Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

So telling children they’re smart, in the end, made them feel dumber and act dumber, but claim they were smarter. I don’t think this is what we’re aiming for when we put positive labels—“gifted,” “talented,” “brilliant”—on people. We don’t mean to rob them of their zest for challenge and their recipes for success. But that’s the danger.

Here is a letter from a man who’d read some of my work:

Dear Dr. Dweck,

It was painful to read your chapter … as I recognized myself therein.

As a child I was a member of The Gifted Child Society and continually praised for my intelligence. Now, after a lifetime of not living up to my potential (I’m 49), I’m learning to apply myself to a task. And also to see failure not as a sign of stupidity but as lack of experience and skill. Your chapter helped see myself in a new light.

Seth Abrams

This is the danger of positive labels. There are alternatives, and I will return to them later in the chapter on parents, teachers, and coaches.

NEGATIVE LABELS AND HOW THEY WORK

I was once a math whiz. In high school, I got a 99 in algebra, a 99 in geometry, and a 99 in trigonometry, and I was on the math team. I scored up there with the boys on the air force test of visual-spatial ability, which is why I got recruiting brochures from the air force for many years to come.

Then I got a Mr. Hellman, a teacher who didn’t believe girls could do math. My grades declined, and I never took math again.

I actually agreed with Mr. Hellman, but I didn’t think it applied to me. Other girls couldn’t do math. Mr. Hellman thought it applied to me, too, and I succumbed.

Everyone knows negative labels are bad, so you’d think this would be a short section. But it isn’t a short section, because psychologists are learning how negative labels harm achievement.

No one knows about negative ability labels like members of stereotyped groups. For example, African Americans know about being stereotyped as lower in intelligence. And women know about being stereotyped as bad at math and science. But I’m not sure even they know how creepy these stereotypes are.

Research by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson shows that even checking a box to indicate your race or sex can trigger the stereotype in your mind and lower your test score. Almost anything that reminds you that you’re black or female before taking a test in the subject you’re supposed to be bad at will lower your test score—a lot. In many of their studies, blacks are equal to whites in their performance, and females are equal to males, when no stereotype is evoked. But just put more males in the room with a female before a math test, and down goes the female’s score.

This is why. When stereotypes are evoked, they fill people’s minds with distracting thoughts—with secret worries about confirming the stereotype. People usually aren’t even aware of it, but they don’t have enough mental power left to do their best on the test.

This doesn’t happen to everybody, however. It mainly happens to people who are in a fixed mindset. It’s when people are thinking in terms of fixed traits that the stereotypes get to them. Negative stereotypes say: “You and your group are permanently inferior.” Only people in the fixed mindset resonate to this message.

So in the fixed mindset, both positive and negative labels can mess with your mind. When you’re given a positive label, you’re afraid of losing it, and when you’re hit with a negative label, you’re afraid of deserving it.

When people are in a growth mindset, the stereotype doesn’t disrupt their performance. The growth mindset takes the teeth out of the stereotype and makes people better able to fight back. They don’t believe in permanent inferiority. And if they are behind—well, then they’ll work harder and try to catch up.

The growth mindset also makes people able to take what they can and what they need even from a threatening environment. We asked African American students to write an essay for a competition. They were told that when they finished, their essays would be evaluated by Edward Caldwell III, a distinguished professor with an Ivy League pedigree. That is, a representative of the white establishment.

Edward Caldwell III’s feedback was quite critical, but also helpful—and students’ reactions varied greatly. Those with a fixed mindset viewed it as a threat, an insult, or an attack. They rejected Caldwell and his feedback.

Here’s what one student with the fixed mindset thought: “He’s mean, he doesn’t grade right, or he’s obviously biased. He doesn’t like me.”

Said another: “He is a pompous asshole.… It appears that he was searching for anything to discredit the work.”

And another, deflecting the feedback with blame: “He doesn’t understand the conciseness of my points. He thought it was vague because he was impatient when he read it. He dislikes creativity.”

None of them will learn anything from Edward Caldwell’s feedback.