Growth Mindset: What is it, and how can it influence wellbeing?

A key predictor of resilience, wellbeing, and success, growth mindsets are an increasingly in-vogue component of modern psychology - across fields ranging from recruitment, parenting, and mental health treatment. So what does a growth mindset represent, and how does it relate to these positive outcomes? It all began with psychologist Carol Dweck.

Humans are a social species. Across our history, we have worked with others to survive - even back when we resembled little more than oddly leg-y monkeys. As a result of this, our psychology is hard-wired to evaluate ourselves against the people around us: In what ways are we better, in what ways are we worse, how can we contribute or fit in with the group? As these constant comparisons can be damaging to our self-esteem, there has been a lot of focus in recent times on trying to prevent these comparisons with others. However, on a similar vein to some of our comments about ACT, sometimes the best recipe for psychological wellbeing isn't to cease unhealthy behaviours, but to adapt them into healthy ones.

Fixed vs Growth Mindset

It is very common to use fixed labels when evaluating human performance. For example, when describing an individual who excels academically, we might label them as "smart", and when observing an individual who is good at sports, we might label them as "athletic". We label performance as though it derives from fixed, intrinsic characteristics within us all. It's certainly true that humans all have different strengths, and can be predisposed to have different natural talents. However, using fixed labels in this way can have surprising effects on wellbeing and performance.

Psychologist Carol Dweck investigated the impact of different kinds of praise on the performance and attitudes of primary school children. She was particularly interested in praise that centred on fixed traits. For example, "Your spelling score is so high! Great work for being so smart." Dweck found that this fixed praise often resulted in children learning to fear failure. When you believe that your performance on a task stems from an unmovable individual characteristic, failure starts to represent a personal deficit. For example, children who are praised as being "smart" when they do well, may interpret a less successful test result to indicate that they are therefore "stupid". As a result of this personalisation of performance, individuals can attempt to avoid risks and challenges, and become highly stressed by exposure to natural variabilities in their performance on different tasks. This can also damage future performance, as why would you work to improve if you believe that you're intrinsically bad at something?

Carol Dweck also investigated another form of praise - growth or process-based praise. This form of praise placed the onus of a child's performance on the behaviours that lead to their success. For example, "Your spelling score is so high! Great work for practicing so hard." Dweck found that children who were praised in this way responded more positively to their failures, and were able to learn from them to improve their performance in the future. This is referred to as a "growth mindset". Using a growth mindset has been found to improve many facets of wellbeing, such as resilience to burnout, stress-management, goal achievement, and motivation in the face of failure.

This is not to say that people are all born exactly the same - humans are an incredibly diverse species and we all have different natural strengths and weaknesses. The issue with fixed praise is that it can lead us to develop a fixed mindset - the belief that our skills are pre-set, and that we are incapable of learning and improving on behaviours that may not come naturally to us.

So how can we adopt a growth mindset?

In positive psychology fields, health guidance can occasionally sound like wishful thinking - sure, a growth mindset can help us approach failure more positively, but rearranging any belief system is a lot easier said than done, even if we think that doing so may be beneficial. Imagine if a new study found that people who believe that the sky is pink are much happier than average - try as we might, it's quite a struggle to just "switch on" a new belief that the sky is pink. We might need some evidence in support of this new belief first. For this reason, a key ingredient in many growth mindset interventions is an introduction to the concept of neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is a neurological trait that allows the brain to grow new connections and pathways at any stage of life. With the right training and practice (and the absence of physical barriers), anyone is capable of learning any skill to at least some degree. Through the generation of these new pathways, we are able to repurpose different parts of our brains to adapt to injuries and learn new skills. In practice, this means that even if we are born with certain pre-dispositions, our brains are always capable of learning and improving our performance - demonstrating that the fundamental premise behind a growth mindset is more than just wishful thinking.

Another common element of growth mindset interventions focuses on goal setting. When setting goals it is important to set benchmarks that are based on self-performance (e.g. I want to run faster than I did last week) as opposed to goals that focus on others (e.g. I want to run faster than my friend). It is also essential to reshape how we respond to failed attempts to reach goals: According to a growth mindset, it is beneficial to focus on issues residing with the goal itself (e.g. running before you can walk), or instead with the process taken to reach the goal (e.g. not enough practice).

For those who often struggle with a fear of failure, it might be helpful to remember that your intrinsic biology is designed to learn from mistakes. Success is process based just as much (if not more) than it is trait-based.

Note: The field of growth mindset study has been criticised, as in many replication studies the influence of fixed vs growth mindsets on overall academic performance has been found to be quite small. However, what we find most interested in for the purposes of this article is the positive influence that fixed vs growth mindsets has on human wellbeing, not performance, and its influence on how we approach failure.

References:

Dweck, C., & Yeager, D. (2019). Mindsets: A view from two eras. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(3), 481 - 496. Doi: 10.1177/1745691618804166

Sisk, V., Burgoyne, A., Sun, J., Butler, J., & MacNamara, B. (2018). To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses. Psychological Science, 29(4), 549 - 571. Doi: 10.1177/0956797617739704

Aditomo, A. (2015). Students' response to academic setback: "Growth mindset" as a buffer against demotivation. International Journal of Educational Psychology, 4(2), 198 - 222. Doi: 10.17583/ijep.2015.1482

Haimovitz, J., & Dweck, C. (2016). What predicts children's fixed and growth intelligence mind-sets? Not their parents' views of intelligence but their parents' views of failure. Psychological Science, 27(6), 859 - 869. Doi: 10.1177/0956797616639727

Chen, J., Fink, A., Frey, R., Solomon, E., Fuest, S., Bhuayani, R., & Kao, P. (2019). Association between burnout and intelligence mindset in internal medicine training physicians. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 34(2), S135 - S136. Doi: 10.1007/11606.1525-1497

Claro, S., Paunesku, D, & Dweck, C. (2016). Growth mindset tempers the effects of poverty on academic achievement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 113(31), 8664 - 8668. Doi: 10.1073/pnas.1608207113