The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How to Adopt a Growth Mindset

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

If we decide that we can't get better at things, or that our ideas and personality traits are fixed... then we hinder our ability to change and improve in enjoyable and fulfilling ways. But by challenging ourselves to be more hopeful about our prospects for improvement we can see profound changes in our lives.David Yeager, a psychology professor at UT-Austin, explains how we fall into limiting fixed mindsets, and how easy it is to start adopting a "growth" mindset that will allow us to flourish. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. They often struggle, at least at first. But after wrestling a bit with the material, they usually arrive at that blissful aha moment, where everything makes sense. You can practically see the light bulbs going off in their heads. But sadly, sometimes I also observe the opposite. Students never make it to that aha moment, because all of a sudden, they just seem to give up. It's a moment that every teacher dreads. I was a middle school teacher and my only skill was getting my kids fired up to learn.

Unfortunately, once they were fired up, I had mediocre pedagogical skills. And so I went to graduate school wanting to learn, if I say this to my kids, are they going to be more motivated than if I say that? And you'd be amazed how little research actually tests anything like that.

This is David Yeager, a psychology professor at UT Austin. He and his collaborator, the renowned Stanford professor Carol Dweck, study how the things we believe about the world, our so-called mindset, can influence our behavior. And they've found that the way we think about a challenge can make a huge difference in how well we get through it. Do I believe that things in the world can change? And if the answer is yes, then the stakes are a little bit lower when things go wrong. This is what Carol Dweck has called the growth mindset. And this is the idea that there's the potential for change. As you'll hear in this episode, the science shows that helping my students develop a growth mindset

can lower the likelihood that they'll shut down when the going gets tough. And developing a growth mindset can also have lots of benefits for your personal life and happiness too. So you could have a mindset about your intelligence and your mindset could be that intelligence is fixed. You either have it or you don't. Let's say you bomb your algebra one test, right? The first major test of the year. Then that's an event that happened to you. It's an objective fact. You got a 60. But the world then gets subjectively interpreted by you and your mind. Your beliefs about the nature of your intelligence can powerfully shape the sense you make of

the failed test. So in a growth mindset, the test is one piece of information. It's something that you need to attend to and react to positively and figure out how to overcome. The same failure, though, in a fixed mindset is very different. That failure feels like something to be ashamed of because it's revealed your lack of ability. You don't want to redouble your efforts and try hard in a fixed mindset because that just outs you even more as the kind of person who has to try hard. In a growth mindset though,

effort is good. Effort is just the process through which you get better. And asking for help is another thing you do in a growth mindset. You say, wow, I don't understand this. What does it mean? In a fixed mindset, you don't ask clarifying questions. So it's this cycle of concealing our misunderstanding that comes from a fixed mindset and then causes us to underperform relative to what we could do. So that's a fixed mindset in the academic domain. But there's also research showing these mindsets might play out in the context of even how we think about our own health and longevity. Research showing these mindsets might play out in the context of even how we think about our own health and longevity.

What Aaliyah Crum has figured out is that people differ in whether they think of stress as something that is fundamentally bad for you and will undermine your goals or something that could be enhancing. And it's a brilliant insight because if you look around our society, there's a negative mindset about stress. But you can have a different mindset, the mindset that that stress response, your racing heart, your sweating palms, the shortness of breath, the feelings of anxiety in your stomach, those are signs that your body is mobilizing energy to really do well and to succeed. And that stress is enhancing mindset, interestingly, actually changes the way your body responds. So if you believe that your racing heart and sweating palms can be fuel for cooling your body down and bringing oxygenated blood to your brain, then that actually happens when scientists measure those things during a

stressful experience. And this is another thing that fixed mindset messes us up on is the extent to which we seek challenges, right? You're resting on your laurels is a good thing if you're totally scared that every mess up means, you know, you're a horrible person and you'll never get better. But talk about why a growth mindset can kind of push yourself in this new way. Dave Neusbaum did a study where he took people, taught them either the fix or the growth mindset, and then had them do a task where they got feedback that they were at the 25th percentile. But then they had a chance to either look at the work of people who were at the 90th percentile or at the work of people at the 10th percentile.

