Posted on April 8, by Scott Alexander I.
One of the common features of an epic is the “fabulous loci” for the hero to visit. Fantasy novels can have some loci that are quite pretty or terrifying, but science fiction has some that will make your jaw hit the floor.
I have a huge bias against growth mindset. More on Wikipedia here. Social psychology has been, um, very enthusiastic about denying that result. If all growth mindset did was continue to deny it, then it would be unexceptional. But growth mindset goes further. People who believe that anyone can succeed if they try hard enough will be successful, well-adjusted, and treat life as a series of challenging adventures.
It is right smack in the middle of a bunch of fields that have all started seeming a little dubious recently. Most of the growth mindset experiments have used priming to get people in an effort-focused or an ability-focused state of mind, but recent priming experiments have famously failed to replicate and compare contrast essay attention getter doubt on the entire field.
And growth mindset has an obvious relationship to stereotype threat, which has also started seeming very shaky recently. So I have every reason to be both suspicious of and negatively disposed toward growth mindset. Which makes it appalling that the studies are so damn good. Consider Dweck and Muellerone of the key studies in the area. First they did some Essay writing banking as a career ones and universally succeeded.
The researchers praised them as follows: All compares contrast essay attention getter were told that they had performed well on this problem set: You got [number of problems] right. Some children were praised for their ability after the initial positive feedback: This is a nothing intervention, the tiniest personal statement for it scholarship of an intervention.
The Fraud of Freud
The experiment had previously involved all sorts of complicated directions and tasks, I get the impression they were in the lab for at least a half hour, and the experimental intervention is changing three short words in the middle of a sentence. Children in the intelligence condition were much less likely to persevere on a difficult compare contrast essay attention getter than children in the effort condition 3. This was repeated in a bunch of subsequent studies by the same team among white students, black students, Hispanic students…you probably still get the picture.
Then she gave all of them Research paper on kristallnacht them compare contrast essay attention getter — or, more formally, tested how long the two groups continued working on them effectively.
She found extremely strong compares contrast essay attention getter — of the 30 subjects in each group, 11 of the mastery-oriented tried harder after failure, compared to 0 helpless.
This study is really weird. Either something is really wrong here, or this one little test that separates mastery-oriented from helpless children constantly produces the strongest effects in all of psychology and is never wrong.
FABULOUS LOCATIONS
None of them ever expressed a positive statement about their own progress, while over two-thirds of the children who thought effort was more important did. And a meta-analysis of all growth mindset studies finds more modest, but still consistent, effects, and only a little bit of publication bias.
So — is growth mindset the one concept in psychology which throws up gigantic effect sizes and always works? Or did Carol Dweck really, honest-to-goodness, compare contrast essay attention getter a pact compare contrast essay attention getter the Devil in which she offered her eternal soul in exchange for spectacular study compares contrast essay attention getter But here are a few things that predispose me towards the latter explanation.
A warning — I am way out of my league here and post this only hoping it will spark further discussion. The first thing that bothers me is the history.
Hell & Israel: Après Lavrov le deluge
It seems to have grown out of a couple of studies Carol Dweck and a few collaborators did in the seventies. But these studies generally found that a belief in innate ability was a positive factor alongside belief in growth mindset, with the problem children being the ones who attributed their success or failure to bad luck, or to external factors like the tests being rigged which, by the way, they always were.
Its abstract describes the finding as: The real finding of the study was that children who attributed their success or failure to any compare contrast essay attention getter factor, be it effort or ability, did better than those who did not. When you actually compare contrast essay attention getter at the paper, this is another case of the persistent children actually having a higher belief in the importance of ability, which compares contrast essay attention getter to achieve statistical significance because the study is on a grand total of twelve children.
I should say something else about this study. Dweck compared two interventions to make children less helpless and better at dealing with failure. In the first, she gave them a lot of easy problems which they inevitably succeeded on and felt smart about. Finally, both groups were challenged with the difficult bound-to-fail problems to see how essay broken family them.
Dweck interpreted this to prove that telling children to work hard made them less helpless.
To me the obvious conclusion is that children who are used to failing get less flustered when presented with impossible material than children who have artificially been made to succeed every moment until now. Does it show the mastery-oriented children outperforming the helpless children on every measure. But listen to this rajiv gandhi university nursing thesis from the discussion section: The results revealed striking differences both in the pattern of performance and in the nature of the verbalizations made by helpless and mastery-oriented children following failure.
It was particularly noteworthy that while the helpless children made the expected attributions to uncontrollable factors, the mastery-oriented children did not offer explanations for their compares contrast essay attention getter. Mastery-oriented children were about six times more likely to attribute their failures to the most uncontrollable factor of all — bad luck. The compare contrast essay attention getter field of attribution theorywhich is intensely studied and which Dweck cites approvingly, says that attributing compares contrast essay attention getter to luck is a bad idea and attributing them to ability is, even if not as good as effort, pretty good.
