Welcome to the Uberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Uberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
My guest today is Dr. David Yeager.
Dr. David Yeager is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the world's leading researchers into mindsets, in particular growth mindset,
which is a mindset that enables people of all ages to improve their abilities at essentially anything.
He is also a world expert into the stress is performance enhancing mindset, which is a mindset that allows people to cognitively reframe stress,
and that when combined with growth mindset can lead to dramatic improvements in performance in cognitive and physical endeavors.
Dr. Yeager is also the author of an important and extremely useful new book entitled 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People.
The book is scheduled for release this summer, that is the summer of 2024, and we provided a link to the book in the show note captions.
During today's discussion, Dr. Yeager explains to us exactly what growth mindset is through the lens of the research into growth mindset,
and he explains also how to apply growth mindset in our lives.
He also shares the research from his and other laboratories on the stress can be performance enhancing mindset, and how that can be combined with growth mindset to achieve the maximum results.
So while I assume that most people have heard of growth mindset, today's discussion will allow you to really apply it in your life, not just from the perspective of you, the person trying to learn, but also for teachers and coaches.
In fact, Dr. Yeager shares not just the optimal learning environments for us as individuals, but also between individuals and in the classroom, in families, in sports teams, and in groups of all sizes and kinds.
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
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And now, for my discussion with Dr. David Yeager.
Dr. David Yeager, welcome.
Thanks for having me.
Can you tell us your definition of growth mindset?
I think most people have heard of it. They have some sense of what it is, but you've worked very intensely on growth mindset for a number of years, so I'd love to know how you define it.
Yeah, so it's simply the belief that your abilities or your potential in some domain can change.
A huge confusion is people think it means if you try hard, then you can do anything, but that's not really the idea. It's simply that under the right conditions with the right support changes possible.
And that ends up being a pretty powerful idea because the opposite is so stressful.
The idea that you are static, nothing about you can change is really kind of a stressful idea.
Of all the studies on growth mindset, including yours, the ones that you've participated in, what one or two kind of high level results stand out to you as the most striking, surprising, exciting, or meaningful.
And here I will encourage you to discard with attribution. We know that or everyone should know that Carol Duac is the originator of the growth mindset idea as a field, and she deserves tremendous credit for that.
So when you stand back from the field, given that it's mushroomed into this very large field now, and you look at that research, which results kind of stand out as like, wow, that's really cool, really meaningful. People should know about that.
What stands out to me a lot, first of all, is just the field experiments that the idea that you can distill a complex idea about the brain, about maliability, you can give it to a young person at a time when they're vulnerable, and that that can give them hope, and then they can do better at school or whatever.
So our 2019 paper in nature that Carol Greg Walton, Angela Duckworth, a lot of us, Cloud Rater, on took a very short growth mindset intervention, two sessions, about 25 minutes each for 9th graders, and we found kids were eight, nine months later, more likely to get grades,
10th grade, more likely to be in the hard math classes, and the unpublished results find effects four years later on graduating high school with college ready courses from a short intervention happened, you know, just one or two times, no reinforcement.
So there's a lot of reasons why that's true that sounds magical and outrageous and there are a lot of mechanisms, but that just demonstrates the overall value of the phenomenon, and in that study we did everything we possibly could to address legitimate skepticism, right, are we collecting processing the data in ways that could bias it, no, third party, is it are we hand picking schools where you could get the best effects, no random sample of schools.
Did we post talk to side on the analyses that would make the results like the greatest, no, pre-registered. So that's a good like, okay, this phenomenon is not something that falls apart in the hands of anyone else besides a select few researchers, that's really, and we can go into that.
That doesn't explain the mechanisms, and I think that there are a lot of interesting growth minds at mechanism studies, my personal favorite is a very under appreciated, kind of like Indy rock study by David Newsbaum and Carol, that David did when he was a graduate student at Stanford.
And it's on defensiveness versus remediation, and the basic idea is in a fixed mindset, the idea that your intelligence cannot change, you are the way you are, can't change.
And your goal in that fixed mindset is to defend your ego, to like hide your deficiencies or any flaws, because if they're fixed and then they're revealed, then it labels you for life in some way as less than shame or the et cetera, right.
And a growth mindset though, mistake is like part of the process, it's just an opportunity to grow. So David took that idea and then set up a study, and I think I have the details right, where undergraduates did a task, they all did poorly, they were getting 20, 30% correct on this task.
And the question is, what do you do before you do your second try? How do you cope with that initial failure? And he found that both fixed and mindset participants wanted to recover their self esteem.
So you do poorly, you feel like crap, what am I going to do to feel better about myself? And a fixed mindset, they looked downward, so the people getting a 25, look at the people who got a 12.
Like I'm twice as good as these losers, right. And a growth mindset, they look at the people getting an 85 or 90, what are they doing? What are their strategies? How can I improve?
Both of them then recovered self esteem and look the same at post-test. And I think about that a lot, like how often in our society does something happen to us and we feel like garbage, and you have a choice.
Like am I going to look down on other people and say, at least I'm not as bad as these losers, or am I going to say like how am I going to get better?
And I just, I love that because think of a ninth grader who bombs their algebra test. Am I like a no good dumb math loser who's not going anywhere in life? Well, at least I'm not that burnout, right. Or is it like, how is anyone getting an A in this class? I'm not getting an A. What's happening? What am I going to learn from them?
So the openness and willingness to self-improve, I think, is the underwriting mechanism. And hardly anyone sites that study, but I think about it all the time. And it's the kind of thing that I like from being honest, that's the mindset I want my kids to have as they go through life.
Very interesting. I'm going to ask you more about this looking down or looking up in terms of performance. But before I do that, I have questions about these brief 25 minute, I think you said interventions.
Yeah, sometimes 25, sometimes we do two sessions each about 20, 25. Yeah.
Can you give us a sense of what those interventions look like? I mean, it's incredible. These two sessions have positive effects lasting up to four years and perhaps even beyond. Maybe just a top contour of some of what these kids hear during those sessions.
Yeah, I mean, so the first thing to realize is that they're short and they have to do two things in order to have long lasting effects. One is, I have to convince you to think differently at the end of the session.
So I just have to persuade you over the course of 25 minutes to have a different mindset. That's sometimes hard. But then even if I do that, you then might have months or years between when I did that and when the outcome is measured. So how could you remember it and apply it and how many 25 minute experiences in your life, you know, recollection of right.
And I've lots. So I think, I think people are skeptical of the mindset style of interventions for two different, I think legitimate reasons.
I got a very famous statistician came to my office at UT Austin and was like, I just don't understand these interventions. I mean, the other day I spent 25 minutes telling my son all the things he has to change and like, how he's doing everything wrong.
And he didn't remember it five minutes later. How could someone remember your thing four years later. And I was like, did you hear yourself talking? Like, I'm sure the way you talked to yourself. It's like totally condescending and bad.
So the first step is in that 25 minutes, how are you communicating in a way where someone's ears are open, where they're not feeling talked down to ashamed, humiliated, etc.
But then the second step is saying that to you at a time when it's possible for there to be what we call a recursive process or a snowball effect. That's going to happen over time.
So that's the stage setting. Okay, so now let's take the first part. 25 minutes. What am I going to say to you? Right.
There are three big things that are in every intervention and the term that Greg Walton, the Stanford professor, colleague, collaborator, uses his wise interventions. That's the umbrella term of which growth mindset is one.
And a good one, but it's just one of many for wise interventions. We often do the following three things. First is we present some new scientific information, some idea that almost in like a glad well way is not is not obvious and intuitive to the reader, but feels like new information.
And useful information. So the first is a scientific. The second is we present participants with stories from people like them who've used those ideas in their lives and found them useful.
So in the concrete case of ninth graders getting growth mindset, it's like 10th, 11th, 12th graders who previously felt dumb, learned a growth mindset, then felt better.
It's more complicated than that. That's a basic idea. And last we don't just tell them the stories we ask.
Third for participants to author a story. So they write a narrative about a time when they struggled a time when they doubted themselves.
And then remember this idea that people can change like my brain can grow, etc. So the three points are like scientific information stories or the technical term is descriptive norms. So you're giving people information about what's normal for people like you.
And the third is the writing, which we call saying is believing, which is the term that if that's a popularized version of the term that came from classic social psychologist Josh Ehrenson, Elliott Ehrenson, who found in the work on cognitive dissonance 30, 40 years ago, that one of the best ways to change someone's mind about something is to ask them to try to persuade somebody else.
So that we do those sort of things. So what is the science in the growth mindset? That's where we draw on the metaphor that the brain is like a muscle that just like muscles get stronger when they're challenged and can recover.
So to does the brain gets smarter when it's pushed and challenged in a certain way.
This idea that writing a story about oneself or about others in which one succeeds can be useful toward building growth mindset in basic terms. I think that's what you're referring to.
So I think it's interesting. It's sort of suggests that we have brain circuits that underlie growth mindset type behaviors and thinking and that just storing into those can potentially lead to better decision making and behavior.
So I can't create new skills simply because I can't write a story about me being able to dunk a basketball and then expect that I can dunk a basketball because that doesn't I can't. But the idea of writing a story about the effort going into
basketball and learning how and then translating that to a more realistic sense of ability that allows me to then go practice more. Is that sort of what you're referring to?
So the in a 2016 paper in P.A.D.S. Greg Walton and I explain these types of interventions as a we call them a lay theory intervention and the idea there is that lay people like that not scientific theories but just our intuitive theories for explaining the world help us anticipate what something means.
So the idea from basic developmental psychology is that human beings are walking around with kind of prior belief about objects about motion about you know number.
And then later about complex social structures like whether people are looking down on me how where I stand relative to others and also lay little lay theories about adversity.
What does it mean when I have to put an effort? What does it mean when I fail?
So the idea is that if you if you understand the theory someone has then you understand the meaning they'll make about a future experience.
And therefore well in the reason meaning matters is because the way you interpret something then affects how you respond to it right so if I see someone and they're doing something innocuous but I interpret as a threat do I call the police you know do I run away.
That's my interpretation that's causing it right.
And so the there's a long way of saying it turns out one of the best ways to preset someone's meaning and give them a different theory is to give them a different story.
Stories are kind of like theories and motion.
This is why you know like what's the point of war and peace right war and peace is really a theory of great leaders in the war.
And there's any English PhDs I'm sure they'll tell me that's over simplified version of what tell so I was doing but you learn the theory in a narrative way right so this is the classic idea throughout human history.
Great writers and authors give us theories through narrative right.
And so we're just taking that simple human fact and doing it in a 10 minute activity.
And the lay theory in a person's mind that when things are difficult it can change can be taught with a very simple narrative which is this person or even I experienced difficult difficulty and something that mattered to me.
