Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.
Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
This seems like a more complicated explanation than the data supports. It seems simpler, and equally justified, to say that praising effort leads to more effort, which is a good thing on tasks where more effort yields greater success.
I would be interested to see a variation on this study where the second-round problems were engineered to require breaking of established first-round mental sets in order to solve them. What effect does praising effort after the first round have in this case?
Perhaps it leads to more effort, which may be counterproductive for those sorts of problems, and thereby lead to less success than emphasizing intelligence. Or, perhaps not. I’m not making a confident prediction here, but I’d consider a praising-effort-yields-greater-success result more surprising (and thus more informative) in that scenario than the original one.
I agree that the data doesn’t really distinguish this explanation from the effect John Maxwell described, mainly I just linked it because the circumstances seemed reminiscent and I thought he might find it interesting. Its worth noting though that these aren’t competing explanations: your interpretation focuses on explaining the success of the “effort” group, and the other focuses on the failure of the “intelligence” group.
To help decide which hypothesis accounts for most of the difference, there should really have been a control group that was just told “well done” or something. Whichever group diverged the most from the control, that group would be the one where the choice of praise had the greatest effect.
I think the universe is not usually engineered to perversely punish effort. Extra effort may sometimes be counter productive… but I think most people I know fail more often for too little effort than for too much. Use the Try Harder, Luke is usually good advice.
I’m inferring more than you said, which isn’t making it easy for anyone to understand me. Sorry about that.
If you think your comment discusses an edge case, and that it’s a good general practice to praise/reward effort rather than intelligence, then we are in agreement and this conversation should probably end. If you think it’s a good general practice to spend the cognitive effort required to scan the world for situations where each type of praise/reward would most help… then I think we’re disagreeing.
Long comment following—summary at bottom.
Dweck’s work sounded a strong chord for me. I was an intelligent kid often praised for my intelligence, and often very scared that I would be discovered not to be as intelligent as everyone seemed to think I was (because the world was full of stuff that I wasn’t immediately good at). I therefore avoided many pursuits that I thought would lead others to discover their previous overestimate of my innate, fixed intelligence. I think there are many children and adults who live in that place (I think that, for example, there is a lot of evidence in Eliezer’s writing that he has a fixed conception of intelligence (eg. http://lesswrong.com/lw/bdo/rationality_quotes_april_2012/68n2). I also think that praise of my intelligence in my youth had a strong influence on my forming that model (fixed intelligence, not being good at something immediately is evidence that you’re not as clever as they thought).
After reading Dweck’s work I’ve tried hard to alter my model of the universe. Innate intelligence obviously varies between individuals… but that’s not very helpful or important to me, and spending time thinking about it doesn’t help me much. As an individual with whatever innate capacity I have I benefit much more by considering the very significant impact my efforts have on what I can understand and what I can achieve. Anyone I meet who praises me for my (innate, fixed) intelligence undermines my efforts to focus on what I can change, so hurts my efforts at self improvement. Anyone who praises me for something I can change (effort, technique, practice, diligence, etc.) helps me to become a better person.
I think this is particularly important with children—watching someone praise a child for a fixed trait now causes me to flinch as if that child had just been slapped.
Summary: I think it likely that there exist edge cases where praising intelligence will boost performance on some particular following task, but I think that in nearly all cases the person thus praised will suffer over the longer term due to the much greater frequency of tasks that that form of praise hurts. I think that most people in most cases will benefit more from Dweck style praise of effort (more precisely, any trait they can control), and that that’s more true over longer timeframes.
Well, what my comment discusses is a potential direction of research, and makes some predictions about the results of that, and isn’t really about application at all.
As far as application goes, I agree that it’s a good general practice to praise/reward effort rather than intelligence. Also to reward effort rather than strength, dexterity, attractiveness, and various other attributes.
More generally, I think it’s a good practice to reward behaviors rather than attributes. Rewarding behaviors gets me more of those behaviors. Rewarding attributes gets me nothing predictable.
Better results than fixed attributes, certainly. No objection to rewarding results as well. My primary concern with rewarding results instead is that it seems to create the incentive to only tackle problems I’m confident I can succeed at.
I’ve seen this study cited a lot; it’s extremely relevant to smart self- and other-improvement. But there are various possible interpretations of the results, besides what the authors came up with…
Also, how much has this study been replicated?
Interesting article about a study on this effect:
This seems like a more complicated explanation than the data supports. It seems simpler, and equally justified, to say that praising effort leads to more effort, which is a good thing on tasks where more effort yields greater success.
