Believe you can change

Aaron Swartz:

Carol Dweck was obsessed with failure. You know how some people just seem to succeed at everything they do, while others seem helpless, doomed to a life of constant failure? Dweck noticed that too -- and she was determined to figure out why. So she began watching kids, trying to see if she could spot the difference between the two groups.

In a 1978 study with Carol Diener, she gave kids various puzzles and recorded what they said as they tried to solve them. Very quickly, the helpless kids started blaming themselves: "I'm getting confused," one said; "I never did have a good rememory," another explained.

But the puzzles kept coming -- and they kept getting harder. "This isn't fun anymore," the kids cried. But still, there were more puzzles.

The kids couldn't take it anymore. "I give up," they insisted. They started talking about other things, trying to take their mind off the onslaught of tricky puzzles. "There is a talent show this weekend, and I am going to be Shirley Temple," one girl said. Dweck just gave them even harder puzzles.

Now the kids started getting silly, almost as if they could hide their failure by making it clear they weren't trying in the first place. Despite repeatedly being told it was incorrect, one boy just kept choosing brown as his answer, saying "Chocolate cake, chocolate cake."1

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 26, 2012 1:43 AM
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