November 23, 2021 • 21 mins
If we decide that we can't get better at things, or that our ideas and personality traits are fixed... then we hinder our ability to change and improve in enjoyable and fulfilling ways. But by challenging ourselves to be more hopeful about our prospects for improvement we can see profound changes in our lives.
David Yeager, a psychology professor at UT-Austin, explains how we fall into limiting fixed mindsets, and how easy it is to start adopting a "growth" mindset that will allow us to flourish.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. In my job as a professor, I often face
situations in which I need to introduce my students to
challenging concepts, ones that are kind of hard to learn.
They often struggle, at least at first, but after wrestling
a bit with the material, they usually arrive at that
(00:35):
blissful aha moment where everything makes sense. You can practically
see the light bulbs going off in their heads. But sadly,
sometimes I also observe the opposite students never make it
to that aha moment, because all of a sudden, they
just seem to give up. It's a moment that every
(00:56):
teacher dreads. I was a middle school teacher and my
only skill was getting my kids fired up to learn. Unfortunately,
once they were fired up, I had mediocre pedagogical skills,
and so I went to graduate school wanting to learn
if I say this to my kids, are they going
to be more motivated than if I say that? And
you'd be amazed how little research actually tests anything like that.
(01:19):
This is David Yeager, a psychology professor at UT Austin.
He and his collaborator, the renowned Stanford professor Carol Dweck,
study how the things we believe about the world are
so called mindset can influence our behavior, and they've found
that the way we think about a challenge can make
a huge difference in how well we get through it.
Do I believe that things in the world can change?
(01:41):
And if the answer is yes, then the stakes are
a little bit lower when things go wrong. This is
what Carol Dwack is called the growth mindset, and this
is the idea that there's the potential for change. As
you'll hear in this episode, the science shows that helping
my students develop a growth mindset can lower the likelihood
that they'll shut down when the going gets tough, and
(02:02):
developing a growth mindset can also have lots of benefits
for your personal life and happiness too. So you can
have a mindset about your intelligence, and your mindset could
be that intelligence has fixed. You either have it or
you don't. Let's say you bomb your algebra one test
right the first major tests of the year. Then that's
an event that happened to you. It's an objective fact
(02:23):
you got a sixty. But the world then gets subjectively
interpreted by you in your mind. Your beliefs about the
nature of your intelligence can powerfully shape the sense you
make of the failed test. So in a growth mindset,
the test is one piece of information. It's something that
you need to attend to and react to positively and
(02:44):
figure out how to overcome the same failure. Though in
a fixed mindset is very different. That failure feels like
something to be ashamed of because it's revealed your lack
of ability. You don't want to redouble your efforts and
try hard in a fixed mindset because that just outs
you even more as the kind of person who has
to try hard. And a growth mindset, though effort is good.
(03:05):
Effort is just the process through which you get better.
Asking for help is another thing you do. In a
growth mindset, you say, wow, I don't understand this, what
does it mean? In a fixed mindset, you don't ask
clarifying questions. So it's this cycle of concealing our misunderstanding
that comes from a fixed mindset and then causes us
to underperform relative to what we could do. So that's
(03:26):
a fixed mindset in academic domain. But but there's also
research showing these mindsets might play out in the context
of even how we think about our own health and longevity.
What Eleocrum has figured out is that people differ in
whether they think of stress as something that is fundamentally
bad for you and will undermine your goals or something
that could be enhancing. And it's a brilliant insight because
(03:48):
if you look around our society, there's a negative mindset
about stress. But you can have a different mindset. The
mindset that that stress response. You're racing heart or sweating palms,
the shortness of breath, the feelings of anxiety in your stomach,
those are signs that your body is mobilizing energy to
really do well and to succeed, and that stress is
(04:08):
in a dancing mindset, interestingly, actually changes the way your
body responds. So if you believe that your racing heart
and sweating palms can be fuel for cooling your body
down and bringing oxygenated blood to your brain, then that
actually happens when scientists measure those things during a stressful experience.
And this is another thing that fixed mindset messes us
(04:29):
up on is the extent to which we seek challenges. Right,
you're resting on your laurels is a good thing if
you're totally scared that every mess up means you know
you're a whole person and you'll never get better. But
talk about why a growth mindset hasn't kind of pushed
yourself in this new way. Dave nus Mom did a
study where he took people taught to either the fix
or the growth mindset and then had them do a
task where they got feedback that they were at the
(04:51):
twenty fifth percentile. But then they had a chance to
either look at the work of people who are at
the ninetieth percentile or at the work of people at
the tenth percentile. And a fixed mindset, they looked at
the tenth percentile because it made them feel better, like, well,
these are not as bad as these losers. And the
growth mindset, though they looked at the people who did better,
they try to adopt their strategies, which is so important, right,
(05:12):
I mean, to learn, you don't want to be looking
to the people who are doing badly. To learn, you
need to look to the people who hopefully are better
than you. So different kinds of responses to the same
feedback depending on your mindset. So far, we've been talking
about the beliefs that we have about our own ability
to change. But when we get back from the break,
we'll find out what happens if we challenge ourselves to
believe that change is possible for other people too, even
(05:35):
for people who totally suck. Think middle school bullies. If
we entertain the thought that not so nice people can
change into kinder people, what will that change in us?
