I have written before about Martin Seligman’s discovery of the phenomenon of learned helplessness. His experiments demonstrated that when animals or people are subjected to unavoidable pain or distress, around two-thirds of subjects seem to lose the capacity to take advantage of subsequent opportunities to improve their situation. The remaining one-third, however, are immune to the effect.

Seligman’s experiments were important because they proved that an individual’s mindset is an important factor in influencing behaviour, an idea which had been rejected by mainstream psychology up to that point. Seligman’s subsequent work in defining the explanatory styles that both led to learned helplessness and provided immunity to it led to the development of  methods of treatment, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, which could be used to change an individual’s core beliefs and, thus, avoid extreme effects, such clinical depression.

Carol Dweck

At the time of this ‘cognitive’ revolution in psychology, Carol Dweck was a graduate student at Yale. She was particularly interested in how Seligman’s observations could be interpreted in an educational context. She was aware that some children seemed to be paralysed by failure, while others were motivated by it. Based on her research, she developed a theory that a student’s belief regarding whether his or her abilities were fixed or subject to change was crucial to educational development. The differences between the ‘fixed’ and ‘growth’ mindsets are clearly illustrated by this diagram.

In a breakthrough study in 1975 she took a group of elementary school students who were having difficulties with mathematical problems. Half of the group were coached to believe that their brains worked like muscles, which could grow stronger with more effort, and that working hard would enable them to solve the problems. The other ‘control group’ did not receive the training. The  group that received the growth-mindset coaching quickly made progress, learning to solve the problems which continued to elude the uncoached control group.

Dweck found that it wasn’t just failure itself that created learning difficulties for children with fixed mindsets. Among successful pupils, fear of failure was also a potential problem. When fixed-mindset kids were told how smart they were, this seemed to create a disincentive for them to learn more, in case future failure tarnished their ’smart’ image. In his article The Talent Myth, which chronicles how an unrestrained ‘talent culture’ led to the collapse of Enron, Malcolm Gladwell describes an experiment of Dweck’s which highlights how the fixed-mindset can lead talented individuals astray:-

Dweck gave a class of preadolescent students a test filled with challenging problems. After they were finished, one group was praised for its effort and another group was praised for its intelligence. Those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks, and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer. Then Dweck asked the children to write a letter to students at another school, describing their experience in the study. She discovered something remarkable: forty per cent of those students who were praised for their intelligence lied about how they had scored on the test, adjusting their grade upward. They weren’t naturally deceptive people, and they weren’t any less intelligent or self-confident than anyone else. They simply did what people do when they are immersed in an environment that celebrates them solely for their innate “talent.” They begin to define themselves by that description, and when times get tough and that self-image is threatened they have difficulty with the consequences.

Dweck’s conclusion based on her research is that teachers and parents who praise children for their talents rather than their efforts could lead them to fear and avoid failure, rather than seeing it as a necessary part of the learning process. As the extract from Gladwell’s essay shows, in extreme cases, it can even encourage them to lie rather than admit to failure.

In recent decades the importance of a child’s self-esteem in educational achievement has had a strong influence on teaching methods. Dweck argues, however, that a ’self-esteem at all costs’ approach has diluted standards and left many children unchallenged and afraid to fail. Students may have felt good about themselves, but at the cost of lowered academic standards. Dweck emphasises the need to teach children that failure is part of the learning process, and that self-esteem is the by-product of overcoming challenges.

Dweck, who is now a professor of psychology at the University of Stanford, has provided an excellent overview of her work in her 2006 book Mindset. The book looks at the influence of mindset not only on education and parenting, but also in many other contexts including relationships, business and sports.

One important theme of the book is how an obsession with ‘natural’ talent can create barriers to those with fixed mindsets. Like Dweck, Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t believe in ‘The Natural’. In his most recent book, ‘Outliers’, he analyses a number of so-called natural talents including Bill Gates and The Beatles to show that their success was a result good fortune and hard work, without which talent alone would never have cut it. Gladwell quotes a rule of thumb of 10,000 hours of practice as a minimum for someone to become an expert in their chosen field, regardless of natural ability. Even Mozart, the most frequently cited child-prodigy, did not produce any masterpieces until he reached his twenties. Dweck believes that fixed mindsets inhibit people from finding out their true potential in a particular field because they perceive themselves as having not having enough natural talent to begin with.

The good news from Dweck’s research is that she has found that changing from one mindset to the other is quite easy given the right training. She has developed ‘Brainology‘, an online training course for schoolchildren, and also runs courses for business managers. Dweck has even become involved in sports psychology, working with English soccer team Blackburn Rovers and lecturing to the Scottish soccer establishment, including Scotland manager George Burley.

Thinking about how the concept of mindset applies to myself has been an interesting and surprising exercise for me. Looking at failure as a growth process has helped me to remain positive in the face of repeated rejection in the current job market. I also found that, upon reflection, I wasn’t quite as much of a ‘growth-mindset’ guy as I thought I was. I even noticed myself developing a fixed mindset about my possession of a growth mindset! I found that the further a growth mindset drives you forward, the bigger the risk of falling into a fixed mindset based on pride at one’s accomplishments.

The ultimate message from Dweck’s work is that defining oneself in concrete terms in any aspect of our lives puts limits on our potential, even if the definition is a positive one. By learning to enjoy the voyage of discovery on its own terms, including the opportunities for growth provided by the setbacks along the way, we can have a more fulfilling life with more potential for learning and achievement.