That difficulty didn't determine my entire future because actually there were steps that I could take in order to like make a difference here the steps that I took and then it improved so it's a very simple as freight tax pyramid.
And even though that simple stories available to all of us you could look in culture and see it you also see the opposite lay theory all the time and so without apps in our intervention it's not like people couldn't end up with a growth mindset.
But they wouldn't kind of know what's a sort for what to look for so we give them some touch points for a very simple of like frustration things can change then they got better.
And we think that once people do that in our writing exercises they're more likely to see that pattern out in the world.
And if you see that enough and then you take the actual steps to get better then it starts becoming true for you.
And that's what I heard called the recursive process that you we give people a starting hypothesis about the world they go out try things struggle fail improves.
Then they see that that's true and then they can keep acting on that over time.
I feel like so much of getting better at things involves re-appraising the stress or anxiety response you know the friction that one feels when they can't perform something well or when things feel overwhelming or confusing.
And I think the analogies to physical exercise apply but I feel like they're limited in the sense that I like the idea that the brain is like a muscle that it can grow and get stronger I think the key difference to my mind is that you know like working out with weights.
You get some sense of the result you're going to get because there's like a lot of blood flow into the muscle so it's like a hint of what's possible with cardiovascular exercise like if we run hard up a hill there's that moment where your lungs are burning etc.
Anyone who understands exercise knows that that's the signal for adaptation such the next time you can do the same thing without the burning of the lungs.
When it comes to mental work and learning I think we immediately assume that if we're not performing well if we're getting confused or overwhelmed that somehow we're doing it wrong as opposed to stimulating the growth.
And so are there any studies that point to bridging the relationship between the physiology you know that the stress response and the mindset that allows one to say okay this is really hard and I keep failing and failing and failing at this math at this language learning and writing this essay whatever it is and that's exactly what I'm supposed to be doing it's like the burning of the lungs or it's like the failure to complete another repetition in the gym.
Yeah I mean I think that you're right you know the standard growth mindset message does have reappraisal components specifically around something Carol de Weck is called effort beliefs which is very simply the belief that if it's hard it means you're doing the wrong thing and that follows naturally from the fixed mindset idea that ability can't change.
And I think it's very important to point out the centrality of that effort belief because people have tried to apply growth mindset but simplified it in a way of just saying basically try harder right or I believe in you if you try hard enough you can do anything right but if your natural inclination is to view the need for effort as a sign that you are doing the wrong thing which is that's the default interpretation.
Then people are going to quit right if I tell if you believe effort out to you as lacking potential and then I say you need to try hard I'm saying you don't have potential that basic inside is very poorly misunderstood in the field and it's led to tons of misapplications of Carol's work and then people like well as thing doesn't work well okay but you haven't addressed the effort belief so I think that the first type of
response to what you're what you said is you can't just abstractly tell someone your brain is a muscle and assume that magically then in the midst of stress and frustration and confusion and and all those negative experiences that you're going to immediately say yes I love doing this and this is great.
But then there's also the physiological component as you're saying so when we're stressed frustrated you know confused your heart starts racing maybe your palms get sweaty right you start your breathing you know starts getting heavier my my daughter is 13 before like a cello audition like I butterflies a mystic I don't you know what does this mean and I think that
growth mindset research didn't always deal with the visceral experience of stress and frustration and I think in a world in which someone here's the growth mindset message and says yes now I'm going to go challenge myself I'm going to be I'm going to embrace stress and frustration do the mental equivalent of you know running ladders or running up a hill.
Then they feel that stress but if they don't know how to interpret that those the growth mindset isn't going to get them to the skill development right or at least to the mental well being of feeling like they have confidence and can do well.
So in some in some research that we've done in the last few years what we've tried to do is to marry together the growth mindset idea with great work originally coming out of Ali Crumb and Jeremy Jameson's labs who were building on lots of great appraisal psychology.
So I think that's a great appraisal psychologist when demand is another is to say okay in the inevitable experience where.
If you if you fully believe our growth mindset and then now you load your plate with challenges but now you've got a physiological stress response.
How are you going to praise that better and that's kind of been the new frontier of growth mindset work in the last four or five years.
So you tell us more about this stress is enhancing mindset I think it's a really interesting one especially when it's woven in with the growth mindset yeah so let me tell you kind of.
That on its own and then and then the the story of how we have this inside is actually kind of interesting to.
The basic idea as you know people who've heard about Ali Crumb would know and Jeremy Jameson is that you know an experience of your heart racing your palm sweating anxiety and your stomach that is itself a new stresser that then needs to be interpreted in appraised by the person experiencing it.
That idea on its own is kind of revolutionary for people people tend to think.
That your physiological arousal is this objective experience that is universally bad Ali Crumb calls that a stress is debilitating belief.
I think that's a good that's a good label for it it's this idea that that heart racing palm sweaty butterflies in your stomach is a sign of your impending failure and doom and it will always interfere with your performance and and in the implication therefore is if you were about to do well on whatever you're going to do then you wouldn't feel that way right.
Ali Crumb calls us being stressed about being stressed and that I think it's a really common experience right now where people are like wow you know if I was a confident good person who's about to do well I wouldn't be sitting here feeling so stressed about I was stressed I am and it becomes this metacognitive layered loop of just being stuck in your mind and interpreting your arousal in the most negative possible light.
So that stress is debilitating belief doesn't people aren't like wrong for having come to that belief because it's everywhere in our culture.
One thing I do in my class a lot is I just have people Google image search stress management means and first of all a surprising number about cats I don't know why people think cat pictures are like the way to convey complex scientific ideas like it would be like a cat with like a cookie jar.
And it will be like growth mindset I don't understand what that the point of that is.
But you know page two or three after all the cats then you get to a lot of things that are you'll see a person with a battery that's empty and it's like they didn't de-stress or ten tips for de-stressing and it'll be like go on a walk drink Camimil tea like.
And the underlying implications that if you're stressed then you need to distract yourself you need to get rid of that stress.
But alternative explanation in the growth mindset world is well maybe you have something very important to you and you've pushed yourself to embrace some challenge in a really admirable way.
And that has filled your plate in some way like if I was about to give a presentation to a senior vice president at work and I'm stressed about it.
And I go take a bubble bath and like go for a walk like I should get ready to kick ass the presentation you know.
And so I think what what Ali Kram and others have identified is that you can think differently about that stress you can say this is actually a sign that I'm preparing to optimize my performance.
And maybe the heart racing isn't my body being afraid of damage maybe it's my body getting more oxygenated blood to my brain and my muscles to like help me do really well.
And that's called a stress can be enhancing belief.
And what's so interesting I think about this work and I want to have credits a lot of other people is that if you're in the stress is debilitating mindset you don't realize that there's an alternative.
And I think that that's the way it is so never occurs to you to say oh this stress is helping me right but once you tell people this what happens is in our studies we actually see a change in stress physiology and changing your mindset about stress in turn changes how your body reacts which then becomes a different stresser that you can interpret.
And so the big insight was pairing the these ideas about reframing stress as in an inevitable force that's going to destroy your goal pursuit into a resource to be cultivated and pairing that together with the first step which is the growth mindset that causes you to like be open to the challenge in the first place.
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I feel like so much of what human being struggle with such as learning and performance, our relationship to stress, etc.
Could be resolved if we could overcome the deficit and language. Here's what I'm thinking we're talking about reframing stress to make it performance enhancing as opposed to performance diminishing.
I wonder if we replace the word stress with just like levels of arousal but then people hear arousal and they think certain kinds of arousal so what we want to do is either way I think about is like a continuum of readiness.
But then that doesn't work because readiness can be readiness for sleep which is a low level of arousal you don't want to be highly alert and then you're not ready for sleep right.
So there's a real deficit of language where I think if there was some other word I don't I can't come up with it on the fly where you know one's internal level of readiness.
As opposed to stress and maybe it looks a lot like autonomic arousal where heart rate is increased and blood pressure is increasing people would say oh yeah that's my body being ready for something as opposed to stressed about doing it.
Yeah and it's kind of a trivial you know recasting of stress on the one hand but in terms of you know kids learning about life and stress and arousal and these internal signals and adults learning about those and incorporating those into their life goals I think it would be pretty meaningful.
And I again I don't have a solution to this but I feel like everyone here stresses bad you hear stresses and enhancing okay great but I think it's really about developing a language that lets us interpret what's going on in our bodies and compare that to what we are facing in the moment and just decide is this well matched or poorly matched to what we need to do is it great for going to sleep is it great for learning is it great for catching that train that's you know soon to leave the station and I just wonder why the death is going on.
Why the deficit in language yeah I think it's a profound question because small changes in language perpetuate problematic late theories because they have the baggage on them and I think that let's think this through so what the psychophysiologist like to point out is that there's a distinction between the stressor which is the it's called the internally or externally imposed demand could be something that's thwarting your goal.
The exam the difficult conversation the right the going to for some people going to the doctor of the dentist the hard conversation with you know with somebody you care about it could be.
Or physical stressor right like a football game or you know running a marathon right so anything that imposes demands on your body in mind and therefore will require resources whether like you know metabolic resources to do well.
That's a stressor okay. Then there's your appraisal of it that's what you name it how you interpret it how you frame it in your mind and then there's your response.
People in general conflate the stressor with a stress response when they say stress they're like I'm really stressed right now well what really what you mean is that there were
stressors you praise them as more than you can handle and then you had a threat type stress response which means that your body is preparing for damage and defeat and that is like an inheritance of how the you know sympathetic nervous system of all to which is to keep us alive from threats mainly physical threats.
And so if you have a stressor some demand praise is something you cannot handle and then your threat type response your body is basically assuming you're going to lose whatever physical fight you're in like the bear is going to you know tear you
and then your main goal at that point is to stay alive and like bleed out more slowly right so you end up with more blood kept centrally in the body cavity less than the extremities right body releases cortisol because it's an anti inflammatory it's going to like help with tissue repair 45 minutes down the road.
So the whole like cascade of physiological responses that come in part from the mental appraisal that this stressor is more than you can handle.
Now we're very rarely confronted with those kinds of physical stressors these days it's often social stressors but a lot of social stressors are threat of social death right like a ninth grader coming in high school getting bullied by all their friends and are excluded because they think the friends in eighth grade now treat you like you don't exist right the threat of social death is pretty bad right or you're a new legal associate you filed your first brief and all the partners are like this is garbage we're not going to send it to you.
We're not going to send it to the client right like all of a sudden you're on trial socially in front of these people who could you lose at any time that's a very vibrant social stressor that evokes the same kind of physiological response as we suppose a physical one would right and so we're very careful to distinguish in our studies a stressor from the stress response because often the stressor isn't really a bad thing like you know
some critical feedback on your first legal brief as a junior associate well that could be awesome it could be like oh great I have these awesome partners at my great law firm are now giving me personalized feedback that's useful or I'm a ninth grader and I have to make new friends but I don't know that's maybe you need new friends like I could be a good thing right and and same with a test same with you know presentation to senior vice president whatever it is stressors often in in our daily lives are not good or bad now of course we're not going to send it to you.
