NurtureShock (3 page)

Jill wasn’t the only one to express such scorn of these so-called “experts.” The consensus was that brief experiments in a
controlled setting don’t compare to the wisdom of parents raising their kids day in and day out.

Even those who’ve accepted the new research on praise have trouble putting it into practice. Sue Needleman is both a mother
of two and an elementary school teacher with eleven years’ experience. Last year, she was a fourth-grade teacher at Ridge
Ranch Elementary in Paramus, New Jersey. She has never heard of Carol Dweck, but the gist of Dweck’s research has trickled
down to her school, and Needleman has learned to say, “I like how you keep trying.” She tries to keep her praise specific,
rather than general, so that a child knows exactly what she did to earn the praise (and thus can get more). She will occasionally
tell a child, “You’re good at math,” but she’ll never tell a child he’s bad at math.

But that’s at school, as a teacher. At home, old habits die hard. Her eight-year-old daughter and her five-year-old son are
indeed smart, and sometimes she hears herself saying, “You’re great. You did it. You’re smart.” When I press her on this,
Needleman says that what comes out of academia often feels artificial. “When I read the mock dialogues, my first thought is,
Oh, please. How corny
.”

No such qualms exist for teachers at the Life Sciences Secondary School in East Harlem, because they’ve seen Dweck’s theories
applied to their junior high students. Dweck and her protégée, Dr. Lisa Blackwell, published a report in the academic journal
Child Development
about the effect of a semester-long intervention conducted to improve students’ math scores.

Life Sciences is a health-science magnet school with high aspirations but 700 students whose main attributes are being predominantly
minority and low achieving. Blackwell split her kids into two groups for an eight-session workshop. The control group was
taught study skills, and the others got study skills and a special module on how intelligence is not innate. These students
took turns reading aloud an essay on how the brain grows new neurons when challenged. They saw slides of the brain and acted
out skits. “Even as I was teaching these ideas,” Blackwell noted, “I would hear the students joking, calling one another ‘dummy’
or ‘stupid.’ ” After the module was concluded, Blackwell tracked her students’ grades to see if it had any effect.

It didn’t take long. The teachers—who hadn’t known which students had been assigned to which workshop—could pick out the students
who had been taught that intelligence can be developed. They improved their study habits and grades. In a single semester,
Blackwell reversed the students’ longtime trend of decreasing math grades.

The only difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons, a total of 50 minutes spent teaching not
math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their
math scores.

“These are very persuasive findings,” says Columbia’s Dr. Geraldine Downey, a specialist in children’s sensitivity to rejection.
“They show how you can take a specific theory and develop a curriculum that works.” Downey’s comment is typical of what other
scholars in the field are saying. Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist who is an expert in stereotyping, told
me, “Carol Dweck is a flat-out genius. I hope the work is taken seriously. It scares people when they see these results.”

Since the 1969 publication of
The Psychology of Self-Esteem
, in which Nathaniel Branden opined that self-esteem was the single most important facet of a person, the belief that one
must do whatever he can to achieve positive self-esteem has become a movement with broad societal effects.

By 1984, the California legislature had created an official self-esteem task force, believing that improving citizens’ self-esteem
would do everything from lower dependence on welfare to decrease teen pregnancy. Such arguments turned self-esteem into an
unstoppable train, particularly when it came to children. Anything potentially damaging to kids’ self-esteem was axed. Competitions
were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red
pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise. (There’s even a school district in Massachusetts
that has kids in gym class “jumping rope” without a rope—lest they suffer the embarrassment of tripping.)

Dweck and Blackwell’s work is part of a larger academic challenge to one of the self-esteem movement’s key tenets: that praise,
self-esteem, and performance rise and fall together. From 1970 to 2000, there were over 15,000 scholarly articles written
on self-esteem and its relationship to everything—from sex to career advancement. But the results were often contradictory
or inconclusive. So in 2003 the Association for Psychological Science asked Dr. Roy Baumeister, then a leading proponent of
self-esteem, to review this literature. His team concluded that self-esteem research was polluted with flawed science. Most
of those 15,000 studies asked people to rate their self-esteem and then asked them to rate their own intelligence, career
success, relationship skills, etc. These self-reports were extremely unreliable, since people with high self-esteem have an
inflated perception of their abilities. Only 200 of the studies employed a scientifically-sound way to measure self-esteem
and its outcomes.

After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement.
It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people
happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.)

At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction. He recently published an article showing
that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister
has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements:
it’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”

By and large, the literature on praise shows that it can be effective—a positive, motivating force. In one study, University
of Notre Dame researchers tested praise’s efficacy on a losing college hockey team. The experiment worked: the team got into
the playoffs. But all praise is not equal—and, as Dweck demonstrated, the effects of praise can vary significantly, depending
on the praise given. To be effective, researchers have found, praise needs to be specific. (