Best of Series: The Latest science of Growth Mindset With Carol Dweck

Hello and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is part of the best of series where we highlight some of the most exciting and enthralling and enlightening episodes from the archives of the Psychology Podcast. Enjoy! Welcome to the Psychology Podcast where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior and creativity. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman and in each episode I have a conversation with a guest who will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding of yourself, others and the world of living. Hopefully we will also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. Today, it's a real honor to have Carol Dweck on the podcast. Dr. Dweck is a leading researcher in the field of motivation and is the Lewis and Virginia Eden Professor of Psychology at Stanford. Her research examines the role of mindsets in personal achievement and organizational effectiveness. Dr. Dweck has also held professorships at Columbia and Harvard universities, has lectured to education, business and sports groups around the world, has addressed the United Nations, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and has won 12 Lifetime Achievement Awards for her research. Her bestselling book, Mindset, has been widely influential and has been translated into over 25 languages. Dr. Dweck, it's so great to chat with you today. Scott, it's great to chat with you. Oh boy, there's so much to talk about. I was thinking about starting with your earliest sort of dissertation research because I remember 2003, I remember I was studying intelligence, I was reading a book, I really enjoyed reading of yours. It was one of these, it was an academic book, it was short, it was short and it went through, it didn't use the language mindsets. This is like back in the day, it was incremental versus entity, right? Can you tell us a little bit about this earliest research? Well, yeah, I'd love to tell you about it. When I was in graduate school, I was kind of gripped by a question. Why did some kids shy away from challenges and crumble at the first sign of failure, while other kids know smarter or more able at the task, seemed to relish taking on challenges and thrive in the face of obstacles. And pretty soon, I found the question was a little bit wrong. It wasn't just that some kids thrived, wanted a challenge or coped with obstacles. I found out that some of the kids loved setbacks. They said things like, I love a challenge, I was hoping this would be informative. And I thought, I'm giving them failure problems. And they're thinking, this makes it worth their while. I couldn't relate to them at all. I thought they were from another planet. But I thought, I'm going to figure out their secret. I'm going to bottle it and I'm going to take a few healthy swigs of it myself. Because I thought I have a lot to learn from these 10 year old kids. That's how I got started on this research. Wow. So it sounds like the original observation was more a behavioral finding than a cognitive mindset finding. Yeah. So you described it. That's so interesting. I wanted to figure out the cognitive underpinnings of it. And my reason was, it was personally relevant. My sixth grade teacher, I kind of figured this out later that it was me as we say, me search, not just research. Oh my gosh. That's what we all do, right? Yeah. And I recommend it because you never get enough of it. My sixth grade teacher had seated us around the room in IQ order. We were already the top IQ class in the sixth grade of five classes. And yet she thought every IQ point was monumentally important. And not only telling you how smart you were, but whether you had good character could be trusted and essentially what you were worth in her eyes. Bending the whole year in that classroom, I was really influenced. Now you might think, oh, I felt downtrodden and unappreciated. No, I was in the first row, first seat. You would think, oh, I won that IQ prize. But as I looked back, I realized I never wanted challenges again. And I arranged my life to be purely successful, not to topple from my height. So I wanted to figure out what goes on in people's minds that can allow them to risk taking on challenges and that can give them the fortitude to keep going when things seem rough. I, yeah, it's such a great question. An important question. I was the opposite. I was in special education as a kid. I don't know if I ever told you that for an auditory processing disability. So people thought I was really slow, slow learner, because I was having trouble hearing things in real time. And sort of the impact of expectations can certainly have an effect on mindsets, I'm sure. And the way we think about things, I'm wondering when did the shift from entity and incremental become fixed versus growth? That was when I wrote the book, mindset. I realized nobody could remember entity and incremental. I always had to remember that myself. Which is if they couldn't remember entity and they couldn't remember incremental. So when I came to write the book, mindset, I said, well, I have to find some more user friendly terms. But kind of a prior question is how, if we just call it mindsets now, how did we get to the point of thinking that mindsets could play a role? Absolutely. And I asked this because it correct me if I'm wrong, but it wasn't entity and incremental. They were called beliefs in your original language. There were beliefs, not mindsets. Is that right? Yeah, but I kind of mean the same thing. Okay. I'd love to hear more about that. Yeah. In my earliest work, I looked at attributions kids made for their successes and failures. Did they think