That Penis lab will be right back. Often people have
(05:58):
heard about growth mindset in academic domain. I think in
part because Carroll's due work has become so famous. But
you've actually done some really lovely work looking at growth
mindset in a different context, in the context of kind
of being nice and forgiveness. So tell me about some
of that stuff. I wanted to develop an experiment to
try to change kids mindsets and see if I could
reduce aggression and revenge in real high schools. And so
(06:21):
we created a growth Mindset program this is about two
thousand and nine two ten, to change kids mindsets about
bullies really and about themselves as victims. And we went
into the second lowest income high school in the Bay Area,
took over biology class on Tuesdays and Thursdays for three
weeks and did workshops about the brain and how the
brain can change and how people can change. And we
(06:43):
asked kids to do skits and sketches about change and
wrote essays where they reframed bad actions as things that
can change, and then we need to measure aggression. Turns
out it's very hard to measure aggression in the high
school because you can't just sit around and wait for
a fight because it's very few kids fight. So we
decided to do an experimental manipulation where you kind of
(07:06):
have to make everybody mad and then see if they
take revenge. And so we had a classroom of like
seventy ninth and tenth graders at a time at this
urban school, and Saint Jose who went through a cyberball
paradigm where they are on a computer and they other
players are throwing the ball to each other and never
throw it to you. And then we say, okay, now
(07:27):
it's time to do a taste testing task and we're
gonna match you with the guy you displayed cyber ball with.
And by the way, this person hates spicy food. I'm
gonna give you a box full of much of different
kinds of foods. You could allocate whatever you want. The
deependit measure for aggression was how much hot sauce did
they spoon into a cup, thinking that the other guy
who just excluded them would have to eat all of it.
We found is that kids who learned people can change
(07:49):
allocated forty percent less hot sauce in this task. In addition,
at the end of the year, teachers were more likely
to have nominated them for good interpersonal behavior. So I
was like, okay, this is great. You can have a
theory of a problem like aggression, you can do a treatment,
and you can get results. So from there we said,
how can it go online and get it to more people.
(08:12):
We went from the sixth day workshop to the thirty
minute workshop two high schools at seventy five schools and
now that growth mindset treatments can be done in a
very short amount of time and now hundreds of thousands
of people per year get them for free. It's so amazing.
It's such an important work. I mean, what did it
feel like in the early days to learn that, like,
if you can change people's internal stories, you can really
(08:34):
change their behaviors in like a profound way, like reducing bullying,
you know, getting teachers to say these are better students.
What people don't appreciate is in two thousand nine, ten
people thought this was the dumbest idea ever. Like nobody
thought this was a legitimate part of education or like
school reform or anything like that. Right, I'll never forget
when I was doing the Hot Sauce study, we were
(08:56):
doing the surveys in the PE class. So I've got
like ninety sweaty kids, and so they're grooping off and
the PE coach comes up to me and he's like, hey, man,
why are you doing the study. I'm like, kind of
want to reduce suppression and you know, help kids have
a better life. And he's like, it's too late for
these kids. You should have gone to the elementary school.
These kids can't change. I'm literally here to teach them
that people can change. I mean, but I think the
(09:18):
power of this insight is like it's just a thing
that we can all learn from, right, you know. I
think we forget that our internal stories are driving you know,
what we eat, the decisions we make, how much we
put effort into things. But like they really are controlling
so much of our behavior and ultimately so much of
who we wind up being as a person. These same
studies work in lots of important things for adults. One
(09:39):
of my favorites is around. Our parents work on mindsets
and intractable conflict. Basically, if you think another group is
fundamentally evil and can never change, then when that group
does something to harm your group, you immediately think of
counterattacks and revenge. You don't think of a peace process.
And they did this work with Israelis soon after a
(10:00):
terrorist attack, thinking about Palestinians and an affect mindset, Israelis
are like no counter terrorism in a growth mindset, even
if they were kind of right wing in general and
inclined more toward a military response, in a growth mindset,
they said, no, let's give the peace process a chance
at least first. So I think that's an example where
even adults who they haven't just spent their whole life
(10:23):
coming up with a fixed mindset, there have been generations,
like thousands of years thinking that way. Even in that group,
a growth mindset can make a difference. We need to
have a growth mindset about growth mindsets, right, like we
need to recognize that our beliefs can change too. I
think that's important because in a lot of pop psychology,
we have these quizzes and tests and Myers Briggs and
(10:44):
a lot of it's used to put people in boxes.
