Believing You Can Get Smarter Makes You Smarter
apa.org
apa.org
http://michaelgr.com/2007/04/15/fixed-mindset-vs-growth-mind...
Still one of the most popular posts there.
I really wish this concept was taught to young children. I bet it could really make a difference.
Encouraging children to aim beyond their means is a very bad idea.
They will have very ambitious goals and will not settle for what they consider beneath them.
This is a recipe for unemployment in the vast majority of cases.
There's a huge difference between saying "You don't seem to be very good at math, why don't you stop trying and do something easy instead" and "This seems to be hard for you, keep working hard at it and it will get easier over time. A brain is like a muscle, it gets stronger when you use it"
There is no scientific consensus that the brain is malleable in any significant way.
Aiming within one's apparent means will likely result in employment.
Rats that are kept in cages devoid of adornment have smaller, less dense, brains than rats that have toys and varied sonsory stimulation. It's simple, the more things we have with which to think, the better and more complex our thinking can be.
Think Orwell's Newspeak and Herman Hesse's Glass bead games.
What is awful here is that you seem to be convinced that mediocrity is a worthwhile tactic for people and for children... and I think this rips the heart from the very idea of what it means to be alive and better oneself.
YC readers are understandably strongly biased against such values of take-it-easy life. I don't subscribe to such values either, but they can not be straightforwardly discounted as inferior just like that. I would argue that understanding your limitations is just as important as developing your abilities.
[1:Einfuhlung, Johann Gottfried Herder, Isaiah Berlin]
This idea recognises ability can be tempered by circumstance ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025431
.... ugh, I feel a blog post or some poetic vitriol coming on.
Failure is the result in most cases.
It's worse with children though because it is hard for them to "undo" their excessive ambition as adults.
Who cares if they fail? If they do, they shouldn't - that's the lesson. If you do, they will - you're a poor teacher.
Ask anyone who regularly teaches both adults and children (musical instrument instructors, foreign language instructors, etc) and they'll tell you that one of the main thing that separates their adult students from their child students is that the children learn much faster because initial failure doesn't bother them. Adult students are paralyzingly frightened of failing, and this significantly impedes their progress in learning new skills. But children seem to understand and be more comfortable with the reality that failure is part of the learning process. You can't learn to play piano (as an example) without first playing the piano very, very ,very badly. :-)
BTW, I think this is why the currently popular advice to "fail early and often" is good advice. Yes, success is better than failure, but the fear of failure and the unwillingness to accept the possibility of failure can be crippling, and IMHO is a major differentiation between those people who do eventually succeed at great things, and the vast majority of us who just dream of doing great things.
I don't agree with your assertion. Do you have any per reviewed studies to back up your assertion?
First, it seems that it is by being ambitious and trying to do hard things that we as humans improve. I would rather try to do something hard and fail than set out to do something easy and succeed. Also, often failing at something hard will result in something short of your goal but still far better than you would have gotten by going for the easy goal.
Second, it is very hard to know what your means or someone elses means are, or even what is possible. A great many things that people used to think were impossible have been achieved.
And finally:
They will have very ambitious goals and will not settle for what they consider beneath them.
First, most people will eventually settle if they hit repeated failure (but perhaps settle for more than they would have gotten by aiming low...). I know one person who dreamed of acting and is now programming, whether this is "settling" is debatable, but it wasn't their stated goal. If a person truly refuses to settle, then they have a couple of choices:
1. They can refuse to give up and keep trying without end. This can be good. They may eventually succeed, and even if they won't, they will probably get further than they would by settling.
2. They can try to cheat and use unethical means to get what they want. But the answer to this one is not to make them less ambitious, but to help make the children more moral so they will never resort to this and stick with #1.
3. They can give up in some extreme way such as living on welfare or ending their own life. But I don't think many ambitious people will take this route, and again the answer is not make the children less ambitous but to make them more moral and more stable so they would stick with #1.
In short, I think it is a very good idea to encourage children to be ambitious and work to improve themselves.
To put it another way, are the many HN articles about starting your own business encouraging potential entrepreneurs to reach "beyond their means"? Who is to decide what another persons "means" are? How do you know?
I ask this in all seriousness, because to my knowledge there's been very little success in finding any early childhood characteristics that have a strong positive correlation to adult success. If I'm incorrect on that I'd love to see some links to studies that do show that adult success can be pre-judged in childhood with a high degree of accuracy.
Besides, as Thomas Edison supposedly said.. "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". By encouraging children to pursue very ambitious goals and to NOT settle for what they consider beneath them, perhaps we can help them to develop the drive needed for that 99% perspiration.
The Stanford Marshmallow study is one that springs to mind - delayed gratification in children correlates strongly with adult success: http://www.sybervision.com/Discipline/marshmallow.htm
Of course, one of the really interesting conclusions of that study was that children can improve their capacity for delayed gratification through practice.
For children, you wouldn't expect them to break down their big overwhelming goals into small subtasks for themselves - you'd do that for them. You wouldn't even mention the big overwhelming goals, or indeed necessarily even have them.
Same goes for adults - except we've got to break it down ourselves.
Happy to have shared them on my twitter stream @victusfate, look me up anytime.
I wondered if he was familiar with some of this research. And also whether it made a difference in class performance.
I've posted it on my LiveJournal blog with pointing to your article and my translation on Google Docs, here: http://vslashed.livejournal.com/9110.html
Since I've never been translated to Russian before, could you drop me the URL once it's up? There's a "contact" page on my site (from the homepage, on the right). Thanks!
Not saying that it's not possible, just that the title is not a conclusion from the study.
Whether or not the students are actually getting smarter is another question. But it doesn't look to me like anyone's getting lied to.
