Dr. Carol S. Dweck is one of the world s leading researchers in the field of motivation and is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. Her research has focused on why people succeed and how to foster success. She has held professorships at Columbia and Harvard University, has lectured all over the world and has been elected to the American Academy of Art and Sciences. Her scholarly book, Self-theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development, was named book of the year by the World Education Federation. Her work has been featured in such publications as the New Yorker, TIME, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe and she has appeared on Today and 20/20. Her newest book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success will be the focus of our interview today.
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KE: Carol, let s begin with a definition of terms. Tell us what you mean by mindset and please describe the two basic types that you outline in your book.
CD: Mindset is a term I use to mean beliefs about yourself and your most basic qualities. Think about your intelligence, your talent, and your personality. Are they simply fixed traits, carved in stone, or are they things you can develop throughout your life? In the fixed mindset, people believe that talents and abilities are fixed and can't be developed. You have what you have and that s it. So, people in this mindset feel that they have to prove themselves over and over, prove that they have the right stuff, because their self worth is based on their fixed qualities. They also believe that people s respect for them is based on them having these fixed qualities.
In the growth mindset, people believe something completely different. They believe their talents and abilities can be cultivated through dedication, effort, and education. Sure, they are happy if they are brainy and talented, but that s just the starting point. Talent was just the starting point for Mozart, Darwin, Edison or Michael Jordan. They were not necessarily very different from many other people. Darwin s father thought he was an ordinary boy; and he was disappointed. Edison, his biographer tells us, was an ordinary boy until he dedicated himself to science. Michael Jordan created himself. So in the growth mindset, it s not that one doesn t believe in talent or ability. They are where you start and effort and education are what take you the rest of the way.
KE: What was it that led you to write this book about mindset?
CD: Well, I had done between 15 and 20 years of research on this topic, other people were starting to pick up the ideas and research them, and I was seeing the benefits of the growth mindset for academic achievement, for business, for sports. For years I was just writing up my articles for professional journals, and talking to other psychologists. One day, my graduate students sat me down; they formed a conspiracy and said, "You have to write this book, you have to tell other people about our findings and how they can be used."
KE: What are the tendencies of people with each of the mindsets?
CD: In the fixed mindset, people believe they are only as good as their latest performance. They believe they only have a certain amount of ability, which is fixed, and they have to prove that ability over and over. Second, people in this mindset are not eager for new learning, because when it's challenging they are afraid they might expose deficiencies, they might be found out, they might be revealed to be imposters. So, they tend to stick to the tried and true; things they know they can do well. There is also a defensive response, when they hit setbacks or encounter criticism, because they feel that the setbacks or the criticism really cast doubt on their basic talents or abilities and they try to cover that up. Finally, in a fixed mindset people tend to be competitive because after all, how do you define how smart you are? How talented you are? It s in comparison to other people. So, there is this attitude, "if you re deficient, maybe I look really good." So, it sets up this kind of competitive stance.
Let s look now at the growth mindset. Here, because you believe your basic talents and abilities can be cultivated, the whole goal is to learn and improve. People in this mindset are really eager for challenges, they enjoy them, they enjoy working hard, and they see this hard work, education, and dedication as ways to become more talented and more skilled. I have seen for years this amazing thing where in a growth mindset, people s motivation is actually stoked or enhanced by setbacks. In my study, some students actually smack their lips with delight when we are giving them problems that are too hard. They say things like, "I love a challenge! Or, "I was hoping this would be informative." They don t ever see it as a failure. Also, people in this mindset tend to be more team players. Someone else s success does not diminish them and they say one of their goals is to help other people improve. In fact, they feel smart when they are using their knowledge to help others learn.