And one thing I hear a lot from managers should
I only hire people with a growth mindset? And I
don't think mindset should be used as a screening tool necessarily.
It's an acquired belief system that comes from someone's experience
in the world, and we have to legitimate where it
comes from. If the world treats you as though you
(11:06):
or your group can never change, what else are you
going to belive? Like, of course you believe things can't change,
But then we shouldn't write you off and say there's
your fixed mindset. There you go because the environment gave
you that mindset. So I think we need to just
help people adopt a growth mindset, but also we need
to do what we can to make it actually true
in people's lives. That means providing resources, I mean providing opportunities,
(11:29):
providing support, giving people the space to grow, and anyone
who has power over somebody else a manager or coach,
a mentor, we need to create the affordances for mindset,
not tell people to have a growth mindset. So far,
we've seen that a growth mindset has lots of benefits
both when we apply that mindset to our own changes
and those of other people. But that raises a big question,
(11:53):
how exactly do we get a growth mindset. When we
get back from the break, we'll talk about strategies you
can use to think more effectively about your own capacity
for change, and why doing so can boost your happiness
in ways you don't often expect. The Happiness Lab will
be right back. After spending so much time talking with
(12:18):
psychologist David Yeager about the power of the growth mindset,
I started to hear a little bit from my inner critic.
She started saying, Laurie, you know how important a growth
mindset is, but you don't always have one. You suck
at it. You're such a phony. Luckily David was at
the ready to deal with this. He has tons of
strategies for how we can adopt a growth mindset, including
(12:39):
one that was hypothesized by his famous collaborator, Carol Dweck.
She argued that we should try to pay close attention
to what our inner critics are telling us. Here's a hypothesis.
You can actually start to distinguish the growth and fixed
mindset thoughts in your head and notice those fixed mindset
thoughts and not suppress them and push them away, but
(13:00):
name them, figure out why they're legitimate, and then choose
to follow the growth mindset ones. So Carol thinks that
this is only a halfway serious idea of it, that
you could name your fixed mindset persona. You know, you
start hearing wait, you think you can try hard and
get ahead, Like, that's ridiculous if that is in your head.
You say, oh, Larry, you know, Larry's always goofing off
(13:21):
back over there with this fixed mindset ideas. And I
appreciate you, Larry, but no thanks today. And you know,
I don't know if that exact idea works, although I
think it's kind of appealing. But the idea of not
villainizing our fixed mindset thoughts and realizing they come from
a legitimate place, but also thinking they're not for us,
they're not going to help us. I love this idea
(13:41):
of kind of labeling the mindset, you know, maybe even
giving it a goofy name. You know. Another thing we
need to pay attention to are the words that we're
using in our stories, right, so talk about how the
use of our words and terms can be really powerful.
I think that's a really profound question, because mindsets are
as you've been saying your own causal theory of the world.
But those theories are shaped by language, and it's because
(14:05):
language has this power of communicating cause and effect very
quickly and easily. So one of the biggest distinctions is
noun phrasing versus verb or process phrasing. So saying like
I'm a good writer, they're a bad person, they're a loser.
In any label you put on yourself implies a fixed
(14:26):
entity that lies underneath it. They can't be changed. So
children who are told you're a good drawer here more
fixed mindset thoughts and make more fixed mindset interpretations relatives
to children who hear that's good drawing. Liz Gunderson to
this study where moms are playing catch with their two
year olds in the lab and they're videotaped, and moms
who say you're such a good thrower end up with
(14:47):
kids who, when they're in fourth grade have more of
a fixed mindset and take the easy road, compared to
kids who have praised for the process that they ecaged in,
like this isn't this fun? Or look how we're doing this.
So I think talking to others conveys mindsets, depending on
whether you're used person or process. But when we talk
to ourselves too, that's where you can really get into
fixed mindset front. So the words to look out for
(15:08):
are over generalizations. Anything where it's like all the time
or every time or always or everybody that implies a
large category that's fixed and stable and can't change and
that carries fixed mindset connotations with it. I've heard that
another way that we can kind of fight those over
generalizations is just to kind of add a word at
(15:28):
the end to things to kind of give ourselves a
little bit of hope for change. So what's this word
we can kind of add on the end to help ourselves. Yeah,
Kildwick had this idea for a while that if you
hear a fixed mindset over generalization, you could add yet
to the end of it. So I'm not a good
programmer yet, right, I'm not a good skier yet. And
(15:49):
I like it. I feel like it reminds us that
everyone's on a journey of learning and it's a process.