(edit: refactoring language)
What isn't suggested by 'many psychological studies' is that IQ can be reliably, long-term, and over general populations by any particular technique. And that's what everyone wants to exist and will read into a statement like that. So, based on the abstract, this study boils down to a good motivation technique.
(I say reliably because with 0.05 significance there will be many false results; long-term because short-term studies will show anything you want them to; and over general populations because there are small deprived groups in which one can easily boost IQ long-term - eg. children in the Balkans with iodine deficiencies.)
EDIT: Also note that the researchers point to increased grades - not increased IQ scores. If they have enough participation, time, and cooperation from these students to do all this teaching & motivating, then it is inexplicable - if they think they're actually boosting IQ - to have not given the students a quick hour-long IQ test; but this omission is quite understandable if they don't think their intervention is actually increasing anyone's IQ but their motivation.
EDIT: Also note that the researchers point to increased grades - not increased IQ scores.
You are quite correct, however one would hope that grades have at least some correalation with intelligence, but more importantly they are the measurable results in school. Being able to increase those measurable results is the primary goal, even if hypothetically intelligence did not go up.
I have been told that in weightlifting the first several stages do not increase the amount of muscles, but they help you call on that strength better so you can lift more and get tired more slowly. This increases your effective abilities even if you do not develop more actual muscle right away.
Similarly, if the ability to use their intelligence is increased hypotethically without actually increasing the intelligence itself, this is still a major improvement.
And why would you think that? I've already criticized the one explicit statement on that.
> You are quite correct, however one would hope that grades have at least some correalation with intelligence, but more importantly they are the measurable results in school. Being able to increase those measurable results is the primary goal, even if hypothetically intelligence did not go up.
They do have correlation. But correlation is not causation. Giving these students a pep talk and seeing their grades go up, and knowing about the correlation between IQ and grades, gives us as much reason to conclude their IQs went up as we had instead hired drill sergeants to stand in their classroom and yell at them in best FMJ fashion for being "slimy fucking walrus-looking pieces of shit", observed their grades go down, and then concluded their IQs went down.
(Another analogy. My dog crossing the road has high correlation with the road being empty. Does my kicking him into the middle of the street clears it of the oncoming SUV?)
> Similarly, if the ability to use their intelligence is increased hypotethically without actually increasing the intelligence itself, this is still a major improvement.
Sure, and it's quite valuable. Self-control and self-discipline are fantastically valuable traits, and to a degree substitutable for IQ. But boosting people's motivation is not the same thing as boosting their IQ. The latter is the historic breakthrough, not the former, interesting and valuable as it is.
http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html
if a study claims that something can't be done (rather than claiming that something hasn't been done).
After further edit: There is recent research showing that learning can actually change brain neural connections,
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09344/1019898-115.stm
so I think this year the burden of proof is on the people who claim lack of malleability, since malleability of human brain function is a replicated research result.
Yes, of course learning changes neural connections. How else would it work? Changing some chemicals won't get a brain very far.
But this is as far away from changing IQ as demonstrating the Casimir effect gets you to a tractor beam sucking in the _Millennium Falcon_. The famous study of the [London taxi](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/677048.stm) drivers shows they have changed connections, alright, even enlarged hippocampi - but nothing about increased brain mass or volume, because it's a zero-sum gain.
Now, as far as my specific assertions go. The 0.05 point is basic statistics which I feel no need to justify. The short-term point flows out of the former (there's simply more noise when you do all your sampling over a few days or minutes, say), and short-term studies are particularly vulnerable to issues like testing effects; the Balkans thing I alluded to in enough detail that you could easily have googled it if you were genuinely curious: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=balkans%20IQ%20io... And iodine deficiency isn't something that's purely long-term either - you can see effects after 24 weeks in this study: http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/83/1/108 (note the high significance).
The burden of proof is not on those who claim lack of malleability - not that there are any such people here - but on those who claim IQ boosts without good long-term IQ testing.
It's not that we think that they can actually do this, we just don't want them to limit themselves to any specific thing.
Do you think IQ is something fixed? That you can't continue learning and getting smarter?
But that is not an issue since there is currently good evidence that it is true that intelligence is malleable. What this shows is that it is very important for children (and indeed, all learners) to actually know this particular true fact.
I'm not troubled by this at all. Here's why. First of all, malleability of IQ is true. And the research finding that advocating the malleability of IQ is motivational and thus leads to better performance is a replicated research finding.
In the fall semester of 2009 I participated in the University of Minnesota Department of Psychology Psychology 8935: Readings in Behavioral Genetics and Individual Differences Psychology journal club with leading researchers on human behavioral genetics such as Tom Bouchard, Matt McGue (the chairman of the journal club), Irving Gottesman, Wendy Johnson, and other colleagues and graduate students of theirs. At the end of the semester, Matt McGue asked each participant what their conclusion was about what could be done to boost IQ and academic achievement, and he noted that as a parent he will be speaking more often to his children about their ability to raise their own level. This is from a researcher who has spent years calculating figures for heritability of various behavioral traits from studies of twins and other studies with genetically sensitive designs. After reading the research and discussing it with his colleagues, he is convinced that even though monozygotic twins resemble each other more closely than other siblings as to IQ (this is what heritablity means, and it is ALL that heritability means), it is still possible for a mindset intervention to improve IQ.
Here's another article about Carol Dweck's research, which I think has been submitted to HN before:
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/feat...
Has anyone else searched and discovered?
From this part under Practical Applications: "Blackwell, Dweck, and Trzesniewski (2002) recently replicated and applied this research with seventh-grade students in New York City. During the first eight weeks of the spring term, these students learned about the malleability of intelligence by reading and discussing a science-based article that described how intelligence develops."