I want to present a couple of studies we have done that really illustrate the difference between these two mindsets and their approaches. A study we did in Hong Kong shows how the fixed mindset makes people so investedinproving their abilities that they would sacrifice crucial learning. At the University of Hong Kong everything is in English, it s an elite university that's somewhat modeled on the British system. Everything - the papers, the lectures, the text - are all in English, but not all the students who show up there are proficient in English. So, in our study we had freshmen who were new to the university, we told them the faculty was thinking of giving an English course that would bring their skills up to snuff, and asked if they would be interested in taking it. We also knew who was proficient in English and who wasn t. We had their scores in an English proficiency exam.
When students had a growth mindset they had very high interest in taking this English course that would give them the skills they lacked. But when they had a fixed mindset about their intelligence, they were not enthusiastic about this course. In other words, they were willing to put their college careers in jeopardy so they wouldn t have to expose their deficiencies.
This next study that I just want to talk about very briefly, shows what a defensive response people in a fixed mindset have to a set back. And also how competitive they are. It s something like, if you are dumb, then I am smart. What we did was we gave students at an elite college a very hard problem. They got feedback that they had done quite poorly and then slyly we gave them an opportunity to compare themselves to students who had done either better or worse. They could click on icons and see the strategies of people who had either done a lot better or a lot worse.
When students were in a growth mindset, they chose to examine what the people who had done well did, what strategies they used. They were in a learning mode. However, when people were in a fixed mindset, they looked at the strategies of people who had done abysmally and what we saw was they felt better about themselves after they compared themselves to people who had done really poorly. So, they didn t learn anything from this. They just salved their egos instead of taking this learning into their hands. You can see if you take this into the workplace what happens. If you can t face or correct your deficiencies, you have to have people around who are worse off in order to feel like a success.
KE: There are so many implications to this information. It seems significant as we think about how a learner s mindset impacts their learning strategy, as one example. Also, people reading this article may be wondering about their personal orientation. How might they quickly assess whether they tend to have a fixed or growth mindset, beyond what you ve already mentioned?
CD: Here are a few statements to consider. The first two reflect a fixed mindset regarding intelligence.
- You have a certain amount of intelligence and you can t really do much to change it.
- You can learn new things but you can't really change your basic intelligence.
People who agree with these are those who have a fixed mindset about intelligence. You can also have a fixed mindset about the kind of person you or others are. Do you agree with these statements?
- The kind of person you are is something very basic about you and it can t be changed very much.
- As much as I hate to admit it, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. People can't really change their deepest attributes.
Now let s look at the statements that apply to a growth mindset.
- No matter who you are you can significantly change your intelligence level.
- You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.
- Everyone, no matter who they are, can significantly change the basic characteristics.
- No matter what kind of person someone is, they can always change very much.
KE: You have done a lot of fascinating research with children and the impact that mindset has on their success. I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about some of those findings.
CD: We have done research with students of all ages and we have shown that especially when students are confronting challenges like making a transaction to junior high school or college, when they are taking difficult courses like Pre-med or Calculus or even MBA students in a negotiation course, mindset plays a key role. Students with a growth mindset in the face of challenge do substantially better. They are also able to maintain their enjoyment of the work, even in the face of setbacks or difficulty. It s also been shown that their self-esteem thrives in a challenging environment, whereas the self-esteem of those in a fixed mindset is threatened.
I want to share some recent work that has been done in other labs that supplement and support our findings. These are studies where they actually changed students mindsets. In the first example (Good, Aronson, & Inzlicht) they gave them a workshop where the students in the growth mindset workshop were taught that every time they learned something new the brain forms new connections and they get smarter. They were taught how to apply this to their schoolwork. People in the control group got a nice workshop, but it did not have the growth mindset message. A look at the math test scores at the end of the year showed that the students who had the growth mindset workshop, although they were identical to the other students to begin with - had significantly higher achievement test scores after the workshop.
