{"id":3382,"date":"2011-11-28T11:56:21","date_gmt":"2011-11-28T19:56:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/drjimtaylor.com\/2.0\/?p=3382"},"modified":"2011-11-28T11:56:21","modified_gmt":"2011-11-28T19:56:21","slug":"parenting-research-on-praise-and-bright-kids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/parenting-research-on-praise-and-bright-kids\/","title":{"rendered":"Parenting: Research on Praise and Bright Kids"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve written about this issue and the research described, but I thought the take on this article from the Harvard Business Review was worth sharing.<\/p>\n

Harvard Business Review<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0November 21, 2011, 6:53 PM EST<\/div>\n
\n

The Trouble With Bright Kids<\/h3>\n

Chances are, if you’re a successful professional today, you were a pretty bright fifth-grader<\/h5>\n
By\u00a0Heidi Grant Halvorson<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n
It\u2019s not easy to live up to your fullest potential. There are so many obstacles that can get in the way: bosses that don\u2019t appreciate what you have to offer, tedious projects that take up too much of your time, economies where job opportunities are scarce, the difficulty of juggling career, family, and personal goals.<\/div>\n
But smart, talented people rarely realize that one of the toughest hurdles they\u2019ll have to overcome\u00a0lies within<\/span><\/a>.<\/div>\n
People with above-average aptitudes \u2014 the ones we recognize as being especially clever, creative, insightful, or otherwise accomplished \u2014 often judge their abilities not only more harshly, but fundamentally differently, than others do (particularly in Western cultures). Gifted children grow up to be more vulnerable, and less confident, even when they should be the most confident people in the room. Understanding why this happens is the first step to righting a tragic wrong. And to do that, we need to take a step back in time.<\/div>\n
Chances are good that if you are a successful professional today, you were a pretty bright fifth-grader. You did well in several subjects (maybe every subject), and were frequently praised by your teachers and parents when you excelled.<\/div>\n
When I was a graduate student at Columbia, my mentor\u00a0Carol Dweck\u00a0<\/span><\/a>and another student, Claudia Mueller, conducted a study looking at the effects of different kinds of praise on fifth-graders. Every student got a relatively easy first set of problems to solve and were praised for their performance. Half of them were given praise that emphasized their high ability (\u201cYou did really well. You must be really smart!\u201d). The other half were praised instead for their strong effort (\u201cYou did really well. You must have worked really hard!\u201d).<\/div>\n
Next, each student was given a very difficult set of problems \u2014 so difficult, in fact, that few students got even one answer correct. All were told that this time they had \u201cdone a lot worse.\u201d Finally, each student was given a third set of easy problems \u2014 as easy as the first set had been \u2014 in order to see how having a failure experience would affect their performance.<\/div>\n
Dweck and Mueller found that children who were praised for their \u201csmartness\u201d did roughly 25% worse on the final set of problems compared to the first. They were more likely to blame their poor performance on the difficult problems to a lack of ability, and consequently they enjoyed working on the problems less and gave up on them sooner.<\/div>\n
Children praised for the effort, on the other hand, performed roughly 25% better on the final set of problems compared to the first. They blamed their difficulty on not having tried hard enough, persisted longer on the final set of problems, and enjoyed the experience more.<\/div>\n
It\u2019s important to remember that in Dweck and Mueller\u2019s study, there were no mean differences in ability between the kids in the \u201csmart\u201d praise and \u201ceffort\u201d praise groups, nor in past history of success \u2014 everyone did well on the first set, and everyone had difficulty on the second set. The only difference was how the two groups interpreted difficulty \u2014 what it meant to them when the problems were hard to solve. \u201cSmart\u201d praise kids were much quicker to doubt their ability, to lose confidence, and to become less effective performers as a result.<\/div>\n
The kind of feedback we get from parents and teachers as young children has a major impact on the implicit beliefs we develop about our abilities<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 including whether we see them as innate and unchangeable, or as capable of developing through effort and practice. When we do well in school and are told that we are \u201cso smart,\u201d \u201cso clever,\u201d or \u201csuch a good student,\u201d this kind of praise implies that traits like smartness, cleverness, and goodness are qualities you either have or you don\u2019t. The net result: when learning something new is truly difficult, smart-praise kids take it as sign that they aren\u2019t \u201cgood\u201d and \u201csmart,\u201d rather than as a sign to pay attention and try harder.<\/div>\n
Incidentally, this is\u00a0particularly true for women<\/span><\/a>. As young girls, they learn to self-regulate (i.e., sit still and pay attention) more quickly than boys. Consequently they are more likely to be praised for \u201cbeing good,\u201d and more likely to infer that \u201cgoodness\u201d and \u201csmartness\u201d are innate qualities. In a study Dweck conducted in the 1980\u2032s, for instance, she found that bright girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up compared to bright boys \u2014 and the higher the girls\u2019 IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses.<\/div>\n
We continue to carry these beliefs, often unconsciously, around with us throughout our lives. And because bright kids are particularly likely to see their abilities as innate and unchangeable, they grow up to be adults who are far too hard on themselves \u2014 adults who will prematurely conclude that they don\u2019t have what it takes to succeed in a particular arena, and give up way too soon.<\/div>\n
Even if every external disadvantage to an individual\u2019s rising to the top of an organization is removed \u2014 every inequality of opportunity, every unfair stereotype, all the challenges we face balancing work and family \u2014 we would still have to deal with the fact that through our mistaken beliefs about our abilities, we may be our own worst enemy.<\/div>\n
How often have you found yourself avoiding challenges and playing it safe, sticking to goals you knew would be easy for you to reach?<\/strong>\u00a0Are there things you decided long ago that you could never be good at? Skills you believed you would never possess? If the list is a long one, you were probably one of the bright kids \u2014 and your belief that you are \u201cstuck\u201d being exactly as you are has done more to determine the course of your life than you probably ever imagined. Which would be fine, if your abilities were innate and unchangeable.\u00a0Only they\u2019re not<\/span><\/a>.<\/div>\n
No matter the ability \u2014 whether it\u2019s intelligence, creativity, self-control, charm, or athleticism \u2014 studies show them to be profoundly malleable. When it comes to mastering any skill, your experience, effort, and persistence matter a lot. So if you were a bright kid, it\u2019s time to toss out your (mistaken) belief about how ability works, embrace the fact that you can always improve, and reclaim the confidence to tackle any challenge that you lost so long ago.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve written about this issue and the research described, but I thought the take on this article from the Harvard Business Review was worth sharing. Harvard Business Review\u00a0November 21, 2011, 6:53 PM EST The Trouble With Bright Kids Chances are, if you’re a successful professional today, you were a pretty bright fifth-grader By\u00a0Heidi Grant Halvorson […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1525],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-parenting"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drjimtaylor.com\/4.0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}