How often have you seen a Bright Girl suddenly lose confidence when faced with a difficult task? How many girls and women, while seemingly smart and good students, claim they "aren't good" with technology and computers?
Heidi Grant writes in the Huffington Post about the gender differences between boys and girls when it comes to facing difficult tasks. Drawing on the research of Carol Dweck, who was her graduate school advisor and the author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006), Grant explains that praise can be bad for girls, particularly Bright Girls. This is because praise tends to promote a fixed mindset about yourself. Comments such as "You are smart," or "You are a good student" lead to fixed ideas about who you are, and thus the need to continually prove yourself. Bright Girls would rather give up than tackle a difficult task that might lead to failure. That would be too painful, since it could involve giving up your basic identity.
Boys, on the other hand, are usually considered a handful by parents and teachers regardless of how well they perform in school. Bright Boys tend to receive feedback such as, "If you try harder, you can get it right." Thus they are free to continually improve themselves without risk of identity failure.
In Mindset, Dweck promotes the idea of people having a "fixed mindset" versus a "growth mindset." When people have fixed mindsets, they tend to exhibit rigid thinking. Dweck gives the example of one of her former teachers, who organized students' seating arrangements according to IQ rank - ironic, since the founder of the IQ test himself did not believe in fixed IQs. People with a growth mindset, on the other hand, regard things such as "intelligence" as just a starting point. Purposeful engagement is the key to achieving expertise or success, not pre-existing attributes such as "talent" or "genes." Dweck noticed that some of the boys she observed loved failure. In fact, they saw "failure" as a stimulating challenge - a temporary state of affairs.
Positive mental attitudes can be adopted by anyone, is the point made by both Grant and Dweck. Seek out people who will challenge you to grow, and don't let "beliefs" about yourself lead to pre-mature conclusions. Embrace challenges without fear.
Read more about real science used for real goals and struggles in:
No comments:
Post a Comment