Another is a study that was done with Stanford students (Aronson, Fried, & Good). Again, these are elite college students, so you would think they were performing at their best. But those who were given a growth mindset workshop performed substantially better in terms of their grade point average after the workshop. Not only did they show this substantial boost in their performance, but many of them said that they valued academic work more than they had before. Many of them said they enjoyed it more. What s interesting was what the Control Group was told. They got a workshop where they learned that everyone has strengths and weaknesses, not to worry about their weaknesses; they may still have strengths in other areas. But, this message was not something that boosted their performance, or their enjoyment, or their valuing of their academic work.
KE: So, the growth mindset workshop was focused on helping the students understand their ability to learn?
CD: Exactly, the growth mindset workshop taught students about the brain, how it forms new connections every time they learn and how they could apply this message to their schoolwork. Later on, I can talk more about growth mindset workshops that have been done with managers and shown an impact on their performance too.
KE: I am a parent of almost five-year-old twins and I was very interested in the recommendations in your book regarding praise. Please describe briefly what types of praise reinforce a growth mindset versus praise that instills a fixed mindset.
CD: In our society we believe that we can enhance people's self-esteem by praising them and especially by praising their intelligence, their talents. We did a survey where we found that over 80% of parents believe that you had to praise your children's intelligence or talent to make them feel good about that and to thrive. I think we believe this in the workplace too, and in our relationships. Well, we decided to put this common wisdom to the test. We wondered whether praising intelligence, rather than helping students gain and maintain confidence, might in fact put them into a fixed mindset and make them even more fragile.
Here is the kind of study we did. These were early adolescents. We gave them a nonverbal IQ test, where they did pretty well on the first set of problems. One-third of them got intelligence praise - Wow! That's a really good score. You must be smart at this. One-third got effort praise - Wow! That s a really good score. You must have tried really hard (and it didn t have to be effort, it could have been praise about the process, their strategy, their concentration etc.) Then, the third group was the control group. They were told Wow! That s a really good score. When we looked to see what the outcome of doing this was, we found first that students who had been praised for their intelligence did indeed go to fixed mindset. They were thinking that you looked into their souls and sized up some fixed ability.
Next, we found that when we asked them, what kind of task do you want to work on now? The students who had gotten the intelligence praise did not want a challenge. They wanted to keep on working on something safe that would allow them to look smart over and over, whereas the students who were praised for effort almost universally wanted a challenging task they could learn from. Then we gave them some really hard problems and looked at how they coped with that. What we found was that the students who had been praised for intelligence lost their confidence. They now thought they weren t smart at all. Because if success meant they were smart, in their fixed mindset, failure meant they weren t. Students with the effort praise maintained their confidence in being able to do well even through the hard problems.
And now let s look at what happened to their performance when we went back to problems that were like the problems of the first set; not too difficult, but still challenging. And what we found on this IQ test was that those who had received the intelligence praise, now just crashed. They showed the worst performance of any group and they actually did significantly worse than they had in the beginning on the first trial. So, this is what our intelligence praise did to their performance on an IQ test. It made them fragile. Those given the effort praise, in contrast, significantly improved from trial one to trial three and were now doing the best of any group.
It s not that the students who got intelligence praise didn t love the praise, they did, but it did not serve them well. Also, we had another very intriguing finding in this study. After they had finished performing, we told them we were going to take this study to another school and that the students at the next school would love to hear about their experience. So, we asked them to write anonymously about their experience and we had a little space where they could put the scores they had earned on this IQ test.
We didn t tell them it was an IQ test but we knew it was and what we found was that almost 40% of the students who had gotten intelligence praise lied about their score. They misrepresented it, always in the same direction, upward. Very few of the students in the other groups misrepresented their scores. What this means is that in a fixed mindset, your intelligence, or your talents are so important to who you are that you cannot bear to reveal this deficiency to the world.
KE: I find it frightening that the way the praise is stated has such power to affect a person s sense of herself.