the failure measured their ability or did they think the failure meant try a new strategy? Seek advice. Just keep going. But eventually we said, why does failure have such a negative meaning for some kids and kind of an informative meaning for other kids? And in the early 1980s working with Mary Bandura, Al Bandura's daughter. I was going to ask her. We suddenly realized, you know, when you think you're being measured and that judgment is really important, doesn't that kind of imply that you have this fixed thing? That's being judged. And if you think it's just a failure, it's just a clue for changing your strategy or trying harder or getting input. And then learning more. Doesn't that kind of imply that you think your ability can be developed? And suddenly we look to each other. It just bold us over. What if people have fundamentally different ideas about intelligence? And they're carting them around with them and it's affecting how they view challenges, how they view setbacks? Well, you know, there was no stopping us at that point. Hi, everyone. Just wanted to take a quick break and talk about my new book that's coming out April 7th. It's called Transcend the new science of self-actualization. Really excited to present this book to you all. It represents the culmination of many, many years of hard work and synthesis. What I've done in this book is I've taken Maslow's classic hierarchy of needs and I've revised it for the 21st century. Trying to bring back humanistic psychology. I think that the field of humanistic psychology in the 50s and 60s really got a lot right about humanity and the creative possibilities of humans, as well as the humanitarian and spiritual possibilities. really hoping this book can present a vision of humanity that transcends us all and helps us connect deeper with each other, but also help us reach our greatest potential individually and collectively. So if you want to check out this book, you can actually pre-order it right now on Amazon, as well as other, there's independent bookstores, I think you can pre-order it from, and then on April 7th, starting April 7th, it should be in bookstores. A lot of people are wondering throughout the years how they can support me and the Psychology podcast. Here's the time. You're always welcome to contribute money to the podcast, help support it. If you're a long time listener or even short time listener, you want to not only support the podcast, but dive deeper into a lot of the concepts and ideas we talk about constantly on the show. This is a great way to do that by buying this book. So please check the book out and let me know what you think. There was a good confluence of research around that as well, because I remember my colleague, Joshua Aronson, was also doing some research that I think contributed to that. Just this overall idea of the malleability of our beliefs. Back, Joshua Aronson and his colleagues, Catherine Good, Mickey Inslect, Carrie Freed, they did some of the first mindset interventions. Before we published any interventions, we had published mindset experiments where we measured or changed people's mindsets within an experimental situation to look at the impact. But Joshua Aronson, Catherine Good and their colleagues, did the first actual interventions where they changed students' mindsets and compared to a control group, they taught a growth mindset, the idea that abilities can be developed and looked at what happened to grades or achievement test scores over time. Those were the first, I would say, landmark studies that took some of the ideas we had developed and really put them to the test. Really for the first time, I fulfilled my dream of bottling it. What were these kids' secrets and delivering it? So that was very exciting research and we followed it with some, these were in-person interventions. We followed it a few years later with a study Blackwell, Tresniewski and Wack 2007. We were very excited that we could do these in-person interventions that could have an impact on grades or achievement test scores. This was very, very exciting. But it was limited because it cost a fortune. We, for the Blackwell studies, we had a big grant from the William T. Grant Foundation. We had something like a dozen research assistants that went out to the school several times a week and you can't scale that up. So that posed a big problem. I could see that. I could see that. You could validate the ideas but you couldn't really scale it up. And two kind of big things happened. One was that Dave Ponescu, Stanford PhD, created a platform for delivering educational interventions online to schools. Of course, then we had to create interventions that were amenable to that. We had to kind of distill the mindset interventions. Can you describe one of the interventions? If I was one of the kids, what would I see? Well, I'll tell you what we do now. We built upon these interventions and the early ones had a lot of this but I'll tell you what we do now. The mindset interventions are aimed at adolescents because they're self-administered. 