We're not good or bad now of course there's traumatic stressors that you know really bad for people but then the praisle is really where there's a lot of leverage and if you think that the stressor is inevitably bad and at your response to it is always harmful then it's really hard for you to think that you have the resources to meet the demand that you're facing and you end up in this threat cycle.
So a lot of our research what we try to do is give people a different story to tell themselves about a stressor and about their response so that way they end up in a better place.
I don't know what that better language is but I will say once gave a talk at a middle school in high school and I use slides that Jeremy Jameson is my collaborator sent me that had the word arousal on it on every single slide and that was a big mistake in a room of like middle school kids.
I strongly recommend different terminology.
And I should I was a middle school teacher I should have known that you can't say that word in a high school.
Right yeah I think that there needs to be a better language I think if people of all ages understood the autonomic nervous system this aspect of our nervous system that is on a continuum that leads us to either be I guess at the extremes you would say
that would be the deepest state of person that is non-arousal then ascending from you know very you know deeply asleep lightly asleep groggy awake awake in alert awaken alert to the point of being highly alert and then you get into kind of low level panic and then all out panic attack right and this kind of the continuum the autonomic continuum.
I feel like if people understood that and they and they could simply ask okay where is my body in mind along that continuum and then compare it to whatever it is they face then we'd have a better sense of whether or not we were in the correct maybe even optimal state for for dealing with challenge or or not and along those lines what is the optimal internal state for dealing with challenge that is just outside our ability.
You know maybe in an exam where I can naturally get 85% of the answers correct but maybe 15% I think this is what the machine learning and AI tells us is probably the appropriate level of difficulty for something in order to best learn I know that's probably.
Yeah if you're motivated and you know a lot of things but yeah I mean I think if you think of the autonomic arousal on just one axis.
Where where you start running into problems we find is is that I think you're right that there's like you know coma to like some arousal or meaningful arousal but the it's the middle to the end part where there's two different tracks and one track is very high arousal but you're terrified of the damage and defeat and the humiliation and the failure and so that's that's.
And that's demanding all your attention that's what we call threat type stress there's another version that is again very high arousal but that's like your stoked and you feel confident you're going to do well and that's also very high arousal and if you just look at arousal measures like pre ejection period right.
It's just it's a simple measure of just the sympathetic nervous system that we use in all of our studies so sympathetic just remind folks is one aspect of the autonomic nervous system has nothing to a sympathy just the more alert means more contribution of the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system sorry it's a mouthful and then less alert would be more contribution of the parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system and PV is just a matter of.
And PEP is just a measure that we use in our laboratory studies and another could have been like skin conductance how it's which is about the sweat coming out of your skin and then we use an electrode to figure out which is there that those kinds of measures can't distinguish what we call a challenge type state that's almost like people have heard of flow where you're optimally balanced between important challenge you care about and resource.
And resources and ability to you know overcomer at least deal with that challenge on the positive side in the other higher arousal state which is threat and that's again you're highly your everything's highly engage your whole stress system but you don't think you can deal with it.
So that becomes really important because here's a very practical example if you look at devices people are wearing to detect their stress that might say higher low arousal but it can't distinguish between super good positive challenge type stress and really negative threat type stress.
One of the examples that psychophysiologist like to say a lot I got this from Jeremy Jamison is imagine you're at the top of a double black diamond about to ski down if you are a good skier your heart rate isn't probably low you're probably amped up your stochial this is awesome I can't wait to do this you're fully confident you're going to make all the turns and have a blast.
If you're terrible skier you're just imagining the yard sale it's about to happen you're about to crash you're going to fall down the mountain you might die also higher arousal if you're wearing like the regular watch that will just detect sympathetic nervous system activation it wouldn't be able to tell the difference between really stoked to do something positive and terrified of crashing and dying.
And so we I like that example because often in social situations or performance situations you want to be higher arousal to perform your best but you you want your perception of that demand the demand that's requiring your body to respond to be matched with an equal belief or we call a praisle of your resources to meet that demand.
So I think my answer to the question is as well I think it's not so much about what's the optimal amount of demand right so that the 85% likelihood of success rate problems or that's titrating demand I think it's how do you pair a necessary level of demand for whatever goal you have with the perceptions of the resources and sometimes those resources are your internal.
Like just confidence you know or sometimes it's your ability to re appraise and other times it's material resources like do you have a it could be in real life do you have a friend that you could turn to or it might be.
Have you been trained in a way where you're able to overcome this you have enough time so resources can be a big bucket and that's kind of the magic is because resources are appraised by the mind in our interventions we can give you a different way of.
Viewing your resources so that way people feel like they can meet the demand and that pushes them from a threat type response into a more challenged type response.
It makes sense if I think that the stress for lack of a better term and the effort is going to get me where I need to go eventually I'm going to be far more willing to invest the effort.
Yeah, especially if I'm motivated I want the I want the thing that lies at the finish line you basically take the demand which was your intense stress and worry and turn it into a resource in your own mind and it turns out that that actually helps people cope at a physiological level got it got it.
We've been talking a lot about kind of the nuts and bolts of growth mindset and stress is performance enhancing mindset maybe we could shift a little bit to the discussion about what you call the mentor mindset and as we do that maybe we'll weave back in some of these some of these concepts yeah your book 10 to 25.
Focus is heavily on social appraisal self appraisal basically the idea that we want to be liked and we don't want to be disliked and it hurts when people say mean things about us or when we hear negative feedback especially if it's provided publicly but ultimately what we do with that information is what determines you know whether or we grow and move forward yeah.
Everyone loves a great report card nobody likes a poor report card so tell us about mentor mindset and both for folks in the 10 to 25 age range but also for everybody you know because it's clear that this impacts us throughout our lifespan.
Yeah so the the work I write about comes out of a dissertation led by Jeff Cohen at Stanford in the 90s with Claude steel and they coin to term that they call the mentors dilemma and the mentors dilemma is the idea that if you're a leader manager coach teacher whatever it is parent it's very hard to simultaneously criticize somebody's work and motivate them to overcome and embrace that criticism.
And the reason it's a dilemma is because the leader on the one hand.
Once to maintain high standards by being critical maybe in order to help the person grow but that could crush the person's motivation the alternative is withhold your criticism don't say the truth hide all the critical feedback and be nice and super supportive.
But in that meets your goal of being friendly and caring but it doesn't help the person grow so it feels like we have to walk through the world was stuck between two bad choices either you're a demanding autocratic you know dictator who doesn't care about human feelings or you are a
like low standards when push over that you know giving in to the like wimpy demands of the week next generation and neither of those have.
You know formally positive connotations and the classic example in Jeff's work was student at Stanford who writes the first draft of an essay and then gets really harsh critical feedback from a professor.
And then he's willing to revise their work or do they say this teacher hates me their bias I dislike them and leave the leave the comments on address.
So the solution to that in that research on the mentors dilemma has been to say two things one is appeal to the very high standard you have for someone's work.
Also always accompany that appeal to the high standard with an assurance that if they implement the feedback and use of support that they're capable of meeting the high standard.
I like to think of it as like if you go to the roller coaster and they say you have to be this tall to ride right so just saying you have to be this tall and you're not see later isn't reassuring to somebody right.
But if you can say here's the standard and I believe you can meet it but it's going to be hard that means a lot and means I'm taking you seriously.
It means I believe in your growth and it's a kind of leadership practice that makes growth mindset be something that comes to life and feel true it's not just an idea in your head that you're growing it's like I live in a social world where people are going to push me to grow and not leave me alone.
Are you familiar with the book of the late I think the pronunciation is Randy Pousch for the last lecture now he was a computer scientist he developed a lot of early online portals for kids in particular young women to learn programming I think it was called Alice.
And he is known for what's called the last lecture he was diagnosed with cancer eventually passed away but he talked about in his book lessons that were important for life and one of the things that he said was the thing to worry about is not when your mentors and coaches are pushing you it's when they stop pushing you that you should really worry because that means they basically give it up on you.
So that always they're always wrong in my mind. Yeah that what would I call the the person who just is no longer maintaining high standards for you I call that a protector mindset that it's it's almost like it's going to be too much trouble to see you dealing with stress from being pushed that I am going to protect you from that stress I maybe I care about you but I'm not going to knock you down hold you to a high standard.
And I see that a lot in coaches I see it in teacher the seat in parents for me the the opposite problematic version is what I call it enforcer mindset this is like here's the standard.
And I'm going to hold you to it and and sub to you to meet it or not right that's kind of like the college professor that says look to your left look to your right half of you you know we're going to be gone by the end of this.
For me the solution is to think about taking the best parts of both of those two.
What's the high standards high support so enforcer great you've got the standards let's add your support protector you care a lot great let's add the standards.
And what Jeff Cohen and Claude steel found in their initial study is that students were far more likely to view negative criticism as a sign that the teacher cared for them if it was accompanied by a transparent and clear communication of these two elements of high standards and high support.
If it was just the critical feedback the professor could have meant the same positive thing I'm caring about you but they didn't make it clear to the person then then participants were less likely to think that the professor was on their side.
And in our work in some small studies we we showed that even seventh graders when they get critical feedback on their essays are about twice as likely to implement the teachers critical feedback with even a very short.
In vocation of the high standards and the high support.
So to get to your question about mentor mindset at some point I got worried that our experiment on high standards high support messages which we called wise feedback on those studies would be viewed as I don't like a magic phrase.
Like I my joke my laugh is a lame laugh line but I'm a professor so that's best I can do my laugh line was always I just live in fear that Pearson and other textbook companies are going to sell wise feedback posted notes so they can magically race the achievement gap right.
And I said that as a joke and then two things happen one is a popular author like I name Dan coil literally called it magic feedback in his book didn't site us but like.
It's not it's not magic at all the magic of high standards and high support is not the 18 words it's i'm taking you seriously when a moment when you're vulnerable and I have power over you.
That is just so deeply human and so powerful but there's nothing about the magic words it's the it's the experience of dignity and respect when you are questioning whether you're either worthy of it or going to be given it by authorities.
So interesting we had Dr Becky Kennedy on here to talk about parenting and she said many important things but among them was the fact that children perhaps all people want to feel real yeah and they want to feel safe yeah an important concept that I think many people heard and are really internalizing I know I am for sure and this idea of feeling real has to do with.
Not just feeling seen but that people believe us even if they disagree with us yeah like they believe us she is another thing that super profound is the kind of two things argument that I can both have high expectations for my kids and love my kids and I think that's a very good version of wise feedback mentor mindset that as parents it either feels like I can expect a lot of my kids.