Where it could be misused is if it turns into
like a goofy catchphrase that doesn't really help people. And
so if you say yet, but, then I'm not going
to support you in any way to help improve, and
it's almost like taking responsibility off of me. So I
(16:11):
think saying yet in the context of a commitment to
continuous improvement is a really powerful way to reframe that
negative self dialogue we have. And I think sometimes we
can think like, oh, I'll just think positively or think
that I'm going to get better and you know, lo
and behold you get better. The key there is the
stories are affecting how we act in the world and
the actions we take in the future. Right, Yeah. So,
(16:33):
I think one of the biggest dangers in mindset is
to think of it as purely lying to yourself and
having unfounded positivity. And you know, I think people are
legitimately skeptical of that. I'm skeptical of that. If someone
tells me to be positive about something that I legitimately
think is hopeless, then I think they're either naive or
just uninformed, Which is why a true growth mindset is
(16:58):
founded in an actual belief that change is possible, like
there has to be a real mechanism for that. Another
tip I often hear about improving growth mindset is this
idea of kind of thinking realistically about the process right
the time and effort. You know, it's easy for me
if I turn on the Olympics and I see some
Olympic gymnast to think, oh, man, I suck. I'm not
(17:19):
a good gymnast. Like I'm inherently not a good gymnast.
And Simone Biles is just you, deeply and inherently a
good gymnast. But what I miss there is all the
training and all the work she puts in. You know,
So talk about the power of paying attention to the
process for kind of getting us towards more of a
growth mindset. Yeah, I think that we tend to look
at excellent performance and think that's how they always were,
(17:39):
and then we underappreciate the steps that it took to
get there. I think what's often more useful in growth
mindset is focusing less on interpersonal comparisons, comparing myself to
someone else in more intro personal comparisons instead. So, how
can I be better in the future? What are the
processes I need to go through to become the kind
(18:00):
of person I would like to be? How am I
already better than I was in the past. One of
my favorite ideas on this is stroke victims. So stroke
victim of course lose functioning in their muscles that are
that are related to the regions of the brain that
are affected by the stroke. But the brain is amazingly
plastic and people can actually recover a lot of their functioning.
And one of the biggest things that distinguishes stroke victims
(18:22):
who recover from those who don't is do you compare
yourself to other stroke victims or to yourself in the
past for your own functioning, or do you compare yourself
to non stroke victims who have perfect functioning. If you
do the ladder, you say, I'll never be like a
normal person again, and people don't follow through and their
physical therapy and they don't ever improve. If you say, wow,
(18:42):
I used to not be able to move this part
of my face and now I can kind of move that,
then people actually show a lot more improvement. So I
think with anything that changes about us, there are different
ways of appraising it or thinking about it, and your
mindsets affect that, and then that affects how we cope
with it, and then how debilitating it is or not.
And I think that the idea of you know, comparing
(19:03):
your performance against your own past performance can be powerful
because then you tend to notice these little winds. You know,
you can tend to notice like oh I'm just a
little bit better and reinforce this belief like, oh wait,
there is change there if I look really carefully. Yeah.
I think it's hard to keep track of how much
we've changed, right. It's like you see yourself in the
mirror every day, and you change a very small amount
(19:23):
every day, But when you see a picture from five
years ago, you're like, oh my god, it looks so
different and so. Part of a reason why we get
stuck and fixed mindset, I think, is because we don't
appreciate the changes that we've had for the better, and
so it feels like changing anything new in the future
is as impossible. So I feel like it's a good
habit to as much as possible acknowledge and appreciating how
(19:47):
far you've come and revisit the steps you took to
get there. I hope you've gained as many actionable tips
from my conversation with David as I have. Next time
I get frustrated with myself for not doing something well,
I'm going to try to take a long view. I'm
going to look back at what I was like when
I first started out and give myself some credit for
(20:07):
all the progress I've made so far. And when that
little voice in my head tells me I'll never be
able to do cropos in yoga, or that I'm not
good at some random thing, I'll give her a silly name.
The next time she pipes up, I'll just tell her
thanks for your input, Linda lame sauce. But news flash,
humans get better over time when they put in some work,
and that means I've got this. I'm also going to
(20:31):
take some of David's advice about encouragement to see if
I can help foster a growth mindset among my students
when they get frustrated, so that instead of giving up
at the first sign of struggle, they can change their
mindset from i'll never get this too. I'm proud of
my effort. And if you're secretly worried that even after
hearing this episode, you'll never get the hang of this
(20:51):
growth mindset thing, that just means you haven't developed a
growth mindset yet. The Happiness Lab is co written and
produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by
Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering Evan Biola.
Joseph Friedman checked our facts. Sophie Crane McKibbin edited our scripts.