9th graders? You've done a lot with 9th graders, right? Yes. 9th graders and older. So first, the downfall of a lot of adolescent interventions is that people say to them, hey, where grownups? And we know how you should think. Well, you've already lost them, right? That's not what you need to say. I won't start there. I won't start there. So we start with, hey, we're developing these programs. We study learning. We're experts in that. But you are the experts, say, in high school or the transition to high school, whichever is appropriate. And we need to learn from you what it's like and how we can change our program in the future to take advantage of your knowledge. We respect them in so many other ways. First, we explain the growth mindset in terms of neuroscience of learning with graphs and so on. In a way that really treats them like the intelligent people they are, we have quotes from older students who have been through a version of the program before. We have quotes from esteemed figures in the world. We just found them on social media or the internet. And we also have exercises originally created by Joshua Aronson to internalize it. The growth mindset, we said, hey, suppose there's a ninth grade student next year and this student is struggling, could you write a letter to this student and giving them encouragement in terms of the growth mindset principles you've learned. And we kind of list those principles. And then they write a personal letter to the student. These letters are really kind of heartwarming. We also tell them why they'd want to have a growth mindset. Now to us nerds, why they don't want to have a growth mindset and grow a stronger brain. To us nerds, that's obvious. Give me more of those IQ points. That's kind of the coin of our realm, the brain, a strong brain, a smart brain. But that may not be true for everyone. And so now we say, we ask them to think about how a stronger brain can help them with their goals in life. So what are your goals in life? What would you like to contribute and how can a stronger brain help you? These are, so this is the kind of intervention that we've developed. And in our biggest study to date, we worked about two years to hone it, two years of honing the program and piloting, re-honing and repiloting. Is that the National Study of Learning Mindsets? Yes. That's the big mama. Yes, we had a pre-registered large scale study before that. But this was the big mama of pre-registered. The hypotheses were pre-registered, the analyses were pre-registered. But let me back up and say, this was a wacky idea. Which one was? The National Study. Not growth mindset there. That's pretty wacky. But in around 2015, David Yeager, professor at the University of Texas now had this wacky idea, he can be a great teacher. being a White House conference to kind of air the idea. I would say the idea was full-hearty, but he's kind of visionary. So we all went along with it, and we all worked super hard on it. But it is kind of wacky that you can think about delivering a growth mindset intervention to a large national sample of ninth graders making that tradition. Was it nationally representative? Yes. Wow. Okay. Was nationally representative? One of the first psychological interventions, or maybe the to be done with a nationally representative sample. David engaged a series of several research firms, one to constitute the sample and conduct the intervention, supervised, the interventions, one to harvest the data. So it was really hands-off. He also engaged a group of Bayesian statisticians to analyze the data blind to make sure that our analyses were entirely seeworthy. So yeah, so across the nation went out our two sessions, total of 50 minutes, growth mindset intervention, versus a control intervention that looked very much the same. But just taught about the brain and its functions, but didn't teach a growth mindset. I see. And I think one of the most wonderful parts of this study was this. We over-sampled sites where we thought it wouldn't work. I think it's unusual for researchers to seek their own non-replication. Well, you're curious what context it might not work, right? Yes. So where doesn't it replicate? No psychological anything works everywhere. And what could we learn from that in order to improve our results and the results for kids in the future? We always want to know where are we wrong and what can we learn from? And we have a whole history of being somewhat wrong and learning from it. And I can enumerate that if you'd be interested. But first I probably should finish the national. Yeah, I'd love to hear that. And we'll have time to talk about that. So tell me about the results that you found to just finish up the thread on this big study. Yeah, absolutely. The first thing we found was that there was a meaningful increase in grade point average for the lower achieving kids who were in the growth mindset intervention group. They were the pre-registered group of targeted kids for the increase in grades. Do you know what the effect size was? The effect size was something that sounds small, 0.11. That's like you're talking about like 7000 7000 was a 14,530. Something like that. Depending on which analyses something like that. And which grades could be matched up. So that that effect size you just said was that for the low achieving group in particular? Or okay, so so it was even smaller for the average of everyone? Yes, there was no effect as we had predicted for the higher. Now we went into the literature because that's about what we were getting in our pilot. And you could say, whoa, that's negligible. Look at Cohen's effect sizes or had he's effect sizes for education. You would need like a microscope. I was going to say that. I can't say that. So we went into the. I love that you have a microscope on your desk right there. That's pretty. Like you do that against I could take a screen capture of that. I love that. Okay, God. I love that. So we went into the literature on educational interventions. And we found something pretty startling. The most successful interventions with adolescents. And large scale expensive ones seem to top out at about point two. It's. And when we're talking about long term outcomes like grades, not on a test a few days later for what you just taught. But grades over time, point two. When you look at adolescents, what's the effect of a year of schooling