CD: Yes, everything we say sends a message and we do this in our interpersonal world too, in fact even I fall prey to this on some occasions. One time my husband had solved this task that we were working on for a while and I said Oh My goodness! You are brilliant - and then I realized what I had done. He said, "I know you mean it in only the most growth mindset way. You mean that I had worked and worked and strategized and persisted and finally solved it." And I said, "Yes, that s exactly what I mean."
KE: What about when children do work really hard and they still don t get the result they desire? What do you recommend we say to our children in those times?
CD: Well first of all we are not giving them, in school and in life, things that are impossible. So, then it becomes a matter, not just of effort but of strategy and we work with them to find other strategies that could work. Parents of learning-disabled children have told me that the growth mindset has really helped them work with their children because these children put in enormous effort, but it s often that they have to find the strategy that works for them. This is true when children put in effort and encounter failure.
KE: And what about those times when we may have a child or even an employee who has a natural ability to do something very, very well and they really don t have to work hard at it. It does come naturally to them. It seems to me that it would be helpful to hear from someone that they do have a natural talent but is that likely to them lead them to a fixed mindset around that talent?
CD: Yes. I feel that in those cases it s really important to give children challenging work. It s nice for them to know that they have a talent or a potential but they must keep in touch with the fact that in order to realize that potential to the fullest they re going to have to work hard. Bruce Jenner, the incredible Olympic athlete, had a learning disability and he said in the end, thank goodness, because with his natural athletic ability he could have coasted for a long time, but without the incredible work he put in he would never have become the champion he became. So at some point, the coasting doesn t work anymore - not for Picasso, not for Beethoven, not for any fantastic scientist or CEO.
KE: Are you suggesting that given a growth mindset and enough effort, everybody can do well?
CD: I would like to add again education, instruction, strategy and coaching into the mix. It's not just effort, it's applying it effectively. But not everyone can do well, not everyone is the same and not everyone is going to end up at the same place. I believe that everyone has a chance to fulfill their potential. And here is the key point, you cannot know in advance what that potential is. We can measure someone's skills, aptitude, strengths in the here and now but we cannot tell where they will end up in the future with dedication, passion and commitment.
As I mentioned at the beginning Darwin, Edison, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Madame Curie - these were people who realized their potential through passionate hard work. There are many famous studies now by Benjamin Bloom and Andreas Eriksson showing that incredibly distinguished people in all fields - musicians, sculptors, pianists, swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and neurologists - many of them were not distinguished early on. Even in early adolescence you could not tell them apart from other talented peers. The only thing that set them apart was their dedication and their passion for what they did, which led them to pull away in the long run.
There is a famous study of pilot trainees. The aptitude test that they were given predicted what they did initially but not who was the better pilot in the long run. There are many examples of intercity kids learning advanced calculus in high school, reading Shakespeare in grade school with the proper instructions. So I do believe people can do a lot more than we think.
KE: Let s move our discussion now to adults in the workplace and how mindset impacts their success. We often hear talk about employees being resistant to change. I am wondering how mindset impacts a person's flexibility around change initiatives.
CD: I think mindset is crucial. Let's think about what it takes to embrace change, to be ready to abandon the tried and true. I just want to review a few things we have looked at. We have seen that in the growth mindset you have this interest in learning, you have a readiness to be a novice again and reveal ignorance and you have an ability to maintain motivation and performance in the face of setbacks. All of those things are crucial to a changing work environment but I want to turn now to new research that s been done with managers and employees by Heslin and his colleagues.
What they did was they measured manager's mindset and then they surveyed their employees about the manager's ability to seek and take negative feedback, criticism, suggestions for improvement. What they found was a strong relationship; the more that these managers professed a growth mindset, the more their employees said that these managers sought out their feedback, wanted to improve and showed that. These were MBA students, who were given an extensive mindset workshop in which they learned that people and their skills can change. They were also asked to think of many examples where people grew in the workplace in ways that they couldn't have anticipated, ways that they themselves had surmounted obstacles and developed skills.