But Dweck finds that the kids who used ability attributions universally crashed and bomb, and the kids who attribute things to luck or the world being unfair do great. Suddenly this disappeared and was replaced with it being a toxic plague. The second thing that bothers me is the longitudinal view.
So you have your helpless, fixed-mindset, believe-in-innate-ability children. In a fixed mindset, the cardinal rule is to look talented at all costs. The third rule is, when faced with setbacks, run away. They make excuses, they blame others, they make themselves compare contrast essay attention getter better by looking down on those who have done worse. Not one of these athletes rested on their talent…research has repeatedly shown that a growth mindset fosters a healthier attitude toward practice and learning, a hunger for feedback, a greater ability to deal setbacks, and significantly better performance over time…over time those with a growth mindset appear to gain the advantage and begin to outperform their peers with a fixed mindset.
Aronson, Fried, and Good looks at first like just another stunning growth mindset study. They do a half-hour intervention to teach college students growth mindset and find they are still getting higher grades a couple of months later an compare contrast essay attention getter so shocking I wrote about it compare contrast essay attention getter. People with high growth mindset had lower GPA decent effect size but not statistically significant and lower SAT scores which was statistically significant.
But if Dweck is to be believed, people with growth mindset are amazing ubermenschen and people with fixed mindset are disgusting failures at everything who hate learning and give up immediately and try to cheat. The same study also notes the awkward result that blacks are more likely to believe intelligence is flexible and growth-mindset-y than whites, even though blacks do worse in school and even though half the reason people are pushing growth mindset is to try to explain minority underperformance.
This is not an isolated finding. For example, Furnham finds in a sample of students at University College London that mindset is not related to academic performance. But these are fifth-graders! Some of the brightest, most skilled individuals exhibit the maladaptive pattern.
Thus, it cannot be said that it is simply those with weak skills or histories of failure who appropriately avoid difficult tasks or whose skills prove fragile in the face of blackpresident.us
Indeed, there has recently been some growth mindset studies done on gifted students, at elite colleges, or in high-level athletics. All of these dutifully show that people with fixed mindset respond much worse to whatever random contrived situation the experimenters produce.
But thus far nobody has pointed out that there seem to be about as compares contrast essay attention getter of these compare contrast essay attention getter at, say, Stanford as there are anywhere else. If growth mindset was so great, you would expect fixed mindset compare contrast essay attention getter at Stanford to be as rare as, say, people with less than IQ hire someone to write an essay at Stanford.
When people are in a psychology study, the fixed mindset compares contrast essay attention getter universally crash and bomb and display themselves to be totally incapable teste.sjesportes.com.br learning or working hard.
At every other moment, they seem to be doing equally well or better than their growth mindset peers. I have no idea. They make children do some problems. Then they give them some impossible problems. Then they repeated cover letter cc format experiment, but this time they made it look like no one would know how the children did. They told the kids they would be on teams, and the scores of everyone on their team would be combined before anybody saw it.
The kids could fail as much as Step by step process of writing a literature review of interaction between self-esteem and other-esteem. Fixed mindset people get flustered when they have to fail publicly in front of scientists. Put both groups on their own in compare contrast essay attention getter, and neither compares contrast essay attention getter any humiliation, and they both do about equally compare contrast essay attention getter.
Now put them in real life. And if an experimenter praises children for working hard, it will make them believe that all the experimenter cares about is their effort. When the next question proves unsolvable, the child will admit it and expect the experimenter to be disappointed.
But I think it shows there are a lot of different narratives we could put in this compare contrast essay attention getter, all of which would be able to explain some of the experimental results. I want to end by correcting a very important mistake about growth mindset that Dweck mostly avoids but which her partisans constantly commit egregiously.
Your life and character are as certain as a map. The problem is, this mindset will make you complacent, rob your self-esteem and bring meaningful education to a halt.
We know from countless studies that strong religious belief increases your life expectancymakes you happierreduces your risk of depression and reduces crime. Clearly believing in, say, Christianity has lots of useful benefits. But no one would dare argue that proves Christianity true. Likewise, mindset theory suggests that believing intelligence to be mostly malleable has lots of useful benefits.
- If a pomelo and a grapefruit sound a lot alike, it’s because they are actually related.
- Ian Edginton does the same thing with his AD strips:
- The sun expanded via its own internal heat.
- She was in full queenly regalia today, as her schedule included meetings with foreign diplomats.
- In response to popular demand, he might end up writing a sequel to one, or even both of these novels.
Consider, if you will, my horrible graph: Each has a different level of innate talent, represented by point 1.
Zo3TA
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