The Cosmic Variance post that led to the Cult of Theory post earlier this week was really about a New York magazine article about the negative effects of praising kids for intelligence. It mostly concerns a study done by Carol Dweck, in which fifth-graders who were praised for being smart after an easy test were more risk-averse and scored lower on subsequent tests than students who were praised for working hard:
Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized–it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.
I don’t really have a lot to add to this, other than to note that the article is well worth reading, but I do wonder about the deeper meaning of this. This seems like something that’s more likely to be an effect contingent on particular cultural factors than a universal human truth.
I say this just because it seems like a fairly complicated chain of subconscious reasoning. The students in the study not only need to note that “You’re really smart” is praise for their natural gifts, but they also need to make the connection between natural gifts and a lack of effort, and the importance of other people’s opinion of you.
I’m sort of curious about whether the same sort of thing would happen in other countries. I’m not sure that valuing natural gifts over hard work is an exclusively American phenomenon, but my vague impression is that we have a bigger obsession with the idea than most other countries (for all that we natter on about “Protestant work ethic” and the like…).
I’m also a little curious about the degree to which this is a generational thing. The studies are being done now with young children, but we keep hearing about how the current generation of college students is very different than past generations. While I don’t generally give a lot of credence to generation-level generalizations, I do wonder if the results would be different for adults from an earlier era.
A lot of this does sort of ring true, though, particularly the stuff about the relative status of hard work and natural intelligence. It’s certainly true among college students, and has been at least since I was a student. When I was in college, a lot of people I knew would make a big show of bragging about how little work they put into various classes. I did it myself, from time to time, bragging about how I once wrote a ten-page paper in just under two and a half hours, and still got a decent grade on it.
Of course, the vast majority of us were lying, and were actually putting in a fair amount of intense work in order to get things done. But there was more status to be had by appearing to blow classes off than by admitting to working hard, in a lot of the campus. (Though in other contexts, it was more appropriate to exaggerate the amount of work you were putting in. Really, the only constant was that everybody lied about how much work they were doing…)
Anyway, it’s an interesting read, and raises some important questions about education and child-rearing.