Growth Mindset: Believing Talent Can Be Developed Through Effort

Growth mindset: failure as information, not a verdict

One phrase sums up this way of understanding learning fairly well: failing isn’t the same as being unable.

A growth mindset describes the belief that abilities can be developed through effort, strategy, and help from others. It doesn’t claim that talent doesn’t exist or that anyone can get anywhere: it claims that where you start doesn’t fix where you end up.

Where this concept comes from

Psychologist Carol Dweck spent much of her career studying how implicit beliefs about intelligence and talent shape behavior. She found two main ways of understanding them: as a fixed trait you’re born with (what her early work called an “entity” theory) or as something that develops with practice (an “incremental” theory).

One of her most cited studies followed 373 New York students through their first two years of middle school, seventh and eighth grade (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, and Dweck, 2007). Those who started out with an incremental view of intelligence saw their math grades improve over time, while the grades of those who saw it as fixed leveled off. The mechanism the authors propose is motivational: if you believe ability grows, a mistake is a clue for adjusting your strategy, not proof of your limit.

How it shows up day to day

• A preference for hard challenges you can learn something from, over easy tasks already mastered.
• Criticism is taken as information for improving, not as an attack on one’s worth.
• Persistence after a setback, instead of quickly deciding “this isn’t for me.”
• Attention to process: which strategy worked, what help was needed, what to change next time.

An everyday example: two people sign up for German classes and fail the first oral exam. One concludes she “has no ear for languages” and stops going. The other looks at what went wrong (she had only read, never practiced out loud) and changes her method. The difference isn’t in the exam result, but in what each believes that result says about her.

Praise that helps and praise that doesn’t

One of the best-known applications of this research concerns praise. In a series of experiments with children aged about 10 to 11, Mueller and Dweck (1998) gave everyone a task they solved successfully and praised them in one of two ways: “you must be smart” or “you must have worked hard.” After a difficult problem, the children praised for their intelligence more often chose easy tasks, enjoyed themselves less, and performed worse than those praised for their effort.

Dweck’s reading isn’t that any effort deserves praise. Praising the attempt when it isn’t working, without talking about strategy, can be a form of consolation that teaches nothing. What her studies support is putting the focus on process: the strategy chosen, persistence, seeking help.

What the evidence says today

The growth mindset caught on in schools around the world, and that has made it possible to measure its effect on a large scale. The result is more modest than the popular message:

• The link with grades is weak on average. Sisk et al. (2018) pooled 273 studies with more than 365,000 participants and found a very small average correlation between mindset and academic achievement (around r = 0.10). In a second meta-analysis of interventions (43 studies, more than 57,000 students), the average effect was also weak, though somewhat larger for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds or at risk of academic failure.
• It works better in certain contexts. The national experiment by Yeager et al. (2019), with a representative sample of U.S. high school students, tested an online intervention lasting under an hour. It improved the grades of lower-achieving students and increased enrollment in advanced math, but only in schools where peer norms supported the message.
• The “false growth mindset.” In 2015, Dweck herself warned about a popular version that reduces the idea to “trying harder” or to saying that anyone can do anything. She wrote that a growth mindset isn’t just about effort, and that she had made the mistake of presenting people as one type or the other rather than as mixtures.

In our reading, the concept remains useful as a description of how mistakes get interpreted, as long as it isn’t asked to do more than the data show: it isn’t a magic lever for performance, but a belief that influences which challenges get chosen and how long people stick with them.

The nuance almost nobody accounts for

Hardly anyone holds the same belief across every area of life. It’s entirely possible to have it strongly at work while, at the same time, feeling you have “no ear” for music or are “just not good” at drawing, without ever questioning that particular belief.

Our quiz captures that uneven split across domains in a result of its own, the mixed mindset. It’s a label from the quiz, not a technical term of Dweck’s, but it describes something she herself has emphasized.

Want to see how your mindset splits across different areas? Take the growth mindset quiz.

Sources

• Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H. & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child Development, 78(1), 246-263. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.00995.x
• Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.
• Dweck, C. S. (2015, September 22). Carol Dweck revisits the “growth mindset”. Education Week. edweek.org
• Mueller, C. M. & Dweck, C. S. (1998). Praise for intelligence can undermine children’s motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 33-52. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.33
• Sisk, V. F., Burgoyne, A. P., Sun, J., Butler, J. L. & Macnamara, B. N. (2018). To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses. Psychological Science, 29(4), 549-571. doi:10.1177/0956797617739704
• Yeager, D. S. et al. (2019). A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement. Nature, 573(7774), 364-369. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1466-y