But then I'm a monster they're going to yell at me or I'm going to be a pushover and then they're going to be unruly and I think part of her was in this to help explain to parents how you can do both of those things.
And indeed one can right I think but it requires having a kind of dynamic stance or dynamic mindset as the the teacher the leader the coach the parent.
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I want to get back to some of the mechanics of how to go about that but why do you think this stuff is so hard like if we think about kind of a curb set of
curbside evolutionary theory meaning I don't have any formal training in evolutionary psychology you can step back and say like I don't know maybe we just used to be so busy from morning to sleep that we didn't really have time to do
anything except the stuff we needed to complete in order to feed our families and take care of our communities etc and now a number of things are outsourced and so here we have this notion of strivings.
But then again you know we went from hunter gather cultures to writing war and peace and everything else right on technologies of all kinds so you know there must be something in the human brain that causes us to strive and what we really talk about here is striving in our relationship with striving.
So if we were to step back and just say okay what do you think determines whether or not someone feels they can do better is it early success you know I they tried it something I mean everyone most everyone I assume who tries to learn to walk walks
learning to speak speaks you know there rare exceptions but you know what do you think this whole thing about strivings is about and when we talk about growth mindset stresses enhancing mindset the mentor mindset
I mean are we trying to get back to activating systems that are hardwired within us and that have been kind of masked by daily life or are we trying to kind of better ourselves in our species through you know like really trying to do something that's never been done in human history before right.
It's a big question but I mean I think that all I can do is conjecture you know as a scientist but the I'm often reminded of something I heard from Ron doll is a neuroscientist at Berkeley not Ronald all the children not Ronald's all Ron Rhondle although Ron is just so this is an awesome guys like this polymath you can do everything and just so curious and generous he what he always says to me is like look it is like David what do you think the human brain wants to do.
Like I don't know feel good he's like no what's it feel better and I think what he was trying to get me to see is that it's the kind of pursuit of some kind of delta and change yeah a change from the state and I think the argument is that even if you are if what you thought was your biggest need if that was satisfied then there's always like another thing I think is part of the argument and so
but it's also this idea that if you think of the human brain as trying to learn at all times like what is it trying to learn and the at least in the animal studies you know often it's like how do I either feel better or void you know feeling worse in a lot of ways.
And I think that as I think about adolescence that's a period where your theory of how to feel better is dramatically changing because you're no longer fully cared for by adults right all of a sudden your criteria for feeling good about yourself is your social standing not just in your parents eyes but in the eyes of the community and the middle of your part of and that comes a lot from your contribution value if you think in our evolutionary history
like the being ostracized in a loan is certain death and ancient human cultures right I mean you can't the tribes wandering around in the Savannah you're alone at a minimum you have no one to watch out for you when you fall asleep and so in humans can't sleep in trees because our muscles aren't don't contract when we're asleep on like animals and so you're just exposed on the ground if you're alone eventually you're going to die right so the fear of moving from a path
moving from a parents taking care of your safety all night to now you have to trust peers to take care of you and watch over you that comes to the forefront of young people's minds the kind of the minute puberty strikes
and so what it means to feel better often is that I'm socially valued by the group there's something they're going to keep me around for some reason now they don't often keep score in an explicit way I mean now things are in social media maybe they're kind of keeping score but like the rules of how you're doing socially
are so implicit you have to read between the lines they're inferred social hierarchy is very complex for adolescents and so they overdo it thinking through like what how am I standing like where am I relative to others now that process is started by puberty and we know from lots of species work that it then leads to changes in the brain
so the dopant energy system of course it's like driven in part by changes in going out on maturation Ron likes to talk about these great studies of songbirds of how do they learn the mating calls
and if songbirds don't have testosterone when they are learning the mating calls they don't do the like over the top obsessive practice so they don't master them and then they don't made in the dialogue
interesting yeah I'm familiar with that with that literature there's a great unfortunately now passed away biologist who was first in the UK and then was up at UC Davis Peter Marler and who studied the bird song learning
yeah and it's it's amazing work yeah it's amazing work and it mimics a lot of the development of human speech although not exactly like there's this babbling phase
yeah where babies and birds experiment with different tones and they're learning to use the fairings and larynx or you know in birds is a slightly different system
yeah and some birds are seasonal singers but I wasn't familiar with this result that the testosterone drives a kind of obsessive practice
yeah it's a process in order to demonstrate a little status but really your value I mean there it's made value right
if the same thing is true for lots of things that teenagers tribal it could be playing guitar you know could be gymnastics
I mean think about how many of their Olympic athletes are like 14 right and they're waking up at 4 in the morning they're practicing obsessively
how many like pro social hackers who take down evil foreign governments right our teenagers right
and things that that takes so much practice and so much learning happen at the exact same age as adults are saying these kids lazy and don't want to work
right so I tend to focus on just get to your question about why do people strive to get better I think in adolescence you look around in your social milieu and see what counts for status
I mean I'm super fish away sometimes happen but often in a deeply meaningful way what am I going to bring to the table one would hope
and then I remember junior high school even far more superficial but I'm 48 so I remember it in the kind of the John Hughes film era where people are very divided in terms of jocks
and skateboarders and rockers and nerds now it seems a little bit more mishmashed but I think also people will in adolescence I feel like kids find their niche and then try and excel within that niche
you know as opposed to high school or junior high school being one huge hierarchy yeah there's kind of these sub hierarchies
yeah Dan McFarland is a sociologist at Sanford did this really interesting study with the ad health data and you turns out you can characterize the social hierarchies in different high schools by kind of single pyramid
high schools versus multi pyramid high schools and there's way better adjustment in the multi pyramid high schools because there's many routes to status
the evolutionary psychologist Bruce Ellis talks about having many roles
and I like that because in the old model you know if there's one pyramid and you're kind of near the top but not at the top
you've got a lot of incentive to destroy reputations be you know mean girls type of behavior
Bob Ferris sociologist at Davis finds that the most bullying in high school is the people that are like the 60th the 85th percentile on popularity
it's like you're near the top but not all the way at the top yeah this maps very well to Robert Sopolsky's work on primate troops
yeah yeah the alphas are stressed but the the sub alphas are they have options yeah and this is true for female and male animals
just as it's true we were talking about testosterone a few minutes ago in obsessive practice I'll remind people that in women
they actually have more adult women have more testosterone than they do estrogen if you look at a pure nanogram
predestine leader comparison it's just that overall it tends to be on average less than in men
so the statement about testosterone obsessive learning or efforts to learn it I have to imagine is not restricted to males or females
yeah and I think I understand as a man praising testosterone that I could come across but I so I always need to remember
that the research is very interesting on T Evelyn Crohn's lab did these great studies where they had kids starting age 10 to like 25
and they had them come in the lab twice and they took testosterone levels but also had them do a bunch of tasks in the scanner
and you can look at nucleus accumbens prefrontal cortex etc.
Areas associated with reward yeah and pursuit motivation yeah and they also have them do risk taking tasks
and what they find is that in both boys and girls testosterone goes up over time starts a little earlier in girls
because going at Archeese one or two years before boys but the change score from one point to the next was equally predictive of neural reactivity
during risk taking tasks for both boys and girls so although boys end up with higher T throughout adolescence
the increase is equally predictive which is another way of saying it's just as important for these social learning things in girls
and T by the way is just a really good testosterone testosterone is a really good proxy other hormones are involved too
they're just more complicated like DHA you could study as well but that's part of the same metabolic pathway of cortisol and testosterone
so it's just messier and harder to interpret so we're not making claims specifically about testosterone it's just like a really good proxy for where you are and go natal maturation
and both boys and girls go natal maturation really matters for this kind of status social seeking part of your brain
yeah so if I understand correctly the slope of the line of one's testosterone increase for both boys and girls is predictive of striving
if it's a steep upward you know line then that's associated with more striving in a given practice
to the extent that like neural activation during a social reward task or a risk taking task is a proxy for striving
and that's what a lot of people have argued
do you think that striving reflects the action of a basic neural circuit that then can be applied to other things
or lots of different things the reason I ask is that you know that the notion of growth mindset is so attractive it's such a sticky idea
because or I think because one imagines okay if I can get really good at one thing chess then I can apply the same kind of relationship to the internal state of stress or arousal
what have you when trying to navigate a new environment of another kind of physical practice or a relationship challenge or something of that sort
that you know what we're really talking about here is an algorithm that can be directed at different pursuits
as opposed to growth mindset is applied in one context and not another so what of that people who are incredibly good at accessing growth mindset in one domain of life
does that mean that they'll be good at accessing growth mindset in another domain of life what's the carryover or the slowover
it's a great question comes up a lot the Michigan State psychologist Jason Moser studied this and they measured growth mindset about your intelligence the classic one
your personality your morality your social relationships your emotions etc.
