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The History of the Fight for Growth Mindsets
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- The evolution from fixed mindset to growth mindset principles represents the belief that every child has the potential to improve themselves.
- The origins of fixed mindset ideas is rooted in inequality, especially racism and eugenics, where groups were considered permanently inferior.
- Carol Dweck's research on growth mindsets has been widely adopted by schools and businesses.
“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right” - Henry Ford
I was first introduced to the concept of growth vs fixed mindsets in my Honors Sophomore English class in high school. At first, I thought it was just material for motivation posters and fluff pieces for business journals. “Everyone is always thinking about how they’ll grow next!” I thought.
Now that I work with students as a tutor, I see that reality is much more complicated. Truthfully, I had taken the growth mindset in our education system for granted. In reality, the debate over growth vs fixed mindsets has been going on for centuries across all kinds of different psychological and political movements. It’s easy to forget about the storied history of the debate from our modern perspective until you meet a student trapped in a fixed mindset.
In my conversations with students, I realize that a lack of motivation is often related to a fixed mindset where students are convinced they just aren’t smart enough to meet their goals. Students can easily fall into this trap in a competitive region like the Tri-Valley that’s filled with a lot of gifted and ambitious students to compare themselves with.
When I start sessions with students, I’m always looking at their mindset and encouraging them to adopt a growth-oriented perspective. Here’s my take on what that means, so you can help yourself and others stay motivated with a growth mindset.
What does Growth vs. Fixed Mindset mean?
According to Carol Dweck, the researcher who coined the terms in 2006:
“In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don't necessarily think everyone's the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it”
“In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that's that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb.”
In simple terms, this means that students with a growth mindset believe they can develop new abilities through effort. They have the motivation and resilience to push themselves so they develop new talents and skills. While this doesn’t mean they can do literally anything they try, they do believe they can improve if they keep trying.
Students with a fixed mindset believe they can’t actually become smarter or learn new skills. They think in terms of a fear of failure rather than excitement about their potential. They’re scared that they’ve met their ceiling and can’t improve any further. This leads students to give up on themselves and their educational journey, stunting their growth.
The Racist Roots of Fixed Mindsets
We all know that phrenology - the theories connecting skull shapes to mental traits - is pseudoscience and hasn’t been taken seriously by the real scientific community in almost two centuries. However, the concept still spread among people because it appealed to popular racist ideas about intelligence being an innate, inherited quality shared within different races.
Franz Josef Gall was a pioneering researcher in cerebral localization, which is the theory that each part of the brain has its own unique function that produces a personality trait. While we do have evidence that different parts of the brain correspond to different functions today, Gall was very wrong about the details.
Gall believed that the shape of someone’s skull could tell you about their personality traits because it reflected a different underlying brain. Today, we know this isn’t the case. Countless studies have shown there is no meaningful correlation between skull shape and intelligence in the data. Gall himself only looked at around 120 skulls. He called it craniology, and later, organology.
Some of Gall’s work is laughably silly in retrospect. For example, he believed that there was a part of the brain that was dedicated to loving poetry.
Nevertheless, despite a lot of controversy, his associate Johann Spurzheim traveled through the United Kingdom and United States to preach about phrenology, which is what he called Gall’s skull shape theories. This had a lot of appeal to less educated people who bought into racist narratives and didn’t have the means to design experiments and analyze data.
Scientists like Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke did find evidence of localized brain function that was accepted by the scientific community, but this was nowhere near as simple and reductive as Gall’s work. Broca was very careful to separate his work from Gall’s so that he was not seen as extending phrenology in any way.
Broca and Wernicke looked at people who had suffered brain injuries, then examined how their behavior was altered. They found a much more complicated portrait of the human brain and the separation of functions than Gall’s theories, suggesting there is no single part of your brain responsible for intelligence that can be measured based on skull shape.
However, in the mid-19th century, Charles Darwin and his cousin Sir Francis Galton published works about inheriting traits that gave new fuel to the misconception of fixed intelligence.
Darwin himself didn’t offer theories of human intelligence, but the idea of “survival of the fittest” was applied by many people to human hierarchies through Social Darwinism. They believed that the elites of society were naturally more intelligent because they inherited traits from elite, intelligent parents. In reality, they were just more educated and had the luxury of time and money to keep learning. They believed that their nations had naturally more intelligent people because they were more dominant and prosperous than other nations, ignoring any history of colonialism, imperialism, genocide, natural resource exploitation, or war.
Galton was inspired by Darwin’s ideas to write “Hereditary Genius,” which explicitly argued that intelligence was inherited. He laid the groundwork for eugenics by arguing that society would progress best if people with “superior” intellects were encouraged to reproduce. This line of thinking is called biological determinism, where your biology is thought to determine your traits, and it is commonly rejected by most scientists today.