I would be interested to see a variation on this study where the second-round problems were engineered to require breaking of established first-round mental sets in order to solve them. What effect does praising effort after the first round have in this case?
Perhaps it leads to more effort, which may be counterproductive for those sorts of problems, and thereby lead to less success than emphasizing intelligence. Or, perhaps not. I’m not making a confident prediction here, but I’d consider a praising-effort-yields-greater-success result more surprising (and thus more informative) in that scenario than the original one.
I agree that the data doesn’t really distinguish this explanation from the effect John Maxwell described, mainly I just linked it because the circumstances seemed reminiscent and I thought he might find it interesting. Its worth noting though that these aren’t competing explanations: your interpretation focuses on explaining the success of the “effort” group, and the other focuses on the failure of the “intelligence” group.
To help decide which hypothesis accounts for most of the difference, there should really have been a control group that was just told “well done” or something. Whichever group diverged the most from the control, that group would be the one where the choice of praise had the greatest effect.
I think the universe is not usually engineered to perversely punish effort. Extra effort may sometimes be counter productive… but I think most people I know fail more often for too little effort than for too much. Use the Try Harder, Luke is usually good advice.
I agree, so if you intended this as a counterpoint, it seems to follow that I have inconsistent beliefs. If so, can you expand?
I’m inferring more than you said, which isn’t making it easy for anyone to understand me. Sorry about that.
If you think your comment discusses an edge case, and that it’s a good general practice to praise/reward effort rather than intelligence, then we are in agreement and this conversation should probably end. If you think it’s a good general practice to spend the cognitive effort required to scan the world for situations where each type of praise/reward would most help… then I think we’re disagreeing.
Long comment following—summary at bottom.
Dweck’s work sounded a strong chord for me. I was an intelligent kid often praised for my intelligence, and often very scared that I would be discovered not to be as intelligent as everyone seemed to think I was (because the world was full of stuff that I wasn’t immediately good at). I therefore avoided many pursuits that I thought would lead others to discover their previous overestimate of my innate, fixed intelligence. I think there are many children and adults who live in that place (I think that, for example, there is a lot of evidence in Eliezer’s writing that he has a fixed conception of intelligence (eg. http://lesswrong.com/lw/bdo/rationality_quotes_april_2012/68n2). I also think that praise of my intelligence in my youth had a strong influence on my forming that model (fixed intelligence, not being good at something immediately is evidence that you’re not as clever as they thought).
After reading Dweck’s work I’ve tried hard to alter my model of the universe. Innate intelligence obviously varies between individuals… but that’s not very helpful or important to me, and spending time thinking about it doesn’t help me much. As an individual with whatever innate capacity I have I benefit much more by considering the very significant impact my efforts have on what I can understand and what I can achieve. Anyone I meet who praises me for my (innate, fixed) intelligence undermines my efforts to focus on what I can change, so hurts my efforts at self improvement. Anyone who praises me for something I can change (effort, technique, practice, diligence, etc.) helps me to become a better person.
I think this is particularly important with children—watching someone praise a child for a fixed trait now causes me to flinch as if that child had just been slapped.
Summary:
I think it likely that there exist edge cases where praising intelligence will boost performance on some particular following task, but I think that in nearly all cases the person thus praised will suffer over the longer term due to the much greater frequency of tasks that that form of praise hurts. I think that most people in most cases will benefit more from Dweck style praise of effort (more precisely, any trait they can control), and that that’s more true over longer timeframes.
Well, what my comment discusses is a potential direction of research, and makes some predictions about the results of that, and isn’t really about application at all.
As far as application goes, I agree that it’s a good general practice to praise/reward effort rather than intelligence. Also to reward effort rather than strength, dexterity, attractiveness, and various other attributes.
More generally, I think it’s a good practice to reward behaviors rather than attributes. Rewarding behaviors gets me more of those behaviors. Rewarding attributes gets me nothing predictable.
There’s something to be said for rewarding results instead of effort to teach people to make sure they are actually trying rather than trying to try.
Better results than fixed attributes, certainly. No objection to rewarding results as well. My primary concern with rewarding results instead is that it seems to create the incentive to only tackle problems I’m confident I can succeed at.
I’ve seen this study cited a lot; it’s extremely relevant to smart self- and other-improvement. But there are various possible interpretations of the results, besides what the authors came up with… Also, how much has this study been replicated?
I’d like to see a top-level post about it.