on achievement test scores? Point two. What's the effect of an excellent teacher versus an average teacher for adolescents? Point two. And a big study that was done funded through IES on the most promising educational interventions. They too topped out at point two when they were subjected to a rigorous test. They topped out at about point two to point two, three. So the fact that we got half of that with a five o'clock minute intervention that cost like 25 cents, 50 cents. Really just the minimal, minimal. We are excited. And then when we looked into the non-delitterature, they're most. Aside from opt-in opt-out, which has huge effects, most of the famous effects are between point one and point two. My gosh, there's just. There's nothing that really like is dramatic. Yeah, and many medical effects that we can cite are kind of like that. So that was really eye-opening. It's eye-opening in a number of ways. One way I'm more shocked that how come no one's been able to develop an educational intervention that is striking? You know, above point five of point six. Yeah, a lot of things work better with younger kids. It's hard to reach adolescents. One-on-one tutoring with great tutors can get you more. But these kind of wholesale large-scale interventions, it's just so multiply determined. There are so many reasons kids aren't achieving. There are so many reasons they may reject or not profit from an intervention. So yeah. And I would even say that you're. I've actually seen larger effects than even that with the 2018 meta-analysis. They've found an effect size, I think, of point three, four for well-SES, from students from well-SES homes, benefited from the mindset programs. I've seen effect size of point three, four. So that's even bigger. Yeah, that's even bigger. But they've got very weak effects for, you know, just like you found for other, you know, higher achieving or higher-SES students. Yes. And so those that larger effect size include some of the face-to-face ones that did get larger, the black, well, the aronsons, those did get larger effect sizes. But when you scale up and condense the program and you're not tailoring it or you're not really interacting with particular kids, and also the large-scale are intent to treat. You've got kids in there who can't read, who can't pay attention on their own. So that deflates the effect sizes. But it was just so eye-opening to see how hard it is to do anything. So we were pretty happy with what we could do. And also the fact, if you multiply it by all the kids who are ninth graders, that could, you know, reorient. Some of them the second finding was I'm like on the edge of my seat here Go on That we were on the edges of our seats So the second finding was because you might say oh Gross-minded interventions are not for higher higher achieving kids They're just for lower achieving fit kids, but that wouldn't be true Across the achievement levels we saw an increase in Advanced math course taking that electing of advanced math course a Year later in 10th grade And this was even slightly greater among the higher achieving kids probably because there were more Advanced math courses in their schools or because They had more of the foundation, but yes more advanced math taking a Year later we were very excited about this and again, although this was a few percentage points That's what they get and Actually Danny Coniman reviewing the Nudge studies said hey in the real world a few percentage points You know again multiplied by a lot of people at a low cost That's pretty good. I think that is a fair point. Absolutely. You know Matthew effects Are important, you know the rich get richer poor get poor kind of idea these these things can snowball especially if you start really really young Yes, they can snowball and another way you can think of them over time is you do a little better a little choices along the way It's not just one time so you do a little better overall You take an advanced math course You graduate from high school you choose to Seek higher edgy. So just little if you can shift enough of those little choices Your hand in an impact Yeah, I'd love to hear more about the conditions which it didn't work because I think that'd be really useful to Educators to hear one thing you told me Or that is in the paper as well is that it didn't work when peer norms weren't favorable is that right? Can you elaborate what that means for teachers who are listening? So at the end of the second session of the mindset intervention and the control group We asked kids Whether they wanted to work if there was enough time whether they wanted to choose some problems that were Easy and they'd be sure to get right and we showed them that on a math worksheet Um that was keyed into their math curriculum or Challenging problems that they might that were hard but they could learn something useful So for each school just Zeroing in on the control group. Yeah, we could see was this a school full of challenge loving peers or challenge denying peers What we found was that when a child In the growth mindset condition Dwelled within a challenge rejecting school We saw that the kids in the growth mindset condition were themselves choosing more challenging Problems than their peers, but the question was could they take their growth mindset out into the real world now and have it take root and flourish and turn into higher grades And the answer was when you have peers if you take your kind of new or enhanced growth mindset learning and you Look interested in schoolwork and you work harder and you ask the teacher for input or you start answering questions in class And your peers don't like that You're not going to do it So that's a really interesting