Psychometrics, the field in psychology dealing with measuring constructs, was pioneered by Galton. He tried to measure reaction times and physical attributes — a crude approach by modern standards, but he was laying the groundwork for the development of IQ tests.
Science Takes Baby Steps
With better technology, data, and collaboration, many scientists in the 20th century began applying more rigorous approaches to their work that moved further away from pseudoscientific theories — while others abused new discoveries to continue propagating unscientific beliefs.
Wilder Penfield and Korbinian Brodmann worked directly on brains, which allowed them to make more precise contributions to mapping brain functions to brain structures. Penfield was a surgeon who used electrical stimulation to map motor and sensory areas in the brain on epilepsy patients undergoing brain surgery. Brodmann worked on analyzing the cellular composition of brain tissue in the cerebral cortex.
Alfred Binet designed the first practical intelligence test with Theodore Simon. The Binet-Simon scale was developed to identify children with special education needs by measuring their mental age relative to their actual age. William Stern proposed intelligence quotient (IQ) a few years later, which was calculated by dividing your mental age by actual age and multiplying by 100.
It’s worth noting that although Binet designed an intelligence test off the backs of psychometrics, he didn’t agree with Galton’s ideas that intelligence was fixed. Binet believed that his test would be used to identify students who could improve with extra support rather than categorize students by their innate potential. This is one of the earliest instances of researchers believing in a growth mindset, although the term didn’t exist then.
Lewis Terman revised Binet’s work into the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, which were widely adopted in the United States. Schools, the military, and researchers all used this scale to measure intelligence for different reasons. In World War I, the army used intelligence testing through the Army Alpha and Army Beta tests, which included difficult intellectual challenges such as tracing paths in a maze while being yelled at by test administrators.
Unfortunately, Terman had a fixed mindset approach unlike Binet, which influenced the use of IQ in the eugenics movement. On top of being very flawed as measures of intelligence, these tests were highly biased based on culture in a similar way that literacy tests for voting were. The connection between IQ testing and eugenics grew so strong that there are a lot of people today still using IQ scores as flawed evidence for racist beliefs.
Behaviorism - Nurture and Nature
While intelligence testing was grappling with theories of fixed intelligence, pseudoscience, and racism, the behaviorist movement emphasized the environment in shaping learning.
You’ve probably heard of Ivan Pavlov or Pavlonian conditioning before, especially if you own a dog. He discovered the principle of classical conditioning, which pairs a biological stimulus with a neutral one. Pavlov’s famous experiment involved ringing a bell every time he gave his dogs food, as they would salivate in response to the food. Then, when Pavlov rang the bell without any food, his dogs would still salivate because they associated the bell’s ring with food.
John Watson, a psychologist and early pioneer in the behaviorist movement, argued we should focus on observable behaviors instead of speculating about mental processes or inherited traits. He believed in a concept called tabula rasa, or “blank slate” theory, which stated that individuals are born with their minds as blank slates that are written on through interactions with the environment. He believed all behaviors, not just intelligence or skills, are related to environmental interactions rather than inherited traits.
Watson conducted an unethical study now called the Little Albert experiment. He chose an 11-month infant referred to as Albert, then tested how the child reacted to different stimuli. At first, Albert showed no fear of a standard white laboratory rat. During the actual experiment, Albert was allowed to play with a rat, but Watson would make a loud, distressing noise every time Albert touched the rat. Eventually, the very sight of the rat would cause Albert distress and he would crawl away.
Although it involved torturing a child, Watson was able to establish that classical conditioning as a way of learning occurs in humans, building on Pavlov’s work.
B.F. Skinner developed his theory of operant conditioning on Watson’s behaviorist theories. While classical conditioning is about the feelings you automatically have as a result of outside stimulus, operant conditioning refers to learning through the reinforcement and punishment of voluntary behaviors.
Skinner placed a hungry rat in a box with a lever. When the lever was pressed, a food pellet would be given as a reward. As the rat explores the cage and presses the lever repeatedly over time, it associates the lever with food and presses it more often over time. Watson and Skinner set up a powerful framework for education and social policy based on the premise that humans have flexible brains that can learn new things.
Progress with Progressive Education
John Dewey was one of the most influential figures of this movement. He espoused pragmatism, or the perspective that education was about problem-solving in the real-world instead of passively absorbing information and reciting it. By encouraging experience as a method of learning, he rejected fixed ideas of intelligence and began promoting clear principles of what we now see as a growth mindset.
Dewey set out four core principles:
Utility: students should learn information that is useful and relevant to their lives
Interest: curriculums should invoke curiosity in students and lead to conversation, investigation, construction, and creative expression
Experience: students should learn by doing rather than just listening passively
Integration: curriculums should not be separated into different subjects but instead show the interconnected and interrelated nature of knowledge
All of these principles view students as malleable and capable of learning to apply their knowledge critically to solve problems in their own lives. This concept of a growth mindset, though it still had not been coined as a term at this point, was explored by many other pioneers as well.