(21:14):
Emily Anne Vaughan offered additional production support. Special thanks to
Miela Belle, Carl mcgliori, Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lucarne,
Maya Kanigg, Nicole Morano, Eric Zandler, Royston Breserve, Jacob Weisberg,
and my agent, Ben Davids. That Pinus Lab is brought
to you by Pushkin Industries, Emmie Doctor, Laurie Santos
Pushkin. In my job as a professor, I often face
situations in which I need to introduce my students to
challenging concepts, ones that are kind of hard to learn.
They often struggle, at least at first, but after wrestling
a bit with the material, they usually arrive at that
(00:35):
blissful aha moment where everything makes sense. You can practically
see the light bulbs going off in their heads. But sadly,
sometimes I also observe the opposite students never make it
to that aha moment, because all of a sudden, they
just seem to give up. It's a moment that every
(00:56):
teacher dreads. I was a middle school teacher and my
only skill was getting my kids fired up to learn. Unfortunately,
once they were fired up, I had mediocre pedagogical skills,
and so I went to graduate school wanting to learn
if I say this to my kids, are they going
to be more motivated than if I say that? And
you'd be amazed how little research actually tests anything like that.
(01:19):
This is David Yeager, a psychology professor at UT Austin.
He and his collaborator, the renowned Stanford professor Carol Dweck,
study how the things we believe about the world are
so called mindset can influence our behavior, and they've found
that the way we think about a challenge can make
a huge difference in how well we get through it.
Do I believe that things in the world can change?
(01:41):
And if the answer is yes, then the stakes are
a little bit lower when things go wrong. This is
what Carol Dwack is called the growth mindset, and this
is the idea that there's the potential for change. As
you'll hear in this episode, the science shows that helping
my students develop a growth mindset can lower the likelihood
that they'll shut down when the going gets tough, and
(02:02):
developing a growth mindset can also have lots of benefits
for your personal life and happiness too. So you can
have a mindset about your intelligence, and your mindset could
be that intelligence has fixed. You either have it or
you don't. Let's say you bomb your algebra one test
right the first major tests of the year. Then that's
an event that happened to you. It's an objective fact
(02:23):
you got a sixty. But the world then gets subjectively
interpreted by you in your mind. Your beliefs about the
nature of your intelligence can powerfully shape the sense you
make of the failed test. So in a growth mindset,
the test is one piece of information. It's something that
you need to attend to and react to positively and
(02:44):
figure out how to overcome the same failure. Though in
a fixed mindset is very different. That failure feels like
something to be ashamed of because it's revealed your lack
of ability. You don't want to redouble your efforts and
try hard in a fixed mindset because that just outs
you even more as the kind of person who has
to try hard. And a growth mindset, though effort is good.
(03:05):
Effort is just the process through which you get better.
Asking for help is another thing you do. In a
growth mindset, you say, wow, I don't understand this, what
does it mean? In a fixed mindset, you don't ask
clarifying questions. So it's this cycle of concealing our misunderstanding
that comes from a fixed mindset and then causes us
to underperform relative to what we could do. So that's
(03:26):
a fixed mindset in academic domain. But but there's also
research showing these mindsets might play out in the context
of even how we think about our own health and longevity.
What Eleocrum has figured out is that people differ in
whether they think of stress as something that is fundamentally
bad for you and will undermine your goals or something
that could be enhancing. And it's a brilliant insight because
(03:48):
if you look around our society, there's a negative mindset
about stress. But you can have a different mindset. The
mindset that that stress response. You're racing heart or sweating palms,
the shortness of breath, the feelings of anxiety in your stomach,
those are signs that your body is mobilizing energy to
really do well and to succeed, and that stress is
(04:08):
in a dancing mindset, interestingly, actually changes the way your
body responds. So if you believe that your racing heart
and sweating palms can be fuel for cooling your body
down and bringing oxygenated blood to your brain, then that
actually happens when scientists measure those things during a stressful experience.
And this is another thing that fixed mindset messes us
(04:29):
up on is the extent to which we seek challenges. Right,
you're resting on your laurels is a good thing if
you're totally scared that every mess up means you know
you're a whole person and you'll never get better. But
talk about why a growth mindset hasn't kind of pushed
yourself in this new way. Dave nus Mom did a
study where he took people taught to either the fix
or the growth mindset and then had them do a
task where they got feedback that they were at the
(04:51):
twenty fifth percentile. But then they had a chance to
either look at the work of people who are at
the ninetieth percentile or at the work of people at
the tenth percentile. And a fixed mindset, they looked at
the tenth percentile because it made them feel better, like, well,
these are not as bad as these losers. And the
growth mindset, though they looked at the people who did better,
they try to adopt their strategies, which is so important, right,
(05:12):
I mean, to learn, you don't want to be looking
to the people who are doing badly. To learn, you
need to look to the people who hopefully are better
than you. So different kinds of responses to the same
feedback depending on your mindset. So far, we've been talking
about the beliefs that we have about our own ability
to change. But when we get back from the break,
we'll find out what happens if we challenge ourselves to
believe that change is possible for other people too, even
(05:35):
for people who totally suck. Think middle school bullies. If
we entertain the thought that not so nice people can
change into kinder people, what will that change in us?
