Grow up
Sometimes, I get the unstoppable urge to poke ideas everyone raves about to see how well they hold up under scrutiny. Often, I find more marketing than substance, like opening a bag of chips and seeing that it’s half-empty1. This inborn tendency has forced me to rethink some popular ideas. 10,000 hours to become an expert, a six-foot wall, a depression gap, or a tortured genius… When I look closer at any of those popularized ideas, I can only conclude that they are more nuanced than they initially seem.
Next up: the growth mindset. You have heard about it, I’m sure. The growth mindset is all the rage. It’ll help you do great in school, land you a wonderful job, and it’s the key to finding the partner of your dreams.
Hold my diet co*ke.
In 2006, psychologist Carol Dweck wrote the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. While the idea of a growth mindset had been around (more implicitly) before that, the book planted it firmly in the limelight. Stripped down to its bare bones, the idea is straightforward. Some people have a fixed mindset (“my abilities are static and there’s little I can do about it”); others have a growth-oriented mindset (“I can learn from my mistakes and improve my abilities”). Keep in mind that it’s not an either-or story, but a spectrum.
The effect of this mindset spectrum has been mostly tested in school settings. If we hold interventions to nudge kids toward a more growth-oriented mindset, do they get better grades?
Controversy
Yes, say some studies.
No, say other studies.
Ha, science. All studies are flawed, but not all studies are flawed in the same way. That’s where meta-analyses come into play. By collating several studies, applying (hopefully) meaningful inclusion criteria, and taking into account potential sources of study bias, they can get us a somewhat more accurate view of the issue.
A recent meta-analysis on the potential effects of growth mindset interventions comes to a sobering conclusion:
When examining only studies demonstrating the intervention influenced students’ mindsets as intended… the effect was nonsignificant…. When examining the highest-quality evidence…, the effect was nonsignificant… We conclude that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws, and bias.
Controversy ensued. Comments on the analysis pointed out that there are a lot of fuzzy edges when it comes to defining and measuring mindsets and their effects, or that different analytical methods still manage to recover a (small and heterogenous) positive effect.
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The authors of the original meta-analysis answered the comments point by point (if you’re on X, this thread by one of the authors is worth a read). They (in my opinion rightfully) stick to their guns.
We found major areas of concern in the growth mindset intervention literature. For instance, 94% of growth mindset interventions included confounds, authors with a known financial incentive were two and a half times as likely to report positive effects, and higher quality studies were less likely to demonstrate a benefit.
I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of this. So far, though, it seems that if growth mindset interventions have an effect it’s small and strongly context-dependent.
Mind your mindset
None of the mindset controversy means that a growth mindset doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter; it simply means that this mindset is not something you acquire at the snap of a finger. That’s like telling someone dealing with depression to “just cheer up”. No matter how well-intentioned; it does not work.
Even a century ago, Bertrand Russell pointed out that getting trapped in our own heads and comparing ourselves to others is a surefire way to be unhappy. (Marion Milner might clap back at him and tell him to do some introspective journaling…)
With nothing to support it but some introspection (take that, Bertrand!), I can very well imagine that getting hung up on all your (perceived) failures can lead to stagnation and leave you stuck. Stuck can be a synonym for fixed (mindset)2. That’s not necessarily bad. Sometimes, you need time to process things and work through them. But it is dangerous when it leads to learned helplessness (which, in some forms, has been linked to the development of depression…). I can’t change myself/the situation, so why even try? Fortunately, a fixed mindset doesn’t have to be fixed. It’s part of a spectrum, remember? Carol Dweck of growth mindset fame herself once wrote:
Everyone is actually a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets, and that mixture continually evolves with experience. A pure growth mindset doesn’t exist…
The issue with the social media/pop science version of a growth mindset is that, like SMART goals (sorry to burst another bubble), a growth mindset is an overly simplistic representation of a complex, multidimensional phenomenon. Some parts of you will sometimes be fixed while others grow, and that combination will change over time. I’d go as far as to say that the growth mindset doesn't exist; your overall mindset has many moving parts, or even domain-specific mindsets, and they’ll move at different speeds and during different times in life.
In itself, the simplistic representation of a growth mindset that is so popular is understandable. It’s hard for an idea to gain traction if we have to spell out every nuance. You only have a few seconds to grab someone’s attention. What irks me about the common conception of a growth mindset, though, is that it puts the onus of both success and failure squarely on the shoulders of the individual.
You failed to manifest (a term I’m allergic to) the life of your dreams? Must have been your mindset. Never - here it comes - ‘mind’ health issues, discrimination, or financial struggles, you just didn’t want it bad enough. What a fixed mindset this is, thinking that mindset is all that matters.
To grow as a person, you need the right mindset, of course, and few things are more inspiring and attractive than people who want to learn, develop, and build parts of themselves to inch closer to that unachievable goal of being whole.
But to grow you also need water and sunlight and care.
Take care.
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1
This is unfair to the bag of chips (my years in the UK make me want to write crisps…). Despite what it looks like, the bag is not half-empty; it’s filled with nitrogen gas to keep the air out and prevent the chips from turning stale.
2
I like parentheses; they allow me to insert multiple, coexisting ideas into a single sentence. My mind is a jungle sometimes…
