Is Intelligence Fixed?

According to an article published by Carol Dweck in the journal Educational Leadership, the type of praise students get is very much a factor in how they view their intelligence. And, how students view their intelligence is very much connected to their academic performance over time.

Students who were continually praised for being smart thought that intelligence was a fixed trait that they couldn’t do anything to affect and which would manifest itself (or not) regardless of the effort put into a particular endeavor. Students who were praised for their efforts, on the other hand, associated their success with the amount of work they put in and, thus, concluded that their level of intelligence was malleable and dependent on their continued development and willingness to learn.

Students who believed that they were as smart as they were born to be inclined towards activities that would confirm or show-off their intelligence and avoided those activities which required effort while students who believed in the power of work to increase ability were much more likely to take on challenges and persist through them. The first group was also more likely to hide or lie about mistakes and deficiencies than the second group, which was inclined to correct them. Research in psychology and neuroscience supports this second group of students with evidence suggesting that the brain is much more plastic than ever thought before.

We at Lumosity get a lot of inquiries from people asking how they stack up against the rest of the world with regard to their performance on various games (sound familiar? “How smart am I really?”). The BPI scoring rubric that we use instead measures improvement over time, recording the effect that a player’s efforts have on their scores. Thing is, when it comes to brain games, it doesn’t really matter (and might even negatively affect scores by discouraging players) what a player’s relative score is. We hope that everyone plays to improve him or herself rather than to reconfirm or undermine an intelligence identity. Rather than make someone feel dumb, a challenging curriculum should be viewed as an opportunity to exercise the brain (which, like a muscle, will grow stronger!) and to practice recovering from setbacks to develop new learning strategies.

Harness your growth potential! Intellectual development is not the natural unfolding of a finite number of smarts.

See: Dweck, Carol S. Educational Leadership, October 2007 | Volume 65 | Number 2: Early Intervention at Every Age. “The Perils and Promises of Praise,” Pages 34-39.