The effect of praise on mindsets

By Kathy Graham / 25 October 2012 / 2 comments

If you’re a parent, you can be forgiven for thinking your child is brilliant. After all, that’s what mums and dads are supposed to think and it’s why they praise little Ethan or Ella to high heaven whenever they get something right, whether it’s solving a maths problem, playing a piece of music, or colouring within the lines.

But how many parents stop to consider whether the way they praise their kids actually helps or hinders them? If you’ve always thought that just to be praised at all is positive then you may be interested in learning what Professor Carol Dweck has to say on the subject.

Dweck, a presenter at next year’s Happiness & Its Causes conference – her session is Mindset: The new psychology of success – is an acclaimed psychologist and researcher in the field of motivation, who’s talking here about a very simple idea with profound implications.

According to Dweck, there are two different mindsets: a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is the belief that intelligence is innate and can’t be changed. A growth mindset is the belief that success is the result of practice, effort and hard work. Dweck’s research has been to examine how to best promote the latter since that is what produces more confident and enthusiastic leaners.

In a now well-known study in which Dweck and her team examined the effects of praise, they gave fifth graders a set of puzzles to solve. Initially, they gave the children a set of easier puzzles to do. When these nine and 10 year olds successfully solved them, they were praised for either their intelligence or the effort they made.

Next, the children were given a much harder set of puzzles to solve, the idea being to observe how the type of praise they received affected their confidence. Either they stopped liking the puzzles because they didn’t think they were any good at doing them, or they persisted despite experiencing difficulty, thinking they just needed to try harder.

The researchers also asked the children what puzzles they wanted to work on some more, the easier ones or ones that were even more difficult.

Interestingly, Dweck and her colleagues found – and the results have been replicated in subsequent studies – that the kids who’d been praised for their intelligence preferred to revisit the easier puzzles. They also believed that the fact they’d struggled with the harder ones meant they weren’t smart or competent at the task, all signs of a fixed mindset. “A very discouraging conclusion,” says Dweck.

Conversely, those students praised for their effort showed a growth mindset in that they wanted to work on harder puzzles they could learn from. That is, they felt smart just by really applying themselves to a challenging task and making even incremental progress.

Dweck concludes from this, “that kids and adults are exquisitely sensitive to what’s going on in a situation, what other people value, what they’re being judged on.

“What is that voice in their head saying? Fixed mindset things like ‘oh, you better not make a mistake, you better look smart, people are judging you’, or growth mindset things like, ‘here’s an opportunity, here’s a mistake I can learn from, I feel smart when I do something difficult’.”

I know which one I’d prefer hearing.