Personality and Learning

Newsweek has an article this week discussing the research of Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist who is attempting to uncover just how much of our personalities are malleable, and how much is genetically determined. Her conclusion? We're highly subject to change, and even subtle differences in the way we talk to each other can be significant.

I am intrigued in particular by one of her methods, in which she praised preteens on test results by either commenting on their intelligence ("You're so smart!") or their dedication ("You must have worked very hard!").

This may seem like a subtle difference, but to the developing mind the two messages are night and day. The former conveys the belief that people's abilities and traits are fixed, written in concrete, while the latter underscores the potential for growth and the value of old-fashioned effort. The results were immediate and unambiguous: the kids who were told they were smart immediately became cautious, shying away from any further testing that might expose weaknesses. The kids who were praised for their effort, by contrast, became hungry for new challenges. What's more, when the kids were subsequently required to solve very difficult problems, on which they all did poorly, the "smart kids" took the failure as a blow to their self-worth; where they had been smart, they were now dumb, irrevocably. The effortful kids just dug in more...

...As a final part of the experiment, Dweck had all the kids write out their thoughts about the test, ostensibly for other kids who would be taking it in the future. There was also a space for them to write in their scores. Nearly 40 percent of the kids who had earlier been praised for their raw talent lied about how well they had done on the test. They inflated their scores. They were in effect using lying as a way to deny their imperfections, which had become shameful to them.

 Isn't pyschology fascinating? And frightening? It's a little overwhelming to think that even praise can have negative results and ultimately lead to a shame based identity. I keep waiting for a study to come out affirming the positive contributions of sarcasm to personality...