That Penis lab will be right back. Often people have
(05:58):
heard about growth mindset in academic domain. I think in
part because Carroll's due work has become so famous. But
you've actually done some really lovely work looking at growth
mindset in a different context, in the context of kind
of being nice and forgiveness. So tell me about some
of that stuff. I wanted to develop an experiment to
try to change kids mindsets and see if I could
reduce aggression and revenge in real high schools. And so
(06:21):
we created a growth Mindset program this is about two
thousand and nine two ten, to change kids mindsets about
bullies really and about themselves as victims. And we went
into the second lowest income high school in the Bay Area,
took over biology class on Tuesdays and Thursdays for three
weeks and did workshops about the brain and how the
brain can change and how people can change. And we
(06:43):
asked kids to do skits and sketches about change and
wrote essays where they reframed bad actions as things that
can change, and then we need to measure aggression. Turns
out it's very hard to measure aggression in the high
school because you can't just sit around and wait for
a fight because it's very few kids fight. So we
decided to do an experimental manipulation where you kind of
(07:06):
have to make everybody mad and then see if they
take revenge. And so we had a classroom of like
seventy ninth and tenth graders at a time at this
urban school, and Saint Jose who went through a cyberball
paradigm where they are on a computer and they other
players are throwing the ball to each other and never
throw it to you. And then we say, okay, now
(07:27):
it's time to do a taste testing task and we're
gonna match you with the guy you displayed cyber ball with.
And by the way, this person hates spicy food. I'm
gonna give you a box full of much of different
kinds of foods. You could allocate whatever you want. The
deependit measure for aggression was how much hot sauce did
they spoon into a cup, thinking that the other guy
who just excluded them would have to eat all of it.
We found is that kids who learned people can change
(07:49):
allocated forty percent less hot sauce in this task. In addition,
at the end of the year, teachers were more likely
to have nominated them for good interpersonal behavior. So I
was like, okay, this is great. You can have a
theory of a problem like aggression, you can do a treatment,
and you can get results. So from there we said,
how can it go online and get it to more people.
(08:12):
We went from the sixth day workshop to the thirty
minute workshop two high schools at seventy five schools and
now that growth mindset treatments can be done in a
very short amount of time and now hundreds of thousands
of people per year get them for free. It's so amazing.
It's such an important work. I mean, what did it
feel like in the early days to learn that, like,
if you can change people's internal stories, you can really
(08:34):
change their behaviors in like a profound way, like reducing bullying,
you know, getting teachers to say these are better students.
What people don't appreciate is in two thousand nine, ten
people thought this was the dumbest idea ever. Like nobody
thought this was a legitimate part of education or like
school reform or anything like that. Right, I'll never forget
when I was doing the Hot Sauce study, we were
(08:56):
doing the surveys in the PE class. So I've got
like ninety sweaty kids, and so they're grooping off and
the PE coach comes up to me and he's like, hey, man,
why are you doing the study. I'm like, kind of
want to reduce suppression and you know, help kids have
a better life. And he's like, it's too late for
these kids. You should have gone to the elementary school.
These kids can't change. I'm literally here to teach them
that people can change. I mean, but I think the
(09:18):
power of this insight is like it's just a thing
that we can all learn from, right, you know. I
think we forget that our internal stories are driving you know,
what we eat, the decisions we make, how much we
put effort into things. But like they really are controlling
so much of our behavior and ultimately so much of
who we wind up being as a person. These same
studies work in lots of important things for adults. One
(09:39):
of my favorites is around. Our parents work on mindsets
and intractable conflict. Basically, if you think another group is
fundamentally evil and can never change, then when that group
does something to harm your group, you immediately think of
counterattacks and revenge. You don't think of a peace process.
And they did this work with Israelis soon after a
(10:00):
terrorist attack, thinking about Palestinians and an affect mindset, Israelis
are like no counter terrorism in a growth mindset, even
if they were kind of right wing in general and
inclined more toward a military response, in a growth mindset,
they said, no, let's give the peace process a chance
at least first. So I think that's an example where
even adults who they haven't just spent their whole life
(10:23):
coming up with a fixed mindset, there have been generations,
like thousands of years thinking that way. Even in that group,
a growth mindset can make a difference. We need to
have a growth mindset about growth mindsets, right, like we
need to recognize that our beliefs can change too. I
think that's important because in a lot of pop psychology,
we have these quizzes and tests and Myers Briggs and
(10:44):
a lot of it's used to put people in boxes.