and the question is is there kind of like one growth mindset that applies in all the different ways or are there totally narrow mindset set of nothing to do with each other
or is it something in between and the finding was that there is an overall association if you think one trait can change and be developed you tend to think another trait can be changed and develop and just empirically it's hard to separate that from people's general tendency to disagree
or agree with items that could be with the common factor is but it kind of makes sense however there's also very domain specific mindsets
so there are people who think yeah I can get smarter but I can't change my shyness and other people who think my relationships are never going to get better but I can learn to play the cello you know and vice versa
and when you want to predict behavior turns out that the closer you are to that domain the better the prediction is going to be so if I want to know if you're going to quit playing the cello or not I'm going to ask you your cello mindset that's going to do way better than in general can human qualities change
but if I'm going to intervene at what level to the intervention happen if I only change your cello mindset well you're right like what if cello isn't your thinking life now are you going to be fixed mindset for your relationships in school and that it not really help you
so the kind of the empirical answer currently is if it's a domain that someone could be really defensive about it's better to be a little vaguer about it
classic example is around how parents work on the Israel Palestine conflict which is obviously a big issue right now there's science paper in 2011 changed mindsets about group conflict in general
can an ethnic group or a national group ever change they didn't go to people in Israel and say Palestinians can change because they're like no they can't that's not possible but if they said you know sometimes leaders change and when leaders change the group's priorities change and they become more amenable to negotiation and when that happens things can change if that was done at a more general level then both Israelis and Palestinians were more open to a peace process
so I think if it's something you're very defensive about I I tend to think back up and do the more abstract mindset now the example is I remember I was in graduate school Stanford and one of my RAs was so excited about our work and he went to a party and talked about it's like that very
very Stanford thing to do is talk about research at a party and he's like oh yeah math ability can change you don't have to be dumb and math forever and the person he talked to was so offended she was like are you telling me I could have done better in high school math and I just didn't try hard enough
and my life could be different I could be an engineer right now like I like my life why are you telling it was it went down this road of like how dare you tell me it could have been different
and I who knows maybe he had bad delivery and had 14 margaritas and that's what happens but I think the idea is like if if someone's got a reason to think about that fixed mindset as comforting in some way
that they don't have to feel bad about something that could have been different it's probably not smart to go after that in a very specific way
but if someone's not defensive generally the closer to the domain the better because they're going to see the application otherwise that's used by analogy and we know analogic reasoning is tough because it's hit or miss
we love stories of people that have come from a place of being really back on their heels or even just dissolved into a puddle of their own tears to doing well again maybe even soaring again
it's sort of the common thing is that this is the classic American story although it's true of people all over the world I imagine
it's not always true in America either but yeah some people cry some people crash and burn but it seems like everybody loves a comeback story
I don't know something about that the hero's journey the hero of a thousand faces is that the Joseph Campbell
yeah and it's written into so many movies and books and real life stories I can't help but superimposed today's discussion on to something like that
right that you know that life is a series of efforts to apply growth mindset from learning how to walk right presumably as part of that right I don't know any child that just stands up and walks early on to
to the things that we really think we can perform well at to finding ourselves like really back on our heels and so are there any data or theories even that point to the use of growth mindset and stresses enhancing mindset in coming from a real
place of deficit and not just from trying to do better and learn new things but from a real place of deficit a real place of challenge
I think it's important for our audience to hear because I think a number of people do feel back on their heels in one or more domains of life
yeah it's a good question I mean I think that the data suggests that growth mindset becomes most relevant to your next behavior the more challenge you face
and so for a long time what that meant is if you maybe were a low achieving student and we're going to evaluate growth mindset by looking at your grades you should see bigger gains for low achieving students compared to high achieving students
part of that could be an artifact if we already have straight A's we can't give you more A's it's impossible right but you know in general
psychological treatments like a growth mindset tend to work better for people who counterfactually wouldn't have them and could possibly benefit from them
where the story becomes more interesting is that often your kind of own individual difficulties are associated with your environment
and the environment is really what allows you to apply your growth mindset over time so it might make you right now need a growth mindset more
but it might make it harder for you to act on it and so the for people who like complex three way interactions the idea is that a treatment for growth mindset should work best for individuals who face the most challenges
but are in the most supportive environments and one is like baseline why do you need it and the other is over time what's going to help you keep using it
so to be very concrete about this in in one paper we published in 2019 the national study of learning mindsets it was published in nature
we evaluated growth mindset in this large national sample and the question wasn't does it work on average the question was where does it work and for whom
because we had there were lots of replications already and and sometimes people tried it like what didn't work here
okay well what's that's a puzzle how do we figure that out and the finding was low achieving students in high schools that had more supportive classroom culture
where you got where you got the long run effects and in the in the four year results it's low achieving students in high schools that offered more advanced courses
so if you're a low achieving student you get with mindset it's like great give me precalculus oh we don't offer that here right or it's a toxic environment in some way
the teachers are untrained their first year teachers there's lots of poverty in the school if you don't have the structure to support the striving
you don't get the long run effects especially if you affect your looking at our increases in equality of opportunity
so for me the message is like think about growth mindset and psychology interventions as one tool in a tool cut to help people achieve their goals
but we can't forget about the entire field of sociology that tells us a lot about the allocation of resources through which people can even be afforded the chance to pursue their goals
and so what I like about that finding which by the way came from a collaboration with sociologists who thought you psychologists are absurd
they're like you think your little mindset is going to like change inequality like you're going to make an argument to 15 year olds and that's your plan for improving the American economy
that's absurd I was like well I don't know might as you could do something and psychologists are skeptical of sociologists
look how often do we have huge changes in law and policy but people don't take advantage of the resources that are available to them
those change the behavior so they take advantage we kind of came together and said what does it look like to consider both the structure and the internal psychology
and I think this was a very important point because people tend to choose one or the other either we're going to lobby for new laws to reallocate resources or we're going to optimize the psychology the individual
and I think our perspective is to find ways to bring those two together and kind of do both
and ultimately it's not a deficit based perspective of you have a deficit and we're fixing that
growth mindset is more like what's an asset based perspective what I mean by that is we're not giving someone motivation in growth mindset
we're presuming people already kind of want to do well they want to impress others they want to be meaningful they want to contribute
but there's a barrier the barrier is when you strive and then inevitably struggle if you're pushing yourself beyond your abilities
people make you feel dumb for that struggle so we are we're trying to remove that cultural and social barrier that's preventing people from their natural goal pursuit
and that comes deeply from Carol Dweck's original work at the intersection of developmental and social psychology
the basic claim and developmental psychology is the human being is an active learner who's trying to figure out the world
this is classic Alison Gapnec you know Susan Gellman infants are meaning makers trying to interpret the world
and wanting to do well and eventually they're socialized into beliefs that prevent them from acting on that basic neural desire to learn and grow
develop et cetera and growth mindset is really it's not trying to be a magic pill to give an unmotivated disaffected kid a shot in the arm of adrenaline so they go out and learn
no it presumes agency in love of learning and kind of like I'm going to say presumes the goodness in kids and tries to remove whatever kind of garbage beliefs they've learned from social context
and then our long term studies then show how you once you do that if you're also in a context where you can act on that love of learning
then you can see long run effects that are far more than what a lot of people have said you could get even in even a disadvantaged context
it's so interesting because what we're talking about here is psychological theory playing out in the real world but also
kind of like deep notions of the human spirit like we are species that seems to organize our experience in terms of stories of ourselves and others
but that when it comes to things like strivings and learning I really always in a constant state of either being more to borrow the words of a friend of mine either back on our heels flat footed or forward center of mass
and what we're talking about today is being forward center of mass at least in certain areas of life I mean that the fact that the reward systems of the brain
when you mentioned them earlier these mesolimic reward pathways that basically deploy dopamine and other things of course are so associated with striving and achieving
striving and achieving and presumably underlie much if not all of our human evolution assuming we're still evolving lately as sometimes I wonder
but some would argue were devolving but I would argue we're still evolving especially with this new burst in AI it's all about math nowadays folks
a few years ago is all about neuroscience and neuroscience is still really important on the two share but it's all about math lately
so I like to just think of the human animal at so different than the other animals of the planet like we're the curators of the planet
the house cats might be striving but they're clearly not doing as well as we are in terms of managing the way the world goes so what do you think that this is like a basic algorithm within human beings to
look at ourselves look at the environment see challenges overcome challenges develop technologies it's just kind of like a
it's like the same way my bulldog used to like to know on things you know you like to chew and pull we just want to learn and grow
do you think it's inherent to who we are as a species maybe even what sets our species apart from all the others
I mean that's a profound question and I think that's that's a good one to debate the what I've been really taken by recently is
Carol Duac's secret life as a neuroscientist she has this great psych review paper that
contradicts a lot of received wisdom about prefrontal planning regions of the brain and the kind of amygdala in the hippocampus the
you know the affective regions in the memory creation regions and the the classic arguments and going back to
Plato in the fadris right is that the rational acting part of the brain plans out what it wants makes all these calculations and then has to tame the
emotional part in order to make those goals into a reality and so the emotion you know the amygdala the mesolumbic that's this unruly horse that the
chariot here has to harness you know and I think that Carol argued and I think other people have argued to I've seen Adriana Galvan and
Randall and others argue this that the affective regions are often the teacher in the prefrontal is the student and that makes sense if you
think about how humans are goal directed think about how a kid learns to walk they don't do that for theoretical reasons they don't
just like look at people walking you make I want to learn how to do that right it's you I fork it's it's usually because there's a toy at the other
side of the room that they really really want and that I don't want them to have and the only way for them to go get it
because I won't get it for them is for them to learn how to walk so that the motor learning is the effect of the desire in the
goal pursuit and what what Carol argued is that faders had is totally wrong it's not that the prefrontal chariot here is
taming the emotional it's really that the the affective part is training the prefrontal to be better at pursuing the
goals that matter in the social milieu that you have and a lot of people like Adriana Galvan and Jen Fifer and Nym Tottenham
and the adolescent space have shown this and I don't understand all the details fully but the argument that I've heard is that once the scanning studies were
able to switch from FMI focused on simple activation to studies looking at connectivity then they were and where you can get temporal ordering then you could start seeing
actually that especially in adolescence it's the the affective regions are training or teaching or telling the prefrontal regions what to do.
So I guess the that's a long way of answering the question of I think that I think goal pursuit is fundamental to human nature
and I think that the brain and our adaptation is designed to help us learn how to be a lot better at pursuing whatever goals will help us survive in our
environment and the brain has to be adaptive to that environmental input because the environment is always changing if it had only one way of pursuing its goals then we
would never survive so it has to be the case that the planning rational observing part of the brain is actually responsive to what works in your context for goal pursuit.
So I'm getting summarizing other people's work here but that's how I that's how I see it yeah I completely agree that emotions drive the
more it's called tactical circuitry of the prefrontal cortex of course that we should be fair to the the neuroscience the prefrontal cortex is part of the limbic system people often think because it's in the cortex it's
higher order and that's simply not true but well if we both agree and it sounds like we do that emotions drive tactical decisions that derive action and learning maybe we could talk about the two major
types of emotions that one could imagine one is I really want the toy I really want the piece of food I really need something for survival or for well-being and so I'm going to be motivated and then the prefrontal cortex will work out the strategies and balance out the relationship
to stress etc and remind ourselves that stress can be performance enhancing and eventually we we get the thing or the skill or the whatever the other would be fear fear of social shame fear of staying in a place
that's not good for us financially emotionally socially etc. Is there any work that identifies whether or not that the core emotion driving motivation is relevant and is there a role for growth mindset there.
That's interesting I guess it put simply take it down out of the ivory tower a little bit which is what we're doing here anyway you do things I love you can do things out of fear you do for both reasons to do things to please yourself you can do things to please others you can do things to avoid others being disappointed in you you being
disappointed in yourself presumably it's both yeah but are is there any I'm dying for you to tell me that when we do things out of love we learn faster but maybe that's not the case well I don't know I mean so two thoughts one is just you know honoring Danny
Conneman who just passed away his work with Amos Tversky took on a version of this question in prospect theory and this idea of does the does the fear of a loss motivate us more than the prospect of a gain.
Right and their argument is that both can be motivating as well as the possibility of a loss but that loss is loom larger that people are more willing to take a risky gamble to prevent a loss than they are to get a numerically equal like a mathematically equal gain.
And so a lot of people have used that information in various ways and I think that that has led people to conclude that the prospect of a gain doesn't mean anything but that really wasn't ever the point in prospect theory it's just that it's a little more powerful to to avoid a be afraid of a loss.
Honestly a problem with with thinking like yeah losses are a little worse you know if I already had a thousand dollars and you took it away feels a little worse than the chance to win a thousand I didn't win mathematically it's the same delta.
