romantic musical, Guettel won the 2005 Tony Award. Will he take it as praise for talent or praise for effort? I hope it’s the latter.
There was one more finding in our study that was striking and depressing at the same time. We said to each student: “You know, we’re going to go to other schools, and I bet the kids in those schools would like to know about the problems.” So we gave students a page to write out their thoughts, but we also left a space for them to write the scores they had received on the problems.
Would you believe that almost 40 percent of the ability-praised students
What’s so alarming is that we took ordinary children and made them into liars, simply by telling em they were smart.
Right after I wrote these paragraphs, I met with a young man who tutors students for their College Board exams. He had come to consult with me about one of his students. This student takes practice tests and then lies to him about her score. He is supposed to tutor her on what she doesn’t know, but she can’t tell him the truth about what she doesn’t know! And she is paying money for this.
So telling children they’re smart, in the end, made them feel dumber and act dumber, but claim they were smarter. I don’t think this is what we’re aiming for when we put positive labels—“gifted,” “talented,” “brilliant”—on people. We don’t mean to rob them of their zest for challenge and their recipes for success. But that’s the danger.
Here is a letter from a man who’d read some of my work:
Dear Dr. Dweck,
It was painful to read your chapter … as I recognized myself therein.
As a child I was a member of The Gifted Child Society and continually praised for my intelligence. Now, after a lifetime of not living up to my potential (I’m 49), I’m learning to apply myself to a task. And also to see failure not as a sign of stupidity but as lack of experience and skill. Your chapter helped see myself in a new light.
Seth Abrams
This is the danger of positive labels. There are alternatives, and I will return to them later in the chapter on parents, teachers, and coaches.
NEGATIVE LABELS AND HOW THEY WORK
I was once a math whiz. In high school, I got a 99 in algebra, a 99 in geometry, and a 99 in trigonometry, and I was on the math team. I scored up there with the boys on the air force test of visual-spatial ability, which is why I got recruiting brochures from the air force for many years to come.
Then I got a Mr. Hellman, a teacher who didn’t believe girls could do math. My grades declined, and I never took math again.
I actually agreed with Mr. Hellman, but I didn’t think it applied to
Everyone knows negative labels are bad, so you’d think this would be a short section. But it isn’t a short section, because psychologists are learning
No one knows about negative ability labels like members of stereotyped groups. For example, African Americans know about being stereotyped as lower in intelligence. And women know about being stereotyped as bad at math and science. But I’m not sure even they know how creepy these stereotypes are.
Research by Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson shows that even checking a box to indicate your race or sex can trigger the stereotype in your mind and lower your test score. Almost anything that reminds you that you’re black or female before taking a test in the subject you’re supposed to be bad at will lower your test score—a lot. In many of their studies, blacks are equal to whites in their performance, and females are equal to males, when no stereotype is evoked. But just put more males in the room with a female before a math test, and down goes the female’s score.
This is why. When stereotypes are evoked, they fill people’s minds with distracting thoughts—with secret worries about confirming the stereotype. People usually aren’t even aware of it, but they don’t have enough mental power left to do their best on the test.
This doesn’t happen to everybody, however. It mainly happens to people who are in a fixed mindset. It’s when people are thinking in terms of fixed traits that the stereotypes get to them. Negative stereotypes say: “You and your group are permanently inferior.” Only people in the fixed mindset resonate to this message.
So in the fixed mindset, both positive and negative labels can mess with your mind. When you’re given a positive label, you’re afraid of losing it, and when you’re hit with a negative label, you’re afraid of deserving it.
When people are in a growth mindset, the stereotype doesn’t disrupt their performance. The growth mindset takes the teeth out of the stereotype and makes people better able to fight back. They don’t believe in permanent inferiority. And if they
The growth mindset also makes people able to take what they can and what they need even from a threatening environment. We asked African American students to write an essay for a competition. They were told that when they finished, their essays would be evaluated by Edward Caldwell III, a distinguished professor with an Ivy League pedigree. That is, a representative of the white establishment.
Edward Caldwell III’s feedback was quite critical, but also helpful—and students’ reactions varied greatly. Those with a fixed mindset viewed it as a threat, an insult, or an attack. They rejected Caldwell and his feedback.
Here’s what one student with the fixed mindset thought: “He’s mean, he doesn’t grade right, or he’s obviously biased. He doesn’t like me.”
Said another: “He is a pompous asshole.… It appears that he was searching for anything to discredit the work.”
And another, deflecting the feedback with blame: “He doesn’t understand the conciseness of my points. He thought it was vague because he was impatient when he read it. He dislikes creativity.”
None of them will learn anything from Edward Caldwell’s feedback.
The students with the growth mindset may also have viewed him as a dinosaur, but he was a dinosaur who could teach them something.
“Before the evaluation, he came across as arrogant and overdemanding. [After the evaluation?] ‘Fair’ seems to be the first word that comes to mind.… It seems like a new challenge.”
“He sounded like an arrogant, intimidating, and condescending man. [What are your feelings about the evaluation?] The evaluation was seemingly honest and specific. In this sense, the evaluation could be a stimulus … to produce better work.”
“He seems to be proud to the point of arrogance. [The evaluation?] He was intensely critical.… His comments were helpful and clear, however. I feel I will learn much from him.”
The growth mindset allowed African American students to recruit Edward Caldwell III for their own goals. They were in college to get an education and, pompous asshole or not, they were going to get it.
Aside from hijacking people’s abilities, stereotypes also do damage by making people feel they don’t belong. Many minorities drop out of college and many women drop out of math and science because they just don’t feel they fit in.
To find out how this happens, we followed college women through their calculus course. This is often when students decide whether math, or careers involving math, are right for them. Over the semester, we asked the women to report their feelings about math and their sense of belonging in math. For example, when they thought about math, did they feel like a full-fledged member of the math community or did they feel like an outsider; did they feel comfortable or did they feel anxious; did they feel good or bad about their math skills?
The women with the growth mindset—those who thought math ability could be improved—felt a fairly strong and stable sense of belonging. And they were able to maintain this even when they thought there was a lot of negative stereotyping going around. One student described it this way: “In a math class, [female] students were told they were wrong when they were not (they were in fact doing things in novel ways). It was absurd, and reflected poorly on the instructor not to ‘see’ the students’ good reasoning. It was alright because we were working