And a fixed mindset, they looked at the 10th percentile because it made them feel better. Like, well, these are not as bad as these losers. And the growth mindset, though, they looked at the people who did better and they tried to adopt their strategies. Which is so important, right? I mean, to learn, you don't want to be looking to the people who are doing badly. To learn, you need to look to the people who

hopefully are better than you. So different kinds of responses to the same feedback, depending on your mindset. So far, we've been talking about the beliefs that we have about our own ability to change. But when we get back from the break, we'll find out what happens if we challenge ourselves to believe that change is possible for other people too. Even for people who totally suck. Think middle school bullies. If we entertain the thought that not-so-nice people can change into kinder people, what will that change in us? The Happiness Lab will be right back. We'll be right back. Often people have heard about growth mindset in the academic domain.

I think in part because Carol Dweck's work has become so famous. But you've actually done some really lovely work looking at growth mindset in a different context, in the context of kind of being nice and forgiveness. So tell me about some of that stuff. I wanted to develop an experiment to try to change kids' mindsets and see if I could reduce aggression and revenge in real high schools. And so we created a growth mindset program, this is about 2009, 2010, to change kids' mindsets about bullies, really, and about themselves as victims. And we went into the second lowest income high school in the Bay Area, took over biology class on Tuesdays and Thursdays for three weeks, and did workshops about the brain and how the brain can change and how people can change. And we asked kids to do skits and sketches about change and wrote essays where they reframed

bad actions as things that can change. And then we needed to measure aggression. blamed bad actions as things that can change. And then we need to measure aggression. Turns out it's very hard to measure aggression in the high school because you can't just sit around and wait for a fight because very few kids fight. So we decided to do an experimental manipulation where you kind of have to make everybody mad and then see if they take revenge. And so we had a classroom of like 79th and 10th graders at a time at this urban school in San Jose who went through a cyberball paradigm where they are on a computer and other players are throwing the ball to each other and never throw it to you. And then we say, okay, now it's time to do a taste testing task and we're going to match you with the guy you just played cyberball with.

And by the way, this person hates spicy food. I'm going to give you a box full of a bunch of different kinds of foods. You could allocate whatever you want. The dependent measure for aggression was how much hot sauce did they spoon into a cup, thinking that the other guy who just excluded them would have to eat all of it. What we found is that kids who learn people can change allocated 40% less hot sauce in this task. In addition, at the end of the year,

teachers were more likely to have nominated them for good interpersonal behavior. And so I was like, okay, this is great. You can have a theory of a problem like aggression, you can do a treatment, and you can get results. So from there, we said, how can I go online and get it to more people? We went from the six-day workshop to the 30-minute workshop, to high schools, to 75 schools. And now that growth mindset treatments can be done in a very short amount of time. And now hundreds of thousands of people per year get them for free. It's so amazing. It's such important work. I mean, what did it feel like in the early days to learn that if you can change people's internal stories you can really change

their behavior in like a profound way like reducing bullying you know getting teachers to say these are better students what people don't appreciate is in 2009 2010 people thought this was the dumbest idea ever like nobody thought this was a legitimate part of education or like school reform or anything like that right i. I'll never forget when I was doing the hot sauce study, we were doing the surveys in the PE class. So I've got like 90 sweaty kids. And so they're goofing off and the PE coach comes up to me and he's like, Hey man, why are you doing the study? I'm like, kind of want to reduce aggression and, you know, help kids have a better life. And he's like, it's too late for these kids. You should have

gone to the elementary school. These kids can't change. I'm literally here to teach them that people can change. I mean, but I think the power of this insight is like, it's just a thing that we can all learn from, right? You know, I think we forget that our internal stories are driving, you know, what we eat, the decisions we make, how much we put effort into things. But like, they really are controlling so much of our behavior and ultimately so much of who we wind up being as a person. These same studies work in lots of important things for adults. One of my favorites is Aronel Perrin's work on mindsets and intractable conflict. Basically, if you think another group is fundamentally evil and can never change, then when that group does something to harm your group you immediately think of counter-attacks and revenge you don't think of a peace process and they did this work with israelis soon after a terrorist attack thinking about palestinians and in a fixed mindset israelis are like no counter-terrorism and in a growth mindset even if they were kind of right-wing in general and

inclined more toward a military response in a growth growth mindset, they said, no, let's give the peace process a chance at least first. So I think that's an example where even adults who they haven't just spent their whole life coming up with a fixed mindset, there have been generations, like thousands of years thinking that way. Even in that group, a growth mindset can make a difference. We need to have a growth mindset about growth mindsets, right? Like we need to have a growth mindset about growth mindsets, right? Like we need to recognize that our beliefs can change too. I think that's important because in a lot of pop psychology, we have these quizzes and tests and Myers-Briggs and a lot of it's used to put people in boxes. And one thing I hear a lot from managers

is should I only hire people with a growth mindset? And I don't think mindset should be used as a screening tool necessarily. It's an acquired belief system that comes from someone's experience in the world. And we have to legitimate where it comes from. If the world treats you as though you or your group can never change, what else are you gonna believe?

