Growing Your Brain: Thinking You CAN

A few days ago, a news article sparked me to write about students who have a belief that they can't do statistics - or other intellectual tasks - because their brains are not wired that way.

A longer report on researcher Carol Dweck came out today, with a focus on the positive: how we can change our beliefs about intelligence - and then improve our performance dramatically, even in areas where we previously did quite poorly.

NPR interviewed Carol Dweck about her studies of the impact on performance of having a growth mindset about intelligence. The audio interview includes some of the middle school students who participated in the experiment.

The publicity has boosted her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, to #45 on the amazon.com top sellers list. But a review of the psychology journals let me know there is a lot more to Dweck's work than I had guessed.


For years, psychologists studied (and argued) about human traits - personality types, intelligence, abilities: are they fixed and stable, or malleable and able to change? Dweck entered into this discussion years ago, taking the perspective that traits might be malleable. But why could some people change traits - even long-standing ones - while others could not?

Rather than seek a genetic or physical cause, Dweck explored how the individuals were thinking about their traits -- and hit the jackpot. Our pre-existing mindset affects the way we listen and observe, the way we organize our perceptions about ourselves and others, and affects our actions.

People who think about the mind as stable and set - having particular traits that will not change - interpret the behavior of other people, their own chance of success, even the actions of people in novel situations in terms of their perceived traits. They quite literally don't notice ideas or behaviors that are contrary to the stable traits they perceive. Her research with the children's math scores showed how their ideas block themselves. Some of her earlier research looked at how stereotypes are formed and maintained. A person who believes that others have stable traits is more likely to engage in stereotyped thinking.

The person with a growth or dynamic way of viewing people, on the other hand, may overlook the stable traits that are present - because of focusing on the immediate events and situation around an event. They tend to view the person as interacting with everything around, rather than acting out a particular personality pattern. They are more likely to think they can develop a new strategy or do something differently, and to attribute other people's behaviors to the situations rather than their intelligence, dishonesty, or other trait.

Are there really such clear cut distinctions? Dwerk developed a three-question test, and found that 85% of us can be defined as either trait-thinkers or malleable-thinkers, about evenly divided. Only 15% fall in the gray area in between.

She finds clear differences, too, in the way people react to personal setbacks. People who think that traits are set for life often feel helpless to do anything when they encounter setbacks or failure; those who believe intelligence and morality can grow and develop look for new strategies. When someone transgresses against them, trait-thinking people often want retribution, while the incrementalists want to education or rehabilitate the other person.

This is still a new area of reading for me - but very exciting stuff! Watch for more updates as I delve further into it.