Then they gave them some scenarios about what they would do if they had a special project that they were having trouble with. Would they seek feedback for their manager? They gave them another scenario where they were asked to imagine that they had been passed up for several promotions that they ardently desired. Would they go to their managers and get feedback about what they had done wrong? Again, they found that the growth mindset workshop had a really big effect on whether they got that negative feedback and got the constructive criticism. The more they had a growth mindset the more they did that.
So you can see that there is this really substantial relationship between having a growth mindset and seeking change, going with change, equipping yourself with the feedback that you need to change.
KE: That reminds me of a study done by Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan concerning leaders and 360 feedback. What their study showed was that the leaders that actively solicited input and suggestions and feedback from their direct reports after receiving their 360 feedback did significantly better making progress than the leaders who simply received the feedback. That finding seems to tie nicely to the concept of a growth versus a fixed mindset.
CD: Exactly, seeking input instead of being defensive.
KE: Many of our members are involved in learning and development. What do they need to know to help learners succeed, given that some will come with a fixed mindset?
CD: It's possible to create a growth mindset environment, so when working directly with people in organizations, the first thing you can do is present the skill as learnable. In research, negotiation skills have been presented as learnable, also management tasks, and computer skills, and when they are presented as learnable, people end up with far superior performance, confidence and morale. The second thing is conveying the idea that the organization values learning and dedication and not just ready-made genius and talent. The third thing is giving feedback in a way that includes coaching for future success and if we have time, I will present research that shows in the growth mindset, managers coach for success
And the fourth thing is presenting yourself or your managers as a resource for learning. It's not sink or swim, I am going to judge you, that s a fixed mindset environment. So, in that way, a lot can be done even for people who come in with a fixed mindset to communicate that the environment is about fostering skills versus rendering judgment. We found in very recent work that even people with a fixed mindset feel more comfortable in that kind of setting.
KE: Those are great principles and I am assuming that they will have a lot more impact if they are held by the senior level leadership in an organization, versus just the learning and development group.
CD: Yes, it can become the organizational philosophy.
KE: You mentioned earlier that you have some research findings on management and coaching.
CD: Heslin, Latham, & Vandewalle, in their studies, measured manager's mindset and then asked their employees the extent to which their manager gave them helpful developmental coaching. For example, they asked, how much does your manager help you analyze your performance, offer useful suggestions about how you can improve your performance, act as a sounding board for you to develop your ideas? How much does your manager encourage you to explore and try out new alternatives, express confidence in you, encourage you to develop and improve, support you in taking on new challenges? In two studies that were done there was a highly significant correlation between managers having a growth mindset and their tendency to coach their employees in a way that fostered their development.
In another study, they identified managers who had a fixed mindset. Half of them received a growth mindset workshop, half of them received this message that all people have strengths and weaknesses and we have to match people with their strengths, etc. Then they showed everybody the same video where they watched an employee who was negotiating with colleagues and did poorly on two different negotiation tasks. They asked the managers how willing they were to coach that employee. They also asked the managers to generate suggestions. They counted up the number and quality of suggestions the managers generated. The more the managers adopted a growth mindset the more they were willing to coach that employee, the more suggestions they generated for that person's improvement and the higher the quality of those suggestions. So what's really great here is that fixed mindset managers were taught a growth mindset. And it lastedbecause some of thismeasurement was taken six weeks later, their interest in coaching, their belief in coaching, their ability to coach was still flourishing.
KE: I am assuming these managers were probably in their 30 s, 40 s or beyond who had a fixed mindset, and through the process of a workshop that lasted for just a day or two, they were able to change their frame of reference?
CD: At SMU, would you believe it was a 90-minute workshop? What they did first was they read a scientific article about how the brain grows with learning throughout life. They saw a video about the brain and its plasticity and its lifelong ability to learn, then they did a number of exercises. They were asked as a manager, what are at least three reasons why it's important to realize that people can develop their ability? They were asked, what's an area in which you once had low ability, but now perform quite well? How were you able to make that change?