But but I think that the way that behavior economic work gets applied is to appeal to people's kind of basis in most you know fearful responses to things and if you think about what what drives a lot of excellence in moral exemplars too.
It's this chance to feel like you've made a big contribution to others and I don't think people are afraid that they didn't help as many people as they could have maybe that drives some people but I think just the the effective forecasting of one day I'll feel good because of the meaningful work I did for others that was high integrity when no one else would have seen it you know that I think that's really motivating for a lot of people.
And I think we under appreciate that and therefore we appeal to very narrow self interest and in my favorite theorist on this is Dale Miller is at the Stanford Business School and he calls it the norm of self interest that if you look around it looks like everyone's behaving for only very narrow short term self interested reasons and because you think that's the norm then you yourself kind of respond to those incentives and then you then in turn create that norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is the norm is
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It's a classic Victor Frankl argument of man search for meaning right of the as Victor Frankl is leaving the the concentration camps what helps him survive and it's the debt that he owes to the future work that he wants to write to share with the world. And it's not it's not the fear of death it's the the meaning of the work he could do for the world if he survives.
Yeah, I think I'd like to hover on this for a minute or two because I think it's really important to realize we're getting more philosophical than operational but we've data on this.
Yeah, yeah, I would love to hear this one one thing some really enjoying about this conversation the moment I think it's going to be abstract or you've got you've got it all there in that brain.
Yeah, let's talk about this the that when when we feel back on our heels or we're flat footed meaning we're not doing well maybe hard things have happened focusing on the prospect of what we can do for others not just trying to avoid loss or further shame or or just diminishment is going to be the best thing.
So what what are the data on this?
Yeah, so well, first just like a correlational studies in these global surveys of happiness and almost anyone you can think of the best predictor of life satisfaction and well being is going to be the meaning of your life in particular the feeling like you're connected to others you've contributed to others.
That your life mattered that your life there was something of value in your life to others or to the world right.
And so the just anecdotally the advice I always give to people like going through depression or the risk of that is to focus on what you can do for others or what you have done right.
So that that's just correlationally now experimentally what we did in some work this is started with my first advisor at Stanford Bill Damon who studies purpose in life is we ask the question of when you're going through something tedious boring frustrating.
What motivates you to keep going and we there are many possible answers to that but we compared two different ones one is the potential benefit you get out of that striving so for student in school it's like the money you would get one day from working hard and doing well.
And alternative though is what you could do with the knowledge that you gained by going through the hard learning how could you contribute to others make a difference et cetera with the knowledge and skills we call that our purpose condition.
The couple things make that different from this standard narrative but but I think ultimately intuitive one is the standard narrative is if you try hard in school or at work or whatever it is in suffer now then one day there will be a kind of financial compensation.
So you're you're suffering now in a way that will bring material reward in the future that the brain is not really designed to make that kind of calculation right it's like well how certain is the reward in the future how far into the future and how bad is the punishment right now so there's all kinds of affective trade offs that.
Hard for anyone are specially hard for 13 year olds right so what a lot of school comes down to is an adult saying you need to suffer through 40 minutes per day of factoring trinomials because I said so that and I said it's good for your long term future so that one day in your 30s you can barely afford a mortgage right this is not a compelling argument for most of America's youth my opinion.
The purpose condition though is not about the exchange value of credential some long time in the future it's more like right now you're getting a hard and kind of admirable skill that not everyone's going to get and you're going to then be prepared when the moment arises to do something of significance for others now that also is uncertain in the future but for things that are contributions you kind of get to feel like a good person right now.
You know how often use is if I'm going to like make lunch for that homeless.
I don't have to wait until they actually eat the food to feel like a good person I feel like a good person when I'm putting it in the bag you know or even when I'm driving to the homeless shelter right.
And I think it our idea was you can move up the reward by making it a social reward right now rather than a material reward years into the future because then the pursuit itself becomes the reward right right now my actually the more frustrating it is right now the more I'm being a good person.
Because it means it was a hard skill to acquire that are preparing me to make a difference later.
And so we we framed super tedious math this is with Angela Duckworth and city Domello and Dave Panesco and others as Marlon Henderson as a chance to gain a skill that helps you contribute versus a chance to learn how to get an a and make money in the future versus a control.
And what we found was that the contribute to others version led to deeper learning greater persistence higher grades over time.
And in one of our experiments we gave them a choice of either doing super boring math or goofing off on the internet and we were secretly tracking with the websites they were going to.
And we found that teenagers did more very boring math and watched fewer videos and played less Tetris when they were given this purpose message before the task instead of 2014 paper.
And what I often always think about that's the kind of paper I wanted to go to graduate school to work on but I think about it because if you think about Dale Miller's normal self interest nobody thinks to do the purpose argument like of course teenagers are short-sighted and think about material rewards and all they want to do is either look cool or make money or whatever.
But no like in our studies if you appeal to the chance to make a contribution right now then they did the behaviors that adults want them to do they didn't goof off online and instead chose boring math.
And adults think the only way you could ever get that is by imposing our will and was this kind of authoritarian set of rules but if you instead just appeal to the level of learning for the sake of others then they're willing to kind of go through this offering.
And in the paper we cite Victor Frankle where you know the person who knows the why for their existence is able to bear any how.
And I think about that that a lot that we underestimate how willing young people are really anyone is to bear through things that are hard and difficult if they have a strong why.
And this is one of the most important concepts frankly ever discussed on this podcast if I'm really honest I think that you know we've parsed dopamine circuits and we've talked about motivation and reward we've talked a little bit about growth mindset in a solo episode but never before have I really understood the the why component the meaning component and I love how it marries so much of what we hear in kind of like you know pop culture psychology with real data like we're finally thanks to you being here meaning.
We're finally in the guts of it because we hear this like oh it feels so good to make a contribution but you know people are also self interested.
Yeah want money I would then people say well past a certain amount of money you don't get any happier and I would argue that it's true money can't buy happiness but it can definitely buffer stress yeah not all forms of stress and money itself can get people into more stress but anyone that says you know past blank number of dollars there's no way to do it.
There's no increase in happiness I I just don't see how that could be given inflation and you know that treats humans like linear functions right I think that's simplification right if higher purpose is best to find is making a meaningful contributions the world to a community to the or maybe at the scale of the world maybe the scale of a family or or what have you a classroom.
The thing that you said before that seems so important is that the moment that you attach your goal to something that's for others it makes the effort involved its own form of reward yeah that to me is so important yeah so so important I kind of highlight bold underlying and you know put a big exclamation mark after it because that's so different than like oh you know I want to be the top player on the team yeah which means that every bit of effort you put in you're thinking I'm going to I'm going to be the best.
I'm going to be the best I'm going to be the best I'm going to be the best but and one perhaps can then feel that progress when one is making it and feel like they're sending that that staircase but
something additional must come about when we're invoking this feeling of contribution and I think this is central to our evolution as a species because we didn't develop an isolation yeah we had to show our value to the group or else they would get rid of us right I mean that's what it meant
to go from being a child to being an adult and the thing about what it just take basketball or whatever right to if I'm trying super super hard and it feels impossible to me and I'm not getting better and it's purely for me then I feel like a failure feels like my goals are not being met and then
never will be met right effort feels terrible because it means something really bad about me right now imagine you're putting an effort for others the harder it is the more awesome it is because it's more noble right you've done something that's super impressive in sacrifice your own happiness for others right the social status of trying hard and failing for yourself is that negative
because it's about shame humiliation and not good enough the status of trying hard and failing and keeping going for others is like super net positive right and I think that's what people fail to appreciate is especially someone young or even just early in a career right starting out if you can reframe difficulty and failure as part of the process of doing something with high integrity for others like it changes the meaning of effort total
and once you have a different meaning then it something that previously felt bad can instead be motivating whether it's the stress like in our stress enhancing work or the boredom you're undergoing it's doing something super tedious or anything like that I remember when I was at Stanford as a graduate student I worked in the lab of John Crosnick who is famously detailed oriented whenever we want to go in the next day
we want to go in really deep into something and go beyond what any other scientists would do our joke name for that is giving it the full Crosnick because in his and communications political science and there was one project I was supervising where this is some ridiculous but it was what is the best
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because the whole purpose of it is to better the work not to I'm assuming the whole purpose of Puppier is to better the work and of course point out where there are real errors in the historical literature.
Right. Well, I think that the yes, there's a new way to become famous in science, which is to like, you know, find errors, which again, is really valuable if you successfully do it, but there's enough room for interpretation that someone can
with circumstantial evidence only make it look like something's really bad and then cause an alarm and it causes all kinds of problems.
However, that for me, at least in our lab, that if you always assume that someone will look at your work with the worst possible intentions and will ask for every file, how did it get from Qualtrics into your paper, just assume that all the time.
Then that means you need to pay as much attention to the file that was downloaded and how it was processed in every part of the pipeline has to be documented.
You just have to do that. And so that working with CrossEx Lab, that's the process that we adopted and there's all kinds of people email that like, wait, this is showing me this finding like, okay, here's the link to the server, here's the syntax, you can go find it, et cetera, et cetera.
So good scientists should do that. And so the possibility of scrutiny and catching fraud should motivate everyone to treat it as though it's an inevitability and therefore, you know, be careful in your process.
Convincing 19 year old Stanford undergraduates that that is likely to happen, you know, and that therefore you need to pay super close attention to the details, that that was my task as a lab manager.
And so there it was a mix of the fear of shame and emiliation, but also ideally the contribution that our work will make.
And we had the hardest working arrays we've ever had that summer and that's not an empirical claim that's, you know, I say that not I didn't randomize the undergrad so that but that experience kind of gave me the idea for the purpose studies was, you know, assume people want to do good work, but all else equal they're going to they might find an easier way to do it.
And then motivate with an appeal to how this work could make a difference how other people could be influenced by it. And also if you don't take it seriously, it'd be really big deal and be really bad.
And I think about that a lot because in we don't often appeal to the contribution value of the work, we appeal to this, you know, getting a good grade and impressing people.
And that's less important for me than did I get a skill and did I do high quality high integrity work.
So what you're basically saying is that if we attach our motivation to the give to the contribution that we're going to make it actually makes the process much easier or at least more rewarding along the way as well as
by definition contributing more positively to society. It's causing me to reflect on what we normally perceive as like high achieving individuals.
So often it seems like we hear the stories of like the Steve Jobs is and I really enjoyed that book by Walter Isaacson and that story of very, you know, impressed by his contributions, always complicated person as is often the case with people that make big contributions it seems.
Or people in the political sphere or people in the academic sphere or the sports sphere, you know, most often we think of them as striving for themselves, maybe for themselves and their family.
And then there are these people that really stand out as these shining examples of like Martin Luther King or, you know, and others where we just start kind of in awe of how mission driven they were for the greater good.
