9

THE DANGER OF PRAISE AND POSITIVE LABELS If people have such potential to achieve, how can they gain faith in the potential? How can we give them the confidence they need to go for in How about praising their ability in order to convey that they have what takes? In fact, more than 80 percent of parents told us it was necessary topraise children's ability so as to foster their confidence and achievement You know, it makes a lot of sense. But then we began to worry. We thought about how people with the fixed mindset already focus too much on their ability. "Is it high enough?" "Will it look good?" Wouldn't praising people's ability focus them on it even more? Wouldn't it be telling them that that's what we value and, even worse, that we can read their deep. underlying ability from their performance? Isn't that teaching them the fixed mindset? Adam Guettel has been called the crown prince and savior of musical theater. He is the grandson of Richard Rodgers, the man who wrote the music to such classics as Oklahoma! and Carousel Guettel's mother gushes about her son's genius. So does everyone else. The talent is there and it's major, raved a review in The New York Times. The question is whether this kind of praise encourages people What's great about research is that you can ask these kinds of questions and then go get the answers. So we conducted studies with hundreds of students, mostly early adolescents. We first gave each student a set of ten fairly difficult problems from a nonverbal IQ test. They mostly did pretty well on these, and when they finished we praised them We praised some of the students for their ability. They were told: "Wow, you got [say] cight right. That's a really good score. You must be smart at this" They were in the Adam Guettel you 're-so-talented position We praised other students for their effort "Wow, you got [say] eight right. That's a really good score: You must have worked really hard." They were not made to feel that they had some special gift, they were praised for doing what it takes to succeed Both groups were exactly equal to begin with. But right after the praise, they began to differ. As we feared, the ability praise pushed students right into the fixed mindset, and they showed all the signs of it, too. When we gave them a choice, they rejected a challenging new task that they could learn from. They didn't want to do anything that could expose their flaws and call into question their talent.