How Our Theories about Ourselves Affect Motivation, Personality, and Development
Over the past two decades, Stanford research 
psychologist Carol Dweck has made some surprising discoveries about why so many highly intelligent students chronically fail to live up their “potential,” while other students never seem to shy away from a challenge. Dweck offers convincing evidence that what underlies these different patterns of behavior is a student’s inherited theory of intelligence and how it relates to one’s self.
In Self-Theories, Dweck presents two competing views of intelligence: a fixed theory and a growth theory. From within the fixed theory, intelligence is seen as an innate capacity, one that is inborn, predetermined and unchanging. Under a growth theory, however, intelligence is more closely associated with the acquisition of knowledge, something that if you work hard at you can gain more of.
Dweck shows that the type of theory a student holds greatly influences a long list of areas of academic concern, including how they respond to challenges, what kinds of goals they will set and how they will deal with failure. The key to understanding why has to do with the fact that each theory reinforces a different set of behaviors.
When a student with a fixed theory of intelligence is confronted with a challenging situation, they tend to take it to mean they must not have the necessary level of intelligence required to deal with the task at hand. Challenge, by nature, reflects poorly on their innate level of intelligence. These students understandably tend to shy away from challenges and instead seek out situations where they feel they are sure to succeed.
Students with a growth mindset, however, are far more likely to see a challenge as something that can be overcome. This is because they see intelligence as a capacity that necessarily comes from work, not as something one is born with. To the student with a growth mindset, a challenge is not a threat but rather an opportunity for growth.
In one experiment, Dweck found that students with a fixed theory were far more likely to report that “working hard made them feel dumb,” whereas those with the growth mindset were far more likely to understand that “mastery is a process that takes place over time and with prolonged effort.”
One of the most surprising conclusions Dweck arrives at deals with self-confidence. She argues quite convincingly that a student’s theory of intelligence is more important even than confidence in dealing successfully with challenge. This is because withing the fixed theoretical framework, one’s ability is only sufficient as long as one meets with success. As soon as one runs into a challenging situation, which is inevitable, their innate ability will still be called into question. Dweck writes, “What appears to be important is not so much the confidence you bring to the situation, as the ability to maintain a confident and nondefensive stance in the face of obstacles. This is much more difficult to do in the fixed-theory framework.”
The good news is that there is something to be done about all of this. Dweck explains that when she exposed children who had been operating under the fixed theory of intelligence to the growth mindset, they showed a marked improvement in their ability to cope with challenge and persevere after experiencing failure. This was done simply by explaining, and then reinforcing, the idea that intelligence can in fact be developed over time with some good old fashioned hard work.
-Jai Flicker
