How Praise Supposedly Shapes Motivation

In any given school, you’re never more than 6ft away from a poster about “growth mindset”. It’s the massively-popular idea that if you believe that people can change, you’ll put more effort into a task (like studying) and end up doing better at it. On the other hand, if you have a “fixed mindset” and think talent is innate and unchangeable, you won’t put in the effort and you’ll fail to reach your potential.

In this episode, Tom and Stuart talk about how the claims about the power of growth mindset have changed over the years, and explain the convoluted back-and-forth story of recent studies and reviews of the evidence. Do growth mindset interventions help kids get better grades? Is growth mindset even a thing? Take a listen to find out.

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Show Notes

* Tom’s 2017 article on growth mindset on BuzzFeed news

* Stuart’s 2022 Substack article “How Growth Mindset Shrank” (including discussion of the various Middle East Peace Process studies)

* The 2018 meta-analysis

* The 2019 large-scale study of growth mindset in the classroom

* Useful online tool to calculate and visualise effect sizes

* “Does psychology have a conflict-of-interest problem?” - Tom’s 2019 Nature News article

* The first 2023 meta-analysis (the more growth mindset-sceptical one)

* The second 2023 meta-analysis (the more growth mindset-supporting one)

* Critique of the first 2023 meta-analysis

* Devastating response to the critique (and Brooke Macnamara’s thread on the same)

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

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