finding and then another thing you said you're you're writing up right now is potentially the role of teacher mindset Like whether if a teacher has a fixed mindset does that have an effect on on the teaching? Yes so We In the study we studied math teachers in particular That's a subject that kids find really hard and yet we know That the future world is really wanting kids to be savvy and math tech etc So We found that if your math teacher and now we're focusing on math grades If your math teacher had more of a growth mindset reported having more of a growth mindset You showed enhance as you know as a group on average you showed enhanced grades in math Uh at the end of the year But if your math teacher reported having a fixed mindset the Gross mindset intervention did not work it did not take root again at the end of the second session these kids want to challenge it but again um You kind of take it out into the world your new or enhanced growth mindset and you say does it work here So maybe you try a little harder just the teacher notice and respond maybe your grade goes up a little Does the teacher notice and respond? Um, maybe you look for opportunities to revise your work and get credit are there those opportunities? so We look at it now as the teachers creating either Opportunities in the classroom or reactions in the classroom That support the nascent or newly increased growth mindset or that kind of nip it in the bud Are they good are they good coaches or not in a sense? Oh So here's his child coming off of growth mindset intervention Maybe willing to work harder willing to get more instruction Um wanting to be recognized and appreciated by the teacher um And it is or isn't there Hi all just a quick break to let you all know that this episode is sponsored by learning and the brain Learning in the brain's mission is to connect educators to the latest research and the science of learning through education conferences Summer institutes one-day seminars and on-site professional development I've had the great pleasure of speaking at several of their conferences already and they always have an amazing array of presenters Many of them are leading national experts on psychology, neuroscience and education If you are an educator interested in the brain and using the learning sciences to improve your school classroom or practice This is the conference for you Learning in the brain runs three conferences a year in Boston, San Francisco and New York City and summer events in Boston and Santa Barbara To find out more about learning in the brains upcoming events please go to learning and the brain.com That's learning and the brain.com Okay now back to the show I have a question I was thinking as you were talking there's such a focus in this research on academic achievement as the dependent variable Have you looked at like the relationship between growth mindset interventions and you know there are other things in life right? So like what like a meaning in life or well-being or personal growth or hope or You know so many other things that you know social relationships Other things that are important school as well. Has anyone ever looked at other outcomes? Yes. Yeah. Okay. I'm dying to hear what they found but Why do we focus on grades test scores, etc Um well first of all they are important and they become more and more important in the modern world to have a um We And let me just stay in that domain for a minute we Things that a growth mindset gets you to the grades because of a greater desire for learning and a greater interest in errors and nurse neuroscience work by Moser Schroeder and college shows different brain responses to error. So we're really in the business of creating more engaged learners. But is the world gonna listen if it doesn't lead to higher grades? We weren't so sure. Well, that's so sad. I know it's sad. What if it leads to higher self-actualization? No one cares about that. Not yet, you've got to measure that self-actualization in some way. Well, we get to that. Higher income. No, that's not how I would measure that. But what do you. Personal fulfillment. Doesn't personal fulfillment matter anymore these days? Did it ever matter? To me, personal fulfillment and contribution, that's the be-all and end-all. Personal growth. Contribute them. That's everything to me. But we also want to show the world that it does both. So you have. There are studies that go beyond academic achievement. I don't see those studies. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, I don't see those studies. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So. Right. So, David Yeager has a whole line of research on changing mindsets about personality. He started it when he was a PhD student at Stanford. He's been very prolific in his career. I know. He's fantastic. And, yeah, he's visionary and the amount of energy he has is extraordinary. So, anyway, he teaches. He did the groundwork and then did interventions, teaching kids that personality is not fixed. Personal skills, social skills need not be fixed. That everybody is capable. Everybody has the potential for change. That's why the way we don't say change is likely or inevitable or infinite or infinite. Not everyone can be, you know, intellectually gifted, right? Open question. Yeah, but we don't we don't know who can or who can't. But everyone has the potential for growth. The reason I say we don't know is we don't know what anyone's asymptot is. We don't know what anyone's, like, high point on their trajectory is. I don't want to be in the business of deciding in advance who can be brilliant and who can't. Because I take as my expert Albert Einstein. He says, "I really was a slow learner." He