And one thing I hear a lot from managers should
I only hire people with a growth mindset? And I
don't think mindset should be used as a screening tool necessarily.
It's an acquired belief system that comes from someone's experience
in the world, and we have to legitimate where it
comes from. If the world treats you as though you
(11:06):
or your group can never change, what else are you
going to belive? Like, of course you believe things can't change,
But then we shouldn't write you off and say there's
your fixed mindset. There you go because the environment gave
you that mindset. So I think we need to just
help people adopt a growth mindset, but also we need
to do what we can to make it actually true
in people's lives. That means providing resources, I mean providing opportunities,
(11:29):
providing support, giving people the space to grow, and anyone
who has power over somebody else a manager or coach,
a mentor, we need to create the affordances for mindset,
not tell people to have a growth mindset. So far,
we've seen that a growth mindset has lots of benefits
both when we apply that mindset to our own changes
and those of other people. But that raises a big question,
(11:53):
how exactly do we get a growth mindset. When we
get back from the break, we'll talk about strategies you
can use to think more effectively about your own capacity
for change, and why doing so can boost your happiness
in ways you don't often expect. The Happiness Lab will
be right back. After spending so much time talking with
(12:18):
psychologist David Yeager about the power of the growth mindset,
I started to hear a little bit from my inner critic.
She started saying, Laurie, you know how important a growth
mindset is, but you don't always have one. You suck
at it. You're such a phony. Luckily David was at
the ready to deal with this. He has tons of
strategies for how we can adopt a growth mindset, including
(12:39):
one that was hypothesized by his famous collaborator, Carol Dweck.
She argued that we should try to pay close attention
to what our inner critics are telling us. Here's a hypothesis.
You can actually start to distinguish the growth and fixed
mindset thoughts in your head and notice those fixed mindset
thoughts and not suppress them and push them away, but
(13:00):
name them, figure out why they're legitimate, and then choose
to follow the growth mindset ones. So Carol thinks that
this is only a halfway serious idea of it, that
you could name your fixed mindset persona. You know, you
start hearing wait, you think you can try hard and
get ahead, Like, that's ridiculous if that is in your head.
You say, oh, Larry, you know, Larry's always goofing off
(13:21):
back over there with this fixed mindset ideas. And I
appreciate you, Larry, but no thanks today. And you know,
I don't know if that exact idea works, although I
think it's kind of appealing. But the idea of not
villainizing our fixed mindset thoughts and realizing they come from
a legitimate place, but also thinking they're not for us,
they're not going to help us. I love this idea
(13:41):
of kind of labeling the mindset, you know, maybe even
giving it a goofy name. You know. Another thing we
need to pay attention to are the words that we're
using in our stories, right, so talk about how the
use of our words and terms can be really powerful.
I think that's a really profound question, because mindsets are
as you've been saying your own causal theory of the world.
But those theories are shaped by language, and it's because
(14:05):
language has this power of communicating cause and effect very
quickly and easily. So one of the biggest distinctions is
noun phrasing versus verb or process phrasing. So saying like
I'm a good writer, they're a bad person, they're a loser.
In any label you put on yourself implies a fixed
(14:26):
entity that lies underneath it. They can't be changed. So
children who are told you're a good drawer here more
fixed mindset thoughts and make more fixed mindset interpretations relatives
to children who hear that's good drawing. Liz Gunderson to
this study where moms are playing catch with their two
year olds in the lab and they're videotaped, and moms
who say you're such a good thrower end up with
(14:47):
kids who, when they're in fourth grade have more of
a fixed mindset and take the easy road, compared to
kids who have praised for the process that they ecaged in,
like this isn't this fun? Or look how we're doing this.
So I think talking to others conveys mindsets, depending on
whether you're used person or process. But when we talk
to ourselves too, that's where you can really get into
fixed mindset front. So the words to look out for
(15:08):
are over generalizations. Anything where it's like all the time
or every time or always or everybody that implies a
large category that's fixed and stable and can't change and
that carries fixed mindset connotations with it. I've heard that
another way that we can kind of fight those over
generalizations is just to kind of add a word at
(15:28):
the end to things to kind of give ourselves a
little bit of hope for change. So what's this word
we can kind of add on the end to help ourselves. Yeah,
Kildwick had this idea for a while that if you
hear a fixed mindset over generalization, you could add yet
to the end of it. So I'm not a good
programmer yet, right, I'm not a good skier yet. And
(15:49):
I like it. I feel like it reminds us that
everyone's on a journey of learning and it's a process.
