Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

The students with the growth mindset may also have viewed him as a dinosaur, but he was a dinosaur who could teach them something.

“Before the evaluation, he came across as arrogant and overdemanding. [After the evaluation?] ‘Fair’ seems to be the first word that comes to mind.… It seems like a new challenge.”

“He sounded like an arrogant, intimidating, and condescending man. [What are your feelings about the evaluation?] The evaluation was seemingly honest and specific. In this sense, the evaluation could be a stimulus … to produce better work.”

“He seems to be proud to the point of arrogance. [The evaluation?] He was intensely critical.… His comments were helpful and clear, however. I feel I will learn much from him.”

The growth mindset allowed African American students to recruit Edward Caldwell III for their own goals. They were in college to get an education and, pompous asshole or not, they were going to get it.

Do I Belong Here?

Aside from hijacking people’s abilities, stereotypes also do damage by making people feel they don’t belong. Many minorities drop out of college and many women drop out of math and science because they just don’t feel they fit in.

To find out how this happens, we followed college women through their calculus course. This is often when students decide whether math, or careers involving math, are right for them. Over the semester, we asked the women to report their feelings about math and their sense of belonging in math. For example, when they thought about math, did they feel like a full-fledged member of the math community or did they feel like an outsider; did they feel comfortable or did they feel anxious; did they feel good or bad about their math skills?

The women with the growth mindset—those who thought math ability could be improved—felt a fairly strong and stable sense of belonging. And they were able to maintain this even when they thought there was a lot of negative stereotyping going around. One student described it this way: “In a math class, [female] students were told they were wrong when they were not (they were in fact doing things in novel ways). It was absurd, and reflected poorly on the instructor not to ‘see’ the students’ good reasoning. It was alright because we were working in groups and we were able to give & receive support among us students.… We discussed our interesting ideas among ourselves.”

The stereotyping was disturbing to them (as it should be), but they could still feel comfortable with themselves and confident about themselves in a math setting. They could fight back.

But women with the fixed mindset, as the semester wore on, felt a shrinking sense of belonging. And the more they felt the presence of stereotyping in their class, the more their comfort with math withered. One student said that her sense of belonging fell because “I was disrespected by the professor with his comment, ‘that was a good guess,’ whenever I made a correct answer in class.”

The stereotype of low ability was able to invade them—to define them—and take away their comfort and confidence. I’m not saying it’s their fault by any means. Prejudice is a deeply ingrained societal problem, and I do not want to blame the victims of it. I am simply saying that a growth mindset helps people to see prejudice for what it is—someone else’s view of them—and to confront it with their confidence and abilities intact.

Trusting People’s Opinions

Many females have a problem not only with stereotypes, but with other people’s opinions of them in general. They trust them too much.

One day, I went into a drugstore in Hawaii to buy dental floss and deodorant, and, after fetching my items, I went to wait in line. There were two women together in front of me waiting to pay. Since I am an incurable time stuffer, at some point I decided to get my money ready for when my turn came. So I walked up, put the items way on the side of the counter, and started to gather up the bills that were strewn throughout my purse. The two women went berserk. I explained that in no way was I trying to cut in front of them. I was just preparing for when my turn came. I thought the matter was resolved, but when I left the store, they were waiting for me. They got in my face and yelled, “You’re a bad-mannered person!”

My husband, who had seen the whole thing from beginning to end, thought they were nuts. But they had a strange and disturbing effect on me, and I had a hard time shaking off their verdict.