Growth mindset: people who believe effort - and not ability - determines success are more resilient, skillful, hard-working, perseverant in the face of failure.
Most of the growth mindset experiments prime their subjects, but recent priming experiments have famously failed to replicate. Dweck’s experiment:
- Group A: easy test (success) -> final bound-to-fail test
- Group B: hard test (told they’re not working hard enough) -> final bound-to-fail test
- Group B outperformed Group A. Explanations:
- Dweck: Telling As to work harder made them less helpless.
- Alternative: B’s are used to failing get less flustered than A’s who have been artificially made to succeed.
In Dweck’s work, why do helpless children and the mastery-oriented children always start out performing at the same level? Shouldn’t the fixed-mindset kids already be underperforming? Why do we find enough fixed-mindset students at elite colleges?
If the only thing that affects success is how much effort you put in, poor kids seem to be putting in a heck of a lot less effort in a surprisingly linear way. But telling kids that they’re failing because they just don’t have the right work ethic is a crappy thing to do.
Mindset theory suggests that believing intelligence to be mostly malleable has lots of useful benefits. And maybe this is worth it. But you’re not “debunking the myth of genius”. Genius remains super-important, just like conscientiousness and wealth and health and privilege and everything else. No, you’re telling a Noble Lie to the children because you think it’s useful.
Winners never quit, and quitters never win, but those who never quit and never win are idiots.