Of course you believe things can't change. But then we shouldn't write you off and say, there's your fixed mindset, there you go, because the environment gave you that mindset. So I think we need to just help people adopt a growth mindset, but also we need to do what we can to make it actually true in people's lives. That means providing resources,

it means providing opportunities, providing support, giving people the space to grow. And anyone who has power over somebody else, a manager, a coach, a mentor, we need to create the affordances for mindset, not tell people to have a growth mindset. So far, we've seen that a growth mindset has lots of benefits, both when we apply that mindset to our own changes and those of other people. But that raises a big question. How exactly do we get a growth mindset? When we get back from the break, we'll talk about strategies you can use to think more effectively

about your own capacity for change, and why doing so can boost your happiness in ways you don't often expect. The Happiness Lab will be right back. After spending so much time talking with psychologist David Yeager about the power of the growth mindset, I started to hear a little bit from my inner critic. She started saying, Laurie, you know how important a growth mindset is, but you don't always have one. You suck at it. You're such a phony. Luckily, David was at the ready to deal with this. He has tons of strategies for how we can adopt a growth mindset, including one that was hypothesized by his famous collaborator, Carol Dweck. She argued that we should try to pay close attention to what our inner critics are telling us. Here's a hypothesis. You can actually start to distinguish the growth and fixed mindset thoughts in your head

and notice those fixed mindset thoughts and not suppress them and push them away, but name them, figure out why they're legitimate, and then choose to follow the growth mindset ones. So Carol thinks that this is only a halfway serious idea, but that you could name your fixed mindset persona. You start hearing, wait, you think you can try hard and get ahead? That's ridiculous. If that is in your head, you say, oh, Larry. Larry's always goofing off back over there

with his fixed mindset ideas. And I appreciate you, Larry, but no thanks today. And I don't know if that exact idea works, although I think it's kind of appealing. But the idea of not villainizing our fixed mindset thoughts and realizing they come from a legitimate place, but also thinking they're not for us, they're not going to help us. I love this idea of kind of labeling the mindset, you know, maybe even giving it a goofy name. You know, another thing we need to pay attention to are the words that we're using in our stories,

right? So talk about how the use of our words and terms can be really powerful. our stories, right? So talk about how the use of our words and terms can be really powerful. I think that's a really profound question because mindsets are, as you've been saying, your own causal theory of the world, but those theories are shaped by language. And it's because language has this power of communicating cause and effect very quickly and easily. So one of the biggest distinctions is noun phrasing versus verb or process phrasing. So saying like, I'm a good writer, they're a bad person, they're a loser.

And any label you put on yourself implies a fixed entity that lies underneath it that can't be changed. So children who are told you're a good drawer hear more fixed mindset thoughts and make more fixed mindset interpretations relative to children who hear that you're a good drawer hear more fixed mindset thoughts and make more fixed mindset interpretations relative to children who hear that's good drawing. Liz Gunderson did this study where moms are playing catch with their two-year-olds in the lab and they're videotaped

and moms who say you're such a good thrower end up with kids who when they're in fourth grade have more of a fixed mindset and take the easy road compared to kids who are praised for the process that they engaged in like this isn't this fun or look how we're doing this. So I think talking to others conveys mindsets, depending on whether you use person or process. But when we talk to ourselves too, that's where you can really get into fixed mindset run. So the words to look out for are overgeneralizations. Anything where it's like all the time or every time or always or everybody, that implies a large category that's fixed and stable and can't change. And that carries fixed mindset connotations with it. I heard that another way that we can kind of fight those

overgeneralizations is just to kind of add a word at the end to things to kind of give ourselves a little bit of hope for change. And so what's this word we can kind of add on the end to help ourselves? Yeah, Carol Dweck had this idea for a while that if you hear a fixed mindset over generalization, you could add yet to the end of it. So I'm not a good programmer yet, right? I'm not a good skier yet. And I like it. I feel like it reminds us that everyone's on a journey of learning and it's a process. Where it could be misused is if it turns into a goofy catchphrase that doesn't really help people. And so if you say, yeah, but then I'm not going to support you in any way to help improve, then it's almost like taking responsibility off of me. So I think saying yet in the context of a commitment to continuous improvement is a really powerful way

to reframe that negative self-dialogue that we have. And I think sometimes we can think like, oh, I'll just think positively or think that I'm gonna get better and lo and behold, you get better. The key there is the stories are affecting how we act in the world and the actions we take in the future, right?

