Mindsets: Growing Your Brain - A Conversation with Carol Dweck

Howard Burton

• Publisher: Ideas Roadshow
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781771700429
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

This book is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and renowned psychologist Carol Dweck, Stanford University. This conversation provides behind-the-scenes, detailed insights into the development of Carol's important work on growth mindsets and fixed mindsets: how different ways of thinking influence learning ability and success.This carefully-edited book includes an introduction, Justified Applause, and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: I. Fixed Beginnings - Mrs. Wilson's legacyII. Confronted by Young Wisdom - Encountering growth-minded 10-year-oldsIII. The Genius Defense - All pain, no gainIV. Good and Bad Praise - Embracing the processV. Getting Personal - Popular writing, John McEnroe, and enforcing standardsVI. Brainsets - Neuroplasticity and intelligenceVII. Gender Differences - Male and female mindsetsVIII. Getting the Message Out - Inspiration and misinterpretationIX. Practical Tips - Beneficial struggling and the power of "yet"X. Diversity and Universality - French, Americans and common groundXI. New Horizons - From school bullying to Middle East politicsXII. The Big Picture - Growing the human conditionAbout Ideas Roadshow Conversations Series: This book is part of an expanding series of 100+ Ideas Roadshow conversations, each one presenting a wealth of candid insights from a leading expert in a focused yet informal setting to give non-specialists a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship that wouldn't otherwise be encountered through standard lectures and textbooks. For other books in this series visit our website: https://ideasroadshow.com/.

The Conversation

I. Fixed Beginnings

Mrs. Wilson’s legacy

HB: Let’s start right at the very beginning. What is a “mindset”?

CD: In my work, a mindset is a belief people have about whether their basic qualities are just fixed, given, inborn, or represent something that can change and develop.

For example, some people have a fixed mindset about their intellectual abilities. They think their intelligence is just fixed: you have a certain amount and that’s that. What we find is that when people have this view, they don’t want to do hard things that might reveal some sense of inadequacy, and they don’t stick to hard things because they feel dumb.

But other people have a growth mindset. They believe their basic abilities can be developed through hard work, good strategies, and help and mentoring from others. They don’t think everyone’s the same, or that anyone can be Einstein, but they understand that people don’t become the people that they become without effort—just as Einstein didn’t become Einstein until he worked at it.

So people with a growth mindset are more likely to take on hard challenges and stick to them, because that’s how you learn and grow.

HB: According to your book you also had a fixed mindset when you were younger before you began to appreciate the power of a growth mindset. Maybe you could talk a little bit about you story, because, while you occasionally refer to it throughout your book Mindset, you don’t talk about it at great length.

CD: Well, I grew up in the heyday of the IQ, fixed-intelligence era. My sixth grade teacher seated us around the room in IQ-order and assigned all responsibilities and privileges in terms of IQ. So this was really a fixed-mindset era.

HB: Was this normal? Because it sounds almost barbaric to me that your teacher would line you up in terms of IQ. Did other students and other people you knew do this sort of thing?

CD: It wasn’t typically done. She carried it to an extreme. But at that time people did place a lot of faith in the idea of IQ testing as a summary of intelligence.

Now, as I also say in my book Mindset, the inventor of the IQ test did not have that in mind at all. Alfred Binet had a radical growth mindset, but the Americans and the English took his test and told themselves that they were measuring intelligence, often explicitly using terms like “fixed intelligence”. As with many fads, it was adopted whole-heartedly by many educators.

Mrs. Wilson was probably an outlier in the sense that she carried it to such lengths. We were already the top-IQ class in the school, and yet she thought that every gradation in IQ was deeply meaningful.

HB: Well, let’s hope she was an outlier. It’s amazing you survived.

CD: It is amazing I survived, but at the same time I was fascinated by the concept.

HB: Really? As a young child you were fascinated by it? You weren’t traumatized by it?

CD: Well, it’s interesting, because I was a winner in that lottery, but the anxiety was tremendous. We all thought to ourselves, What happens if I take another test and my IQ goes down?

HB: Right. You have to protect your position at the top of the hierarchy.

CD: Yes. That’s how you define yourself.

One day, a new girl came into the class. She had just moved to the school district. And instead of saying to myself, “Oh, maybe a new friend. Maybe she’s nice,” I thought, “She’d better not take my seat”.

So, it just gives you this fear. It’s a view of the world where you’re not wishing other people well: they’re your natural rivals and you want your teacher to respect you. So even if you’re a winner in that lottery for the moment, it’s teaching you the wrong thing.

I also didn’t want to go to the city-wide spelling bee because I was already the best speller. Why should I go somewhere else and lose?

HB: Right. You have nowhere to go but down.

CD: Yes. This is a very, very limiting mentality. I knew that I didn’t like it at the time, but when that’s the main game in town, you play it.

HB: Well, you don’t even know presumably. I’m guessing you’re not even aware that there’s a whole other way of looking at the world.

CD: That’s right. At the same time, there was this duality: I had been with these other students for years. I knew they were great students, even if they might have had a slightly “lower number” than some of the other students. It didn’t completely make sense to me.

Questions for Discussion:

1. Would you say that you generally have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset? Has your mindset changed in any way as you grew older?
2. Do you know what your IQ is? Has this chapter made you more, or less, inclined to take an IQ test?

II. Confronted by Young Wisdom

Encountering growth-minded 10-year-olds

HB: I’m guessing/hoping that you didn’t have Mrs. Wilson-like people throughout your entire academic career.

CD: I didn’t have people as extreme as Mrs. Wilson all the way through, but I did carry with me this idea that my claim to fame was being smart, being smarter than many others. So I made sure that I took courses and majored in things where I knew I could do well.

HB: I presume that psychology was one of those subjects.

CD: Psychology interested me; and I thought it was possible—and maybe even easy—to do well. But it isn’t easy. It can be a very difficult field. When you look at the other sciences, the problems are agreed upon. The measurement is handed to you, although perhaps you have to do it in a deeper or cleverer way than someone else.

But in psychology you have to take this messy stuff and figure out how to think about it, figure out how to measure it, figure out how to do experiments on it. So in the end, psychology is tremendously diffi...