They also wrote an e-mail to a hypothetical struggling prot g about how abilities can be developed. They were encouraged to include instances of how they personally had dealt with these kinds of challenges. They were also asked to identify three examples of each of the following: How they have observed someone learn to do something they thought that person could never do, why they think that occurred and what the implications of that are. So by the end of all these exercises they really believe in the possibility of substantial growth for everyone.
That lesson lasted for at least the six weeks that they were measuring it and really showed up in their behavior. They have another study where they showed the same growth mindset led managers to really notice employee improvement. Managers in a fixed mindset do not notice improvement; they are stuck in their initial impression. So the growth mindset workshop leads them to be better coaches, leads them to be more in tune with their actual employee performance and improvement.
KE: HR and learning and development folks talk about the need for their managers to become more effective coaches. Where they typically start is by getting them a coaching training program. This information on mindset and the study results you just mentioned cause me to believe there is some fundamental work that needs to happen before the training program begins. For someone with a fixed mindset, the whole notion of coaching probably seems odd. If employees talents and abilities are fixed, what would be the value in coaching them?
CD: Exactly, then it's all in selection and aptitude, it's not in employee development.
KE: We ve often talked on these webcasts about the powerful development available through stretch assignments. It seems now that mindset would greatly impact the value of the assignment; the mindset of the employee and also of the manager involved.
CD: Stretch assignments are powerful as long as they are presented that way, because that could also be presented as tests of their talent. And they could perceive that their bosses are judging them on that basis. So just giving challenging stretch assignments could be different in a different mindset.
KE: What would your recommendations be for delivering feedback from a 360 review to a person with a fixed mindset, where there is clearly a need for some improvement in certain areas?
CD: I think there are two approaches, one is short-term and one is long-term. The short-term is you can present something to someone in a fixed mindset as a mistake or criticism. It has to be what you like about their work and ideas and how there can be more of that or how it can be amplified. Oh, I like your idea of this and I wonder if it could be applied here? Or, I wonder what we can do to implement that idea better. What are some things we might try the next time? But I think even with a boss there can be a long-term conspiracy to create a growth mindset environment.
I just heard on the train, I was taking the train from San Francisco and the man in front of me was talking about his boss who had weekly humiliation sessions, where he tells the employees everything they did wrong publicly, and even in that context the employees can come back. So what can we do to improve? Tell me what I should do differently? I want to get this right, will you show me how to do it? Will you coach me in the right way to do it? I think even employees with respect to a boss can form a conspiracy to create a growth mindset leader who will coach them, who can see development and who can take it from there.
KE: You have an entire section in your book about leaders and I highly recommend Carol's book for those of you who are interested in knowing more. She goes into great detail about how a leader s mindset impacts their views and their choices in leading their organization and I think it is a tremendously powerful place to look as we explore ways to increase the quantity and quality of effective leaders.
You also have a section in your book on parenting as well as one on relationships. Is it possible for a person to have one mindset at work and a completely different one in their personal relationship?
CD: Yes, it is. We have found in our research that people with a growth mindset in relationships seek criticism from their partners; they don t want to be put on a pedestal and be seen as perfect. People in a fixed mindset do want to be perfect and they worry about flaws in their relationship or flaws in their partner and see them as permanent and fatal. We have a brand new study (Kammrath & Dweck) that shows who deals with important issues in their relationships. Say something happens where you are really angry and upset. Do you speak up and try to solve that? What we find is that people in a growth mindset do speak up, trying to be constructive and solve the problem. But people in a fixed mindset, who see problems as unsolvable and flaws as permanent and fatal, do not. In fact, we found the worse they think the problem is, the less likely they are to speak up. They think about leaving, but they don t confront. You can see how this would be really key to the success of a relationship.
KE: Thank you for your time and insights, Carol. For those of you interested in knowing more, we encourage you to purchase Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, written by Dr. Carol S. Dweck.