says, "Everyone thought they understood light and mess and speed and energy and I just kept saying, "I don't get it." Well, he ended up reconceptualizing the whole thing. I've read that his early, read that some of that was over, overplayed his early difficulties. When you actually look into it, he actually was a good student. Oh, I'm not talking about whether he was a good student. He was, he says, "I was slow to understand." Others understood it faster than I did. But it turns out they didn't understand it as deeply as he did. Didn't he, like, you know, he was sitting in the classroom and he was able to just imagine what would be like being on a beam of light through space. I mean, that seems like that came easier to him than others, that visualization. But the point I'm trying to make is that there were, there have been many students who didn't seem promising to their teachers who went on to do great things. I was really in colleagues ever and the late Anne Brown was labeled retarded when she was a teenager in England. Because she hadn't yet learned to read. In my book, I talk about a scientist who, I think a Nobel Prize winner. But some, a great scientist. He later in life found his school records and found out he had a pretty low IQ or a lower IQ than he thought. He says he might not have tried to be a scientist. So I just, I don't like deciding in advance. I think that is a really good point. I've heard some, some thoughts from the giftedness, gifted education community. Some of them have drawn on your work as suggesting that you're denying the existence of intellectual giftedness at any point in time. And I was wondering to hear some of your thoughts on that. Oh no, I do not deny. And it should be clear from some of my writing and even in the book mindset. I don't deny that some kids are precocious and should be supported. Every child should be challenged. I love that. And that child should be taught to love challenge and not allowed to be bored in school. If they want to take a college course and they're nine years old, I'm so totally in favor of that. And that's favorite parents pushing the kids constantly. But when that Ellen winner calls it the rage to learn is there the rage to master. Yeah, go with it. A lot of educators have wrongly interpreted. So again, in mindset, I talk about these incredibly precocious kids. People have said, oh, cut out gifted and tell in my name have said cut out gifted and talented programs. Have said, you know, homogenize kids and in ways that don't challenge the kids who are more advanced. I don't agree with that. You're not saying that on the further record. You're not saying that. Okay, cool. I think that'll really make a lot of people in the gift education can be really happy to hear that. I don't say there aren't things to change and learn. I think kids, kids who are way advanced must be kept engaged in learning, not just being gifted and talented. Must love challenges. And rather than thinking, oh, if I make mistakes, maybe they won't think I'm a genius. Don't make them into who I was and Mrs. Wilson's class. Learn from what almost happened to me. That's interesting. You know, when you think of the work you've done on the importance of praising effort, you could see how a child who is very, very precocious, you come very easy for them and they can just quickly memorize things and ace tests without studying. If you apply that theory of teaching them, praising them for their effort, that will feel quite inauthentic to those students, don't you think? Yes. So we say more than praising the effort had happened in that series of studies we chose one form of process praise. But growth mindset has sometimes been oversimplified to say it's about effort and praising effort. And as you say, it would be inauthentic to praise their effort. And also I am wondering, is it really bad to praise intelligence? Is that bad? That in a minute. Okay. We'll get to that. After this precocious child. If they're challenged, they should sometimes be struggling and working hard. You can encourage them to try different strategies. If they're stuck, you can show their progress over time. And you can show how the effort yielded some results over time. only doings. stuff that is quick and easy, then you don't get a chance to keep them loving and respecting and appreciating the process. So kids at every level of current ability should be shown that challenges are interesting, easy as boring, that when they're stuck, try new strategies and list a ramp up the effort and see the progress. All kids should be doing that. Good, I'm really glad that we talked about that. I saw an interesting study by Lee and Beads from 2017 that I don't think was published. I emailed Timothy Beads about this and he hasn't responded to my email. So I want to say on the record, it was just a preprint I found. But they found an interesting thing, they found that children's mindsets showed no relationship to IQ. So it was uncorrelated to IQ. School grades are changing grades across the school year. With the only significant result being in the reverse direction, better performance in children holding a fixed mindset, I wonder from a causal perspective, if you do generally have an extraordinarily high IQ and some kids do at certain points in time. And I'm right there with you, by the way, Carol, we should write off kids with the lower IQs or kids with lower achievements. So I'm right there with you. But there are kids who do have extremely high IQs. You can see from a causal perspective that they could actually rightfully develop a fixed mindset if things are coming that easily to them, that actually matches their reality more than lower IQs do. So I wanted to see what you thought