Yeah, so I think one of the biggest dangers in mindset is to think of it as purely lying to yourself and having unfounded positivity. And I think people are legitimately skeptical of that. I'm skeptical of that. If someone tells me to be positive about something that I legitimately think is hopeless, then I think they're either naive or just uninformed, which is why a true growth mindset is founded in an actual belief that change is possible. There has to be a real mechanism for that. Another tip I often hear about improving growth mindset is this idea of kind of thinking realistically about the process, right? The time and effort. You know, it's easy for me if I turn on the Olympics and I see some Olympic gymnast to think, oh man, I suck. I'm not a good gymnast. Like I'm inherently not a good gymnast. And Simone Biles is just, you know,

deeply and inherently a good gymnast. But what I miss there is all the training and all the work she puts in, you know, so talk about the power of paying attention to the process for kind of getting us towards more of a growth mindset. Yeah, I think that we tend to look at excellent performance and think that's how they always were. And then we underappreciate the steps that it took to get there. I think what's often more useful in growth mindset is focusing less on interpersonal comparisons, comparing myself to someone else and more intrapersonal comparisons instead. So how can I be better in the future? What are the processes I need to go through to become the kind of person I would like to be? How am I already better than I was in the

past? One of my favorite ideas on this is stroke victims. So stroke victims, of course, lose functioning in their muscles that are related to the regions of the brain that are affected by the stroke. But the brain is amazingly plastic and people can actually recover a lot of their functioning. And one of the biggest things that distinguishes stroke victims who recover from those who don't is, do you compare yourself to other stroke victims or to yourself in the past for your own functioning? Or do you compare yourself to non-stroke victims who have perfect functioning? If you do the latter, you say, I'll never be like a normal person again. And people don't follow through on their physical therapy and they don't ever improve. If you say, wow, I used to not be able to move this part of my face and now I can kind of move that, then people

actually show a lot more improvement. So I think with anything that changes about us, there are different ways of appraising it or thinking about it and your mindsets affect that. And then that affects how we, how we cope with it and then how debilitating it is or not. And I think that that idea of, you know, comparing your performance against your own past performance can be powerful because then you tend to notice these little wins. You know, you can tend to notice like, oh, I'm just a little bit better and reinforce this belief like, oh wait, there is change there if I look really carefully. Yeah, I think it's hard to keep track of how much we've changed, right? It's like,

you see yourself in the mirror every day and you change a very small amount every day. But when you see a picture from five years ago, you're like, oh my god, it looks so different. And so part of a reason why we get stuck in fixed mindset, I think, is because we don't appreciate the changes that we've had for the better. And so it feels like changing anything new in the future is impossible. So I feel like it's a good habit to, as much as possible, acknowledge and appreciate how far you've come and revisit the steps you took to get there. I hope you've gained as many actionable tips from my conversation with David as I have.

Next time I get frustrated with myself for not doing something well, I'm going to try to take a long view. I'm going to look back at what I was like when I first started out and give myself some credit for all the progress I've made so far. And when that little voice in my head tells me

I'll never be able to do crow pose and yoga or that I'm not good at some random thing, I'll give her a silly name. The next time she pipes up, I'll just tell her, thanks for your input, Linda Lamesauce, but newsflash, humans get better over time when they put in some work. And that means I've got this. I'm also going to take some of David's advice about encouragement to see if I can help foster a growth mindset among my students when they get frustrated, so that instead of giving up at the first sign of struggle, they can change their mindset from, I'll never get this, to, I'm proud of my effort. And if you're secretly worried that even after hearing this episode, you'll never get the hang of this growth mindset thing,

that just means you haven't of this growth mindset thing. That just means you haven't developed a growth mindset yet. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Joseph Fridman checked our facts. Sophie Crane-McKibben edited our scripts. Emily Ann Vaughn offered additional production support. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliore, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Daniela Lucarn, Maya Koenig, Nicole Morano, Eric Sandler, Royston Reserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.