I Got a Question from Diego Over at Metacool This Morning About Conditions Under Which

From Bob Sutton’s Blog “Work Matters”

I got a question from Diego over at Metacool this morning about conditions under which people are “less smart” can outperform people who are “more smart.” I wrote Diego a long rant about topics ranging from teams dynamics to wisdom, but I realized that probably the single most important point I made was stolen from my Stanford colleague Carol Dweck, a psychologist who has been studying beliefs about intelligence for decades. Check out her book, Mindset, for the complete story. But the headlines from her research have profound implications for everything from whether we should classify people as smart or dumb to whether it is wise or unwise to encourage people to do things where they are likely to fail.

We talk about Dweck’s research a lot in Hard Facts, as it raises questions about what it means to be smart or talented – and for much the same reason – Malcolm Gladwell raises it in his fantastic New Yorker essay on the Talent Myth, which asks: Are Smart People Overrated?

Here is Dweck’s Main point (This is a condensed and edited version of what we say in Hard Facts): When talent or IQ is believed to be fixed, this assumption can cause people to believe that it just isn’t worth trying hard because they – or the people they lead – are naturally smart or not, and there is little, if anything, anyone can do about it. BUT raw cognitive ability isn’t nearly as difficult to enhance as many people think. When people believe they can get smarter, they do. BUT – and this is very important – when people believe that cognitive ability is difficult or impossible to change, they don’t get smarter.

Dweck’s numerous studies show that when people believe their IQ level is unchangeable, “they become too focused on being smart and looking smart rather than on challenging themselves, stretching and expanding their skills, becoming smarter.” Dweck finds that most people either believe that intelligence is fixed or it can be improved through effort and practice. People who see smartness as fixed believe statements like “If you are really smart at something, you shouldn’t have to work hard at it,” don’t take remedial classes to repair glaring deficiencies, avoid doing things they are not already skilled at because it makes them look “dumb,” and they derive less pleasure from sustained effort and commitment. After all, they believe that, if you have to work hard at things, it means you aren’t that smart. Dweck concludes that, when people believe they are born with natural and unchangeable smarts, it causes them to learn less over time. They don’t bother to keep learning new things and improving old skills, and even when they do try, they don’t enjoy it. But people who believe that intelligence is malleable keep getting smarter and more skilled at what they already can do, and are willing to learn new things that they do badly at first. This research has profound effects for leadership: It means that if you believe that ability is fixed and communicate this to the people you lead in your organization, they will treat their performance as an From Bob Sutton’s Blog “Work Matters”

“impression management” problem, and carefully avoid providing you with information that they are bad at anything. If, by contrast, you—and they—believe that performance and ability are malleable, they will see tasks as learning opportunities, not just tests that determine if they are preordained to be “good” or “bad” at something. This research also has essential implications for stereotypes about IQ. There is strong evidence that many African-Americans are subtly brainwashed to believe that intelligence is fixed and they have inherently lower ability than members of other races. The myth that African-Americans are “hard- wired” to have lower IQ’s and they can’t do anything about it has been perpetuated by everyone from Nobel Prize winner William Shockley to academic psychologists in the controversial The Bell Curve. These stereotypes undermine academic performance even among those African-American students who earn the best grades and test scores. Some fascinating research shows, however, that if you can convince them that smarts comes from what people do, not what they were born with, performance improves markedly. In a study with Stanford undergraduates, randomly selected students were persuaded to believe that intelligence was malleable rather than fixed. Two months later, they reported being more engaged in and taking more pleasure from the academic process than students in control conditions. Most impressively, students persuaded to believe that smartness was malleable got better grades the next term, especially African-American students.

Dweck’s research and subsequent studies following in her path have received press attention, but I believe that they deserve far more because there are so many messages in our society that you are smart or dumb, talented or not, or an A player or a B player, and there is nothing that you or anyone else can do to change you. Yet, in fact, a large body of evidence suggests that such beliefs only will hold when you (or your leaders) believe they are true!

P.S. The reference for the study of Stanford students is: Aronson, Joshua, Carrie B. Fried, and Catherine Good (2001) Reducing the Effects of Stereotype Threat on African American College Students by Shaping Theories of Intelligence. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 22: 1-13.

P.P.S. There is also a wonderful, and related, Gladwell New Yorker story about Stanley Kaplan’s war with the Educational Testing Service over the SAT. Kaplan’s company helps students prepare for the SAT and other standardized tests. The Educational Testing Service held the official position – for decades – that studying for such tests was useless because they tapped what students had learned over the years at school and also reflected "fixed" elements of their IQ. They pushed the belief that studying for the test was useless despite a compelling body of evidence showing that studying for the SAT had significant and sometimes large effects on a student’s scores. ETS has relented in recent years, but they resisted mightily for decades. Again, we see a case where treating something as fixed rather than malleable can have profound effects, and place a student at disadvantage.