about that. I'm really interested in that. Cool. A fix, if you have a fixed mindset and you say to yourself, it's fixed and I've got it. And you never doubt it. Oh, that'll be tricky when they actually do face challenges someday, right? Maybe, but in the moment, until that happens, they could be fine. They could be fine. Yeah. They could be fine. Fixed mindsets, not always necessarily a detrimental thing. Yeah, until you start thinking, oh, I don't want to do this. Maybe I'll look dumb. Oh, I made a mistake. But if you're super secure in your fixed mindset, you can look good. And not until later, when other people start catching up with you or, and you're not doing it right. The other thing is the Lee and Bates studies were done in China and just found out something really important. There's this pizza test that is a worldwide achievement test that's given to hundreds of thousands of 15-year-olds in 70 across 79 countries. Guess how many countries and how many countries a growth mindset was at some level positively related to a pizza achievement test scores? How many countries? 76 out of the 79. Oh, and China was one of the, that didn't? Yes. Well, that's, well, that is very interesting. I'm so intrigued by that. And this is going to address a couple of things you have. That is truly interesting. Okay. Now, I'm in touch with a really fantastic young researcher in China. And he said a few things that were illuminating. One of them goes back to something you said before. He gave a growth mindset intervention to, you know, typically high-achieving Chinese kids. It got them more intrinsically motivated and engaged with learning at lower their anxiety. But because it didn't raise their achievement, because they were, they already apparently work more than 50 hours a week on school, work out of school. Nobody cared. So he's upset about that as you are. And I am that no one cares about the well-being, just the grades. But why was. I'm glad I'm not the only one. I'm not the only one. But also why wasn't the Chinese score positively related to achievement, the growth mindset? What is it about the, is it something about the culture of work ethic? Yeah, even negatively related to achievement. Correct. Correct. Because they found in their study that those with a fixed mindset actually had higher performance. Yes. And then that's what we're seeing in China in the Pisa Resolve. And I'm working with the Pisa people to figure that out. It could be that when you're in such a high pressure, cauldron, you know, they're heading toward the big high stakes test for getting into college there. It's really high pressure. If you have a growth mindset, maybe you have a more sane attitude about some of the things. Maybe you think errors you can learn from. Whoa. Instead of errors are not permissible. So it's possible that under certain circumstances, having learning goals and thinking errors are informative and valuing progress rather than immediate achievement. Maybe you're a sane or happier kid, but maybe you're not at the top of the achievement distribution anymore. Well, that's really what would be really interesting for the research. Yeah. And what would be really interesting? So I want to talk about this quote, unquote, replication crisis that have been happening in other fields. There's this paper I know you love and I'm being sarcastic by Alexander Bergonne at all and two that just came out recently. And they really, you know, they take you to task on saying that you've overclaimed and overhyped with some of your prior quotes. Would you still say things like the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects you lead your life? And they also take your task for saying mindset creates different psychological worlds for students and forms the core of their meaning systems. So would you say that those things are in light of the most recent effect sizes to dramatic? What would you say? Because they really take it a task to this, as you know. I know and I appreciate that they're interested in mindsets and they challenge us and we get better. I think given what I said before, how hard it is to change grades, achievement, test scores, anything in the real world, I think our effects are striking. The fact that it's a 50 minute program that changes achievement for lower achievers and changes the course taking a year later. The fact that it can be distributed widely at incredibly low cost. I think that's striking. I stand by striking. Well, maybe we can distinguish between striking. It sounds like you're saying striking given the noisiness of the real world and all the other things that could have depressed the effect. I mean, how do we know objectively what is striking isn't without looking relative to other kinds of interventions and the goals and the outcomes and I've seen some higher effects. Well, I've seen some like self-efficacy interventions. They're quite higher in terms of effect size. Well you have to have the benchmarks. I don't know the self-efficacy literature or self-efficacy interventions. It's possible that they're higher. We view gross mindset as one path to efficacy. The maintaining of efficacy over time in the face of challenge. I'm looking at okay. Thank you for being here. being so open, this is a credit to you to be so have such open honest intellectual honesty to discuss these things with me. So first of all, I want to say thank you. I'm looking at this, how do you biggs and purdy 1996 found meta meta natto average effect size for the typical education intervention on act of act of performance be 0.57? It looks like the average intervention is actually 0.57. All meta natto analytic of analytic effects of minds interventions in act of performance, like