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