colleagues showed that after a self-administered growth mindset session
kids showed lower anxiety less threat when they were asked to do public
speaking in front of peers which is a standard stress situation public
speaking in front of peers who are evaluating you so in the short run that
chronic stress was reduced and then showed differences over time
I mean acute stress was reduced and then showed differences over time in chronic
stress to conclude I hope I've shown you that the beliefs or mindsets adolescents
have about themselves and their attributes can play an important role in
their health mental health achievement trajectories over time I want to
emphasize that the mindset environments students people are in are of the utmost
important of importance I focused on the individual level today
but this systemic the environmental level the mindset cultures people are in
are tremendously important and not only instilling the idea of growth and
development but maintaining it over time