Where it could be misused is if it turns into
like a goofy catchphrase that doesn't really help people. And
so if you say yet, but, then I'm not going
to support you in any way to help improve, and
it's almost like taking responsibility off of me. So I
(16:11):
think saying yet in the context of a commitment to
continuous improvement is a really powerful way to reframe that
negative self dialogue we have. And I think sometimes we
can think like, oh, I'll just think positively or think
that I'm going to get better and you know, lo
and behold you get better. The key there is the
stories are affecting how we act in the world and
the actions we take in the future. Right, Yeah. So,
(16:33):
I think one of the biggest dangers in mindset is
to think of it as purely lying to yourself and
having unfounded positivity. And you know, I think people are
legitimately skeptical of that. I'm skeptical of that. If someone
tells me to be positive about something that I legitimately
think is hopeless, then I think they're either naive or
just uninformed, Which is why a true growth mindset is
(16:58):
founded in an actual belief that change is possible, like
there has to be a real mechanism for that. Another
tip I often hear about improving growth mindset is this
idea of kind of thinking realistically about the process right
the time and effort. You know, it's easy for me
if I turn on the Olympics and I see some
Olympic gymnast to think, oh, man, I suck. I'm not
(17:19):
a good gymnast. Like I'm inherently not a good gymnast.
And Simone Biles is just you, deeply and inherently a
good gymnast. But what I miss there is all the
training and all the work she puts in. You know,
So talk about the power of paying attention to the
process for kind of getting us towards more of a
growth mindset. Yeah, I think that we tend to look
at excellent performance and think that's how they always were,
(17:39):
and then we underappreciate the steps that it took to
get there. I think what's often more useful in growth
mindset is focusing less on interpersonal comparisons, comparing myself to
someone else in more intro personal comparisons instead. So, how
can I be better in the future? What are the
processes I need to go through to become the kind
(18:00):
of person I would like to be? How am I
already better than I was in the past. One of
my favorite ideas on this is stroke victims. So stroke
victim of course lose functioning in their muscles that are
that are related to the regions of the brain that
are affected by the stroke. But the brain is amazingly
plastic and people can actually recover a lot of their functioning.
And one of the biggest things that distinguishes stroke victims
(18:22):
who recover from those who don't is do you compare
yourself to other stroke victims or to yourself in the
past for your own functioning, or do you compare yourself
to non stroke victims who have perfect functioning. If you
do the ladder, you say, I'll never be like a
normal person again, and people don't follow through and their
physical therapy and they don't ever improve. If you say, wow,
(18:42):
I used to not be able to move this part
of my face and now I can kind of move that,
then people actually show a lot more improvement. So I
think with anything that changes about us, there are different
ways of appraising it or thinking about it, and your
mindsets affect that, and then that affects how we cope
with it, and then how debilitating it is or not.
And I think that the idea of you know, comparing
(19:03):
your performance against your own past performance can be powerful
because then you tend to notice these little winds. You know,
you can tend to notice like oh I'm just a
little bit better and reinforce this belief like, oh wait,
there is change there if I look really carefully. Yeah.
I think it's hard to keep track of how much
we've changed, right. It's like you see yourself in the
mirror every day, and you change a very small amount
(19:23):
every day, But when you see a picture from five
years ago, you're like, oh my god, it looks so
different and so. Part of a reason why we get
stuck and fixed mindset, I think, is because we don't
appreciate the changes that we've had for the better, and
so it feels like changing anything new in the future
is as impossible. So I feel like it's a good
habit to as much as possible acknowledge and appreciating how
(19:47):
far you've come and revisit the steps you took to
get there. I hope you've gained as many actionable tips
from my conversation with David as I have. Next time
I get frustrated with myself for not doing something well,
I'm going to try to take a long view. I'm
going to look back at what I was like when
I first started out and give myself some credit for
(20:07):
all the progress I've made so far. And when that
little voice in my head tells me I'll never be
able to do cropos in yoga, or that I'm not
good at some random thing, I'll give her a silly name.
The next time she pipes up, I'll just tell her
thanks for your input, Linda lame sauce. But news flash,
humans get better over time when they put in some work,
and that means I've got this. I'm also going to
(20:31):
take some of David's advice about encouragement to see if
I can help foster a growth mindset among my students
when they get frustrated, so that instead of giving up
at the first sign of struggle, they can change their
mindset from i'll never get this too. I'm proud of
my effort. And if you're secretly worried that even after
hearing this episode, you'll never get the hang of this
(20:51):
growth mindset thing, that just means you haven't developed a
growth mindset yet. The Happiness Lab is co written and
produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by
Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering Evan Biola.
Joseph Friedman checked our facts. Sophie Crane McKibbin edited our scripts.
(21:14):
Emily Anne Vaughan offered additional production support. Special thanks to
Miela Belle, Carl mcgliori, Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Daniella Lucarne,
Maya Kanigg, Nicole Morano, Eric Zandler, Royston Breserve, Jacob Weisberg,
and my agent, Ben Davids. That Pinus Lab is brought
to you by Pushkin Industries, Emmie Doctor, Laurie Santos
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