You might have heard of Montessori schools. Although there is no specific trademark associated with Montessori, these schools claim to implement the theories of Maria Montessori, one of the first female doctors in Italy. She believed that a child’s natural curiosity should be nurtured so they can direct their own learning, become more independent, and develop problem-solving skills.
Although these theories of learning were gaining support, there was still a demand for traditionally structured methods that make it easy to measure and compare student intelligence. This led to the rise of standardized testing as we know it today, including the Scholastic Aptitude Test — the dreaded SATs.
It’s worth noting though, that standardized testing isn’t inherently an endorsement of fixed mindsets, despite any other objections and controversies involved. Remember that Binet’s initial work leading up to IQ testing was to use tests to identify students who could improve with more support.
The Crucial Bridge of Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive science advanced significantly in the late 20th century, benefitting learning theories enormously. Ideas about education became more commonly rooted in brain mechanisms that were studied scientifically and embedded in mature social theories.
Jean Piaget proposed a series of stages of cognitive development in humans: sensorimotor (0-2), preoperational (2-7), concrete operational (7-11), and formal operational (11-15+). In simple terms, he believed humans went through phases of development, from learning that your parents don’t actually disappear when they play peek-a-boo to the abstract thinking behind literal rocket science.
Lev Vygotsky viewed learning as a very collaborative process. He believed higher mental functions only develop through social interactions. Unlike Piaget with his discrete rigid phases, he believed that development varied depending on culture and social experiences. Vygotsky championed play time as highly important for children to experiment with new contexts, rules, roles, and social interactions.
Both of them were social constructivists, meaning they believed that students actively create their ideas of reality through experiences in the world and interactions with their environment, rather than having fixed pre-established ideas at birth. Piaget emphasized individual exploration while Vygotsky emphasized collaboration, but they agreed on the role of environmental interaction in learning.
Other fields in cognitive science also made contributions to learning theory. Martin Seligman accidentally came across the theory of “learned helplessness” while studying depression and realizing that dogs he was conditioning did not learn to escape negative situations. This inspired a lot of interest in motivation and resilience as factors in people’s decision-making and learning abilities.
Albert Bandura, one of the most famous and widely cited psychologists in history, made a lot of contributions in social learning theory and social cognitive theory. He viewed humans as agents that take initiatives to regulate themselves based on processing their own thoughts, in contrast to those who believed humans were driven just by impulses and reactions to their environment.
Specifically, Bandura researched self-efficacy, or the confidence someone has that certain actions will help them make progress on their goals. He found that both students and teachers with high self-efficacy set up higher goals for themselves and were more likely to commit themselves to it. This is the other side of Seligman’s learned helplessness.
These advances sparked a lot of interest in how students’ beliefs about their own potential or intelligence could impact their learning outcomes.
Enter Carol Dweck
Carol Dweck set out to study this phenomenon. In the 1970s and 80s, she discovered that students interpreted failures in different ways. Some students perceived failure as a judgment on themselves and the limits of their potential. Other students saw failure as opportunities to work on areas of improvement.
At first, Dweck reconciled this split with entity theory and incremental theory mindsets. Those who use entity theory believe that their abilities are fixed traits, so they have a learned helplessness that causes them to rank their chances of success poorly. Those who use incremental theory believe intelligence and skills are learnable traits that they can develop through their own efforts.
In 2006, Dweck published “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success,” where she outlined growth and fixed mindsets as a more accessible version of the entity and incremental theories from before. The success of the book and the research behind it led growth vs. fixed mindsets to be a framework used very commonly in education systems, from designing curriculums to motivating students interpersonally.
Dweck worked with several schools and organizations to promote the encouragement of growth mindsets in education. Many teacher preparatory and training programs began to include growth mindset interventions in their curriculums. Conferences and workshops began to frame growth mindsets as a core principle in student achievement and well-being.
Ongoing research does offer some critiques about the limitations of growth mindset interventions, including nuanced and selective application depending on the individual students and specific intervention strategy. However, the ideal of having a growth mindset remains popular.
As a tutor, I try to do my part to foster a growth mindset in students, especially by collaborating with parents to get a holistic understanding of a student’s mindset. Many students hide their fixed mindset and negative beliefs about themselves very well, so having a variety of mentors in their life working together can make huge changes for a student’s perception of themselves and their abilities.
Every child deserves to feel they have potential. It’s hard to nurture a growth mindset alone. We’ve compiled some strategies you can check out here.
You can also reach out to us for help if you need it! As tutors, our ability to pay attention to students individually allows us to work closely on improving their mindsets as well as their grades.