in the cis women analysis are less than 0.35. And most were no as in that that's what the cis get all 2018 paper and you found that as well. So would I mean, you could see how so and you could see also and could say striking is is is over absolutely. Yeah. It turns out that many of the studies in the haddy interventions were the teaching of particular information in class and then the testing of that information in class, which is very different. We don't teach anything of content. We change a mindset and then we look at grades in the real world over time. Very different from teaching particular content and testing it. And I know John had he he's looking into this now and he's a big fan of our work. I think he now agrees that you have different benchmarks for different kinds of interventions. But you know, Scott, the one thing I want to emphasize, we're not perfect and no intervention works everywhere. I think what I want to emphasize too is we're not done. We consider our intervention work to be in its infancy. I want to look back one day when we learn how to create gross mindset sustaining environments. And I want to look back and say, wow, we have much bigger effect sizes now, which we think we will have when we learn how to teach teachers to create gross mindset, producing and sustaining environments. We don't know how to do that yet. We call this our next big mount Everest. It's hard to change teachers. It's hard to change context. But we feel strongly that we will not understand the power of mindsets to change children's trajectories until we can help create those contexts. Thank you for for laboring that. You know, some educators might get this idea that they should be focusing on growth mindset interventions at the cost of actually teaching skills and abilities and knowledge. You're not talking about the secret here, right? You know, the book, the secret where whatever you believe is going to be true. I mean, I can't, I mean, if you if you have really, really like no talent, like I've, when I was a kid, I could have all the growth mindset in the world about being in the NBA. And trust me, I wanted to be in a great basketball player. But I don't think all the growth minds in the world would have really gotten me there. So can you kind of put this in context? I guess is what I'm trying to say. Absolutely. Mindset is not a miracle maker. Mindset is a growth mindset is something that supports your being a learner. And what we want to do is help teachers understand how to integrate it into their teaching and teaching practices effectively to support students, self-afficacy about learning as well as their learning. We, I think we underestimated how easy it would be to identify the practices that really worked and to teach the practices that really work. In fact, in the beginning, I thought it was going to be just intuitive for teachers. I got after I published the book mind set, I got all these emails where teachers said, I did these four things and here's what happened in my class. And I thought, wow, that's amazing. And I still believe they did that. But now I think they already had kind of a growth mindset and understanding of how to apply it and what kind of crystallized it and allowed them to kind of run with it. But after that, I'm aided by my Australian colleague Susan Mackie who said, you know, I'm seeing a lot of false growth mindset in classrooms. I really opened my eyes to the fact that it's really hard to deeply teach what a growth mindset is and how to apply it. And again, that's our next big Mount Everest. That's exciting to me to hear about your most excited, what you're most excited for in terms of future directions. So that's the big mountain. Do you want to leave today? I'm so respectful of your time and excited that you spent so much time with me. But let me just leave here is anything else you want to say directly talking to all the educators that are listening to this who really are excited about growth mindset. They want to apply in their classroom. But they want to they want to do it the right way. You know, anything you can say to them. Yes, curts.net prts.net founded by David Pound Day Pound Esco. My mentioned drawings give some tips. But stay tuned because over the next few years, we hope to collaborate intensely with teachers who create classrooms full of students with growth mindset. We hope to collaborate with many other researchers to climb that Mount Everest. And at the end of that, when we're at the summit, we would like to give you all the gift of a growth mindset curriculum that teachers can truly effectively implement. Well, the stakes are high here and we have children's lives, you know, at stake here. So I wish this research with very well. And I was you very well. And I want to thank you. I want to end by saying, I put a call on my Twitter. Are you on Twitter? You probably didn't even see this. I said, I said, I'm so excited. I'm talking with Kat, how do I, anyone, anything you want me to ask you to ask? And I got so many questions to ask you today. And but one thing I wanted to leave you with someone just wrote, OMG, just tell her, thank you. So I just want to end on that note. So thanks for all the work and energy you put into this research over the years and your willingness and openness to seeing how the research evolves in the future. Thank you, Scott. It was just great talking to you. So exciting. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusacologypodcast.com or on our YouTube page, thusacologypodcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well. So you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show and tuning next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior and creativity.