The Emperor Has No Growth Mindset

Stop making it a thing

Intro

It is my prediction, or at least my hope, that growth mindset will stop being a thing in the near future.

Much smarter people have given their critiques on the subject, but if I were to oversimplify the whole thing, I would point out that it’s a giant motte and bailey fallacy.

What is a motte and bailey? They’re parts of a castle; presumably some bright minded academic decided it would be a useful analogy for a particular kind of cognitive bias.

Basically a person goes around making controversial claims (i.e. the “bailey” — the weaker part of the castle): “If I put positive vibrations out into the world than positive vibrations will come back at me.”

And if people contest these claims, they “retreat to the motte” i.e. shift their argument to a more palatable form. “Thermodynamics states matter that cannot be created or destroyed — and matter is energy, after all.”

Lots of pseudoscientific claims use the motte and bailey strategy — as does growth mindset.

The growth mindset bailey: “You can achieve anything with a growth mindset if you put enough effort into it.”

When they're questioned about it — such as the relevant scope of efficacy, the heritability of traits, the G factor model of intelligence — they retreat to the motte, which effectively boils down to: “Practice makes perfect. What’s wrong with that?”

But this two pronged approach to growth mindset is borderline harmful, considering…

It’s poorly defined, even now

Carol Dwek herself places an actual value judgement on the type of people who have a fixed mindset (i.e. the people who failed to cultivate a growth mindset.

From her own paper:

Those with a fixed mindset believe that their talents and abilities are simply fixed. They have a certain amount and that’s that. In this mindset athletes may become so concerned with being and looking talented that they never fulfill their potential.

First, she defines people with a fixed mindset in a circular fashion. That's like if I described a warhammer by saying “It’s a hammer used for war.”

Second, her next sentence makes the entirely orthogonal claim that people who believe in natural talent are more superficial than those with a growth mindset. Regardless of whether it's true, it’s an separate discussion.

Lastly, her final statement — they’re concern with looking good — is an yet another unrelated claim. I would argue that if I'm a basketball player concerned with looking good, then the best way to achieve this is to actually score, like, 50 points per game.

But more importantly…

It’s easily misinterpreted

Here's the way growth mindset as presented:

1. Fifth grade students are praised either for their intelligence or their effort in completing a task, then

2. They are given a difficult/impossible task, only to find

3. The students who are praised for their effort tried to solve the problem for significantly longer than those who were praised for their intelligence

As a result, the conclusion that people draw is this: if you praise a student for her intelligence, she will “give up” quicker when presented with a challenge, because they believe their abilities cannot change. Therefore, it's better to praise her for the effort they put in.

I'm probably not the first one to notice this, but I feel like there's a glaring flaw in this conclusion.

First, if you praise somebody for their intelligence and then give them a test, then they will likely believe the test to be a mark of intelligence. Considering the question is beyond their capability, the most intelligent thing to do is to give up as quickly as possible. In Silicon Valley speak, this is called “failing fast.”

Second, if you praise somebody for their effort and then give them a test, they will likely believe the test to be a mark of effort. As a result, they will not do the most intelligent thing, but the thing that produces the most effort – in this case, work on the problem for a longer duration.

But even this is tangential to my main problem with this nebulous idea of growth mindset, which is…

It’s cruel

I have to believe on some level even Dweck herself understands the motte and bailey nature of growth mindset, considering she herself occasionally retreats back into the motte.

But I don’t think she or any of her colleagues have done nearly enough to communicate scope or limitations of growth mindset. As a result, it leads to a cruel optimism. “If you didn't achieve the results you wanted, then you just didn't have the right mindset.”

If a farmer in North Korea doesn't become a billionaire, is it because she didn't have a growth mindset? What about a student with Down syndrome? Do they have a fixed mindset if they are unable to attain a masters degree in physics?

You might be thinking these are ridiculous examples. But why? According to this study, the farmer and the student just need to rethink their mindset around their challenges.

What about somebody who is 5 foot 3 who decides they don’t have what it takes to make it into the NBA? What about somebody who is 5 foot 10? Six feet even? Where is the line between fixed mindset and being realistic?

You might be tempted to reply. “Of course we can't guarantee that somebody will make it into the NBA. We're just saying that if you put effort into playing basketball, you will become better than you were before.”

But this is retreating into the Motte. It seems a little bit discouraging if, after all of this research and funding, the basic thing that they’re trying to impress upon people is “Practice at X produces greater competency at X.”

Conclusion

Growth mindset needs to go away, because the weak version of the claim is woo, and the strong version of the claim is obvious. How many people don’t actually believe that you can practice and get better at something?

Moreover, there’s better ways to talk about improvement. We can use the frame of neuroscience, habit formation, or other areas of psychology. They would get the point across without having the externality of implicit moral judgement.

Thanks for reading until the end. Here’s a shark getting rotated.