So what sort of work is being done to encourage that kind of mindset, the contribution mindset, growth mindset through contribution mindset, just calling that contribution mindset.
That's more words in there.
Exactly, that's all it needs more mindsets.
But the contribution mindset, because I think at least in this country, we are often raised to revere people that make big contributions.
But then we get really absorbed into that person's story. Right. It's like the story of the person and what made them take in, then there's a lot of ego in it, you know, and they, or they have a kind of obsessive nature to them.
And we know, we know what goes on in other people's minds, you know, we were so, I must say there's a certain arrogance in our, in all of our perceptions of others, like that we know what they're, why they're doing what they're doing.
Right. Half the time we don't even know why we're doing what we're doing.
But I think you get the idea here. What I'm imagining is the more benevolent world where people also enjoy striving more and this driving process itself, while hard has meaning and people are not ego lists, but where there's a bit more balance.
Like, are we getting a little bit like, we, you know, kind of looking at this through rose colored glasses, or I think it's possible. I like to think it's possible.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the, the, the version that in which people are purely prosocial, self transcendent and have no self interest, you know, is not super realistic.
And that's not actually what our data are finding. So what we find is that adding this prosocial contribution argument has a big effect.
But if you do it absent any plausible benefit, the person would get it tends to not be motivating. So it's the combination of, let's just take the school case.
I'm going to learn something, gain a new skill. I'm going to get a job that I enjoy and that gives me freedom and make a contribution to others.
We found it was the addition of the prosocial part to the self interest part. Now, if it was, do XYZ and, you know, make lots of money for the future and then give that money away, that didn't work.
Because that's still the same logic of sacrifice now for later financial reward, which then has an exchange value of some ambiguous, you know, amount in the future.
That one didn't motivate kids or students to want to tell the flu.
Universities depend heavily on philanthropy, especially nowadays. And we're grateful to them that they support so much good work.
So you're saying that it makes sense that there needs to be some component of self interest, like jobs, loved design, right?
Presumably, folks like Elon and others love the mechanics of what they do, building rockets, building electric cars and things like that.
But then there's this prosocial thing, the idea that the world could be better and different with these things in them.
Yeah, if you did the work right. I mean, a good example is my friend, Daniel Kratek, who ran empathy lab at Google for a while.
And before that worked at Apple and other places, you know, you could think that designing products at a large tech company is purely about is that a product can sell a lot, make a lot of money, etc.
And that's obviously part of the value for the shareholders and so on. But in her philosophy was always, OK, what is what's going to happen with the user?
What is the user need? Is there a life going to be better with this product? And that often led to design choices that made the product even better and more profitable.
And I think there are a lot of examples of that where, you know, when when the team is trying to create something that is high quality, but with integrity and ethics that are going to benefit people, people are willing to put in extra hours, they're willing to solve a puzzle, do better work.
I think there are a lot of examples of that. That's on the product design side. I also want to talk about the management side.
So one of the people I followed from my book is a manager at company. She wasn't Microsoft. Now she's at a place called Service Now.
And I just studied how she mentored young employees, her name is Steph Acha Modo.
And she has this great story about a really awesome 25-ish employee 25-year-old-ish employee showed up and had come from teaching Teach for America and now was in HR at Microsoft.
And Steph could immediately tell her name is Solani. She's going to be bored by her regular job. She's going to be able to do more than what she had to do.
But as a manager, you can't say as the first thing, you need to do twice your job for the same amount of pay. That's like not a good management philosophy.
So instead it was a conversation. All right. What's a contribution you want to make to the company where in making that above and beyond, you're going to learn a new skill that's going to help you move up the ladder.
So that in your next performance review, you're going to look like a superstar, like a total over performer.
And so at the time they were running global manager development. And so what they decided was don't just deliver the programs well, which Steph thought she could do well.
But also created dashboard to track everyone's progress. So every new hire would they would know where they are in the management process. And it was global during the pandemic. So kind of a complicated time.
Anyway, she did her regular job really well and created this whole dashboard, which brought value to the company. Big contribution.
But then when it came time for performance evaluations, she could say like you're already performing at a level two levels up. That gave her promotional velocity.
She moved up. She left the company for a while now is the chief of staff at HR at Microsoft, right, kind of in line to lead Microsoft.
And then what about Steph? Well, Steph's team over performed. So which was incentivized. But then she gets to go home saying like, I use my time as a manager to change someone's life.
And that brings her so much joy. And she and it's just so much fun, you know, as a teacher to have some of our time with young people lead them to on a path they wouldn't have been on otherwise.
It is a total blast to mentor someone and change their lives.
So I think that's a good example of it's in everyone's long term self interest to contribute to both the company and the people around you.
But no one's being a martyr. They're not, you know, really like it's all sort of one's compensated. So you need to think about of course is the company going to pay you if you help others improve and this important questions that we asked there.
But I think that's a good example where we have a false dichotomy of it's either good for me or I'm a martyr helping others.
But like the best work is both and then it feels awesome because you both change people's lives and you're compensated for it. And that's great.
Certainly has been my experience that doing things that I love like learning and organizing and distributing information with the specific intention of people benefiting from it.
Should they choose to use it or apply it or think about it is the best of both worlds.
Yeah, certainly. Let's talk about this other phenotype. The people that and they do serve a role in the world.
Folks that whose sole purpose seems to be to critique to identify errors.
And I think in the case of catching like real like fundamental flaws and stuff play a key role.
We need those right. And it's kind of unfair. We that that as a scientific field. We force a small group of people to have to police everybody else's work.
Ideally, they wouldn't have to do that job. And so there's a lot of value in the people who have developed very honest and high integrity tools to find mistakes.
Yeah, I think some of the AI tools for finding errors at least in foot, you know, in data sets.
Right. Like the images in a neuroscience study where you can tell that the images have been altered or plots.
Yeah, I remember a few years back the Reinhardt shown cases of that he was like this wonderkin who published I was like crazy numbers like eight or 10 papers in science and nature per year.
And then I think it was actually similarities in the noise, the random quote, in quotes noise plots that eventually led to the like the understanding that like there was data duplication or something.
Yeah, I don't remember how it went. Yeah, it's important to correct the literature that way, right. But then there seems to be at least online.
There's in and on social media, there seems to be a kind of a short term incentive. I have to imagine there's some incentive for people just being really critical.
Like I was thinking about this the other day. What kind of mindset would what have to just randomly go put an nasty comment on social media?
Like if you just think about it, not about an issue you're particularly vexed by or somebody stands on like that that makes sense right people get get aggravated.
Yeah, they do. But just think about the mindset there like, oh, you've got your life, you have time.
And you're going to go like say mean things. Like it's like to me, it's as inconceivable to do that online like to go and just post that stuff. But clearly there's something there's some incentive built there.
And I don't think this is a new thing. I'm guessing that before we had online culture within medieval societies and that there were these elements exist within us.
And that there must be some reward. They must feel some reward. But it's not it's not generative. It's not building society.
Yeah, when appropriately placed I guess we're saying it provides a corrective mechanism. But what do you think that's about and is there any literature on on this kind of thing?
Yeah, well, not the exact example of being a total jerk on online. I mean, I can't imagine doing that because who has the time?
For a couple of people, coach baseball. I don't know how I'm going to like police other people.
Unless it's relevant to my work. And I think someone's like not having integrity. And what they're doing. And like you guys are being sloppy. And I might say that.
But what I find compelling is a beautiful new book by Mary Murphy called Cultures of Growth who was trained at Stanford under quad steel.
And also trained by Carol Dweck just came out a week ago and getting tons of great press. And in her work, what she finds is that fixed mindset can be a cultural variable, like a more a leadership variable.
Not just in the mind of the individual. And when that's the culture, then she finds people are more willing to try to.
Make everyone else look like an idiot so that you don't get attacked. That's the summary finding. And there's a kind of deflection strategy that if I, if I trash other people for being idiots, then it'll make other people think twice before they mess with me.
So, but it creates the very toxic culture that they're trying to escape, which is the threat of their own intelligence being attacked. So it's totally counterproductive. And she uses the example of Microsoft under the bomber era where you'd go into meetings and you'd get yelled at if you made any mistake and you weren't allowed to talk.
And they would like literally flip over a table and yell at you and people would leave the room crying. And this is a lot of accounts of this is a very public information. And one of the things such an adela did when he came in was to change what he said, he said, we have a culture of know it all.
And we need a culture of learn it all. And as the virtue of ending in the same word. So it's pithy, but I kind of like that idea. And so Mary describes how in this culture of genius, she calls it.
You don't just get the hyper criticism, you then the consequence of that is unethical behavior where you hide mistakes or lie about things because you're worried about being outed as not a genius. So the culture of fearing mistakes gives rise to the kind of unethical hiding type of culture.
Now the layperson could draw a line between that and like the zoom in Bing and other like failed products, you know, that's all leave that to organizational scholars to decide if that's the story. But at least the cautionary tale is like Boeing is another example where
Calhoun when he came in as a CEO changed the incentive scheme at Boeing to be something called stack ranking, which is where you fire the bottom 10% every six months or a year within your group. So if your group might be
higher performing on average than some other group, but the bottom 10% of your group are getting fired.
And this goes back to GE. It's a Jack Welch policy. Anyway, so that happened, you know, two years ago and look what's happened in the last two years now he's out, right, if all these mistakes where people aren't going and finding the problems.
Now again, I'm not Boeing. I can't, you know, as a sign as a sign does I can't say that that is the cause. But the argument in Mary's book is that when you have organizations like that culture of genius, you hide mistakes.
And then you have unethical behavior. In order to conceal those and then you don't fix them, but in what she calls a culture of growth, you're like willing to examine mistakes because they're not indicative of a sign that that
indicative of your overall inability to do well. They're like part of the process of growing as a group.
Super interesting. You said Mary Murphy, Cultures of Growth. Yeah. Interesting. And seems everybody worked with Carol Dweck. You caught steel Mary Murphy.
I have a small friendship group. That's an amazing group. By that, I mean, I have no friends except people I work with.
They you've clearly landed in a great group nonetheless. This is very interesting. So people who are hyper critical or spend an enormous amount of time being critical just for being critical say are are are are masking. They're cloaking themselves.
It's a form of self protection. Yeah.
I think that's their answer. That's the claim. And I think there's some pretty good suggestive evidence of that. Yeah, be interesting. If if online like everyone had to put some of their CV and their mast head, you know, it's like what is sort of like what have you done as you're attacking because that would differentiate the people like Elizabeth Bick, for instance, who I think that's her name, who's a what considered one of the best data evaluation.
People, right, she runs in it, her Twitter account is they essentially she shows errors in papers and I think the goal there is to offer people the opportunity to not necessarily retract although in some cases are checked, but to all the papers right around and addendums and things that to say it would right.
Yeah, so that that's like that the the appropriate use of critique, right. She's not doing it to to cloak anything else presumably. Yeah, as opposed to people that just run around trying to poke holes in everything that they see.
It's cynicism really it's kind of a it's kind of an like online cynicism. Well, I think it's it's easier to be skeptical than it is to like eventually believe in something after being convinced.
And so I think there's a there's a default to where I don't believe that. And we get that sometimes with growth mindset they're like, well, what do you mean 50 minute intervention has a fit well, okay, but all the things you're compiling about are things that we addressed in the study.
So at some point you have to just say you believe in the process of science or you don't. And I understand if there were initial studies that didn't follow the process of science or left big holes to be addressed, but at some point it's like, well, we did what you asked for.
So I don't know what's tell you sorry. Yeah, I know the growth mindset field has come under a bit of of a not attack, but critique.
I know this because in researching the solo episode and this one, you know, it's when I always has to be careful about relying on Wikipedia too much because it's the use of editors, legacy editors and I'll go on records saying that there's a ton of bias and even within the legacy editors.
I just by the way, I'm not just got my page vandalized even more, but I've sort of given up at this point because things are clued together out of context. And so I like that if I look at growth mindset on Wikipedia, there's a lot of supportive evidence. And then you can get like two paragraphs of like of critique, right?
And so for the uninformed, they don't know how to weigh that, right? Which is why we basically need a new system. And they kind of want to say on one hand on the other hand, you know, right?
Yeah, and there's no real waiting. We don't know the expertise of these people where they're gleaning from blogs or whatnot. And look, I think it's a great concept. I think that it's just, to me, least seems that there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that growth mindset and related mindsets that we've talked about today have have immense value.
I think it's also good to have competing opinions in any field. But I think it is as we're kind of parsing motivation for people that really want to make it.
I don't know if field are best to do their best to make a contribution to the world.
And it seems like the default state that the fast food, the junk food, the solar, the solar p, the twizzlers and the and the Snickers bar there. I just got myself in more trouble by naming name brands. The junk food is is in hiding by critiquing.
I think maybe there's the man in the arena thing, you know, that is easy to be a spectator. It's hard, it's hard to try and do something real. Yeah, I think that going back to this question of like, are you willing to reveal your mistakes or not?
Mary writes a lot about great exemplars in her book Jennifer Dudenah, who's developed CRISPR famously has a lab that's hypercritical in the lab, but then the work stands well in public.
And it's someone who could have every incentive to just turn out as many papers as possible and for profit, et cetera. But instead, and I've actually interviewed one of the postdocs from that lab.
And it's like an amazing scientific enterprise that I write about this astrophysics lab at Vanderbilt with a guy named Kaval on Stassen, who is just a legend.
And so, as you know, a lot of people would be thrilled to have one nature paper in their lives, like he had five last year, right? But what he does is mentor the probably the most diverse group of physicists in all of America.
And he developed what are called bridge programs where students often graduate students of color or students who had low GRE scores, low socioeconomic status, they're pre-admitted to a master's program in physics at a local HBCU, sorely plaque college university.
And then if they do well, then they're pre-admitted to the physics PhD program. And so now, well known idea, but the basic concept is in the old days, you look at just your GRE scores and say, are you smart enough to be a physicist or not?
And what he argued was that the coin of the realm for professional physics is publishing professional physics. And if you come into a lab and you can analyze data and write a paper and publish it in a journal, then you're a physicist. So he has people come for two years regardless of your GREs.
But if longs you have kind of grit and resilience into drive, as you're saying, and less than work in labs. And it turns out about about 85% of students end up getting admitted to the PhD program.
And then they do well. So the first ever black first author on a nature paper in physics is his student. Right. So like a ridiculously hyper portion of racial diversity at NASA or graduates of his program is laboratory.
And his lab is at Vanderbilt.
His lab is at Vanderbilt. It's called the Fisk, Vanderbilt Fisk graduate program.
And for the book, I interviewed him and I was like, well, that's your admission. So what happens? There's still five years when people have to learn to be a physicist. And every day they have a different thing they do.
So Monday's the journal club Tuesday's a coffee. But the the lifeblood of the lab is Wednesday's lab meetings where you as a trainee put up your figures in your paper and overleaf, which is like a wizzy wig editor for scientific papers.
And everyone critiques your stats, your tables, your figures, your narrative. And everyone's just looking at your work and critiquing it. And these are all top physicists in the lab.
And that sounds terrifying. And it kind of is initially. But then by the time they present at the conference, they've heard everything.
And they're doing that far before they're spending three months doubting themselves, unable to complete the paper, et cetera, et cetera. It's like you just have to do that. You have to face that fear. So it's very demanding. But it's super supportive.
And they don't pull punches in terms of the critique of the content. It's it's, but it's never in question.
Whether the comments are coming from a place of believing your potential to be a great physicist. And what I like about that is that you're not like it doesn't feel good at that time to be critiqued publicly.
But it feels necessary. And you kind of know that you will measure up at the end of that process and that it's formative.
And I think that's fundamentally what a lot of people I think misunderstand about what it takes to help someone become better. So they think either I have to be a monster to critique you or I just have to pull my punches. But like you can be like Stassen's lab and be super demanding and super supportive. And then people grow.
Sounds like the key thing is to make sure that one is gleaming critique from the correct sources. And this is one of the major issues with kind of just open online critique while attractive because of the lack of barriers.
And it means that you have to be a selective filter. Right. I mean, you can see this in online comments. People some people are very impacted by them. And then other people say, oh, yeah, well, that's some person in a basement or that's a, you know, like what have they done? And you know, but some people just have a thinner skin than others.
And, but when you're in a, in a community where clearly everyone cares about the mission, the outcome, the physics, et cetera, then you can put trust in the critique. By the way, I find it really interesting that this lab at Vanderbilt is focused mainly on motivation and drive as the key thing as opposed to some standardized score metric or something.
And then the prior experience when I was starting my lab as a junior professor back before being at Stanford at UCSD, UC San Diego, a senior colleague of mine said when picking students.
You have to really evaluate many things, right. Ethics how they do the work, et cetera, but the main thing was is just drive. Are they driven? Yeah.
Yeah, that turned out to be the case. Yeah, I think it's it's hard. I mean, it's just a case by case decision, you know, like you don't pick that many students over your career. So you don't get to really learn.
But I think I had a colleague when I started who was like, just told me they just sort by Jerry right away. And like, by standardized, by standardized test ground, I was like, well, I would never do that.
He's like, how about this? How about you take all the low GRE students and I think all the high ones and see students do better.
Yeah, I feel like standardized tests in some cases are necessary, but not sufficient. Yeah.
That there's this other thing, this like nuance and I mean, coming up with great experimental ideas or there's just so many examples of people that just weren't good at standardized tests that just kick to ass in their in their various fields.
And there is a correlation there typically. I mean, I think my issue it in a perfect world, standardized test scores would be great for equity because there would be people who didn't get great information in high school about where to go to college or started out in the wrong major and eventually figured out don't have great GPAs or didn't go to great college.
They have tremendous ability and they deserve a shot. And so I think that that argument for GREs is makes us on a sense. The problem is that you can just pay to have someone teach you how to take the GRE and your scores can go up a huge percentage.
And so the GREs end up being a proxy either for the training you got now or it's a proxy for how good your 10th grade math teacher was because it's mostly testing 10th grade geometry. And so again, that's going to be a function of what neighborhood you grew up in and how good your high school teachers were.
So what I don't love is I guy I would love test scores if they were about meritocracy and a quality of opportunity. But they often end up being just a proxy for kind of advantages you already had.
So ultimately though for cave on the setting aside the GRE in physics was like a hypothesis ultimately the proof in that needed to be in the pudding was did the students admitted under an alternative means end up producing great physics.
And in that case the answer is absolutely yes. And so for me it's like yes consider it or not for admissions. But what are you doing with the students when they arrive how are you mentoring and how are you training and how are you breaking the link between whatever advantages might have had in the past and the work that they can do in the future if they're if they're driven.
We've been talking a lot about data and other people I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you a little bit about you sure no pressure to to share anything you don't want to share. But of all the things you could study of all the contributions you can make you decide to focus on this notion of mindsets and and
essentially trying to figure out how people can be their best for the greatest good of the world. It would be the way I would describe it.
Is that just inherent in your in your wiring or was there something about your experience coming up that makes you value that in particular or did you happen to just resonate with with carol and folks and feel like hey there's a big place to place my efforts.
Well that's an impossible question to answer because there's no have no counterfactual so a real causal inference person wouldn't allow me.
What so what this is a this is a digression but so my only real.
Prokosha skills that I can do the splits which sounds like a weird thing to do but I can it's my party track at weddings you always could.
Yeah I did but not seriously not for very long and one time someone another academic he was like you can do the splits that's super weird I'm like yes it is weird and.
And he was like how can you do that I was like well it is a kid I was in gymnastics and I stretched all the time.
And he was like that is the dumbest causal story I've ever heard of my life there's no way that that is the single even the most important cause right and I just thought I think about that as like.
My whole life I've been I've been posed with this puzzle of why do I why can I do this weird thing and I told myself that and I don't think that's even remotely true I think this for whatever reason it's just kind of developed.
So I can't fully answer your question about why I like got super interested in this work but I will say that out of college I thought I was going to be a lawyer and that's because my my college major was something called the program of liberal studies which is a great books.
Major where you read the great works of history and philosophy and stuff yeah you read them in order.
And so and there's no lectures allowed you and you can't even read the introduction to the book so you just have to like read human pretend like you can understand it and Kant and stuff like that and you argue with other 19 year olds about what it might mean.
And I loved it was great I still don't know what Kant was talking about but I'll figure that out at some point but then with PL last the joke is probably law school which is the answer to the question of what are you going to do with this liberal arts major.
And so I thought that's what I'll do but at the last second I just had a change of heart and so I went and taught in a really low income school in Tulsa Oklahoma and I ended up being the sixth through eight English teacher the K through basketball coach I coached
basketball and ran the book club and like ran the cat five cables to fix the internet and the attic you know and it's great I worked like a hundred hours a week I made $12,000 a year it's a lot of fun had a great time.
And at the end of it I thought now I'm going to go to law school and when I was doing my applications a friend of mine died of cancer they got started home it was real quick it was like six months.
And we all went back to college and were there for a service and I remember being in the airport and I picked up Jeffrey sacks end of poverty which is a popular book at the time.
And just thinking like here's a guy who like I don't know is doing something pretty Monday macro economics but he was spending all his time talking world leaders in other countries out of crushing death that was causing poverty and it's like taking whatever
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I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I
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Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion all about growth mindset and the stress can be performance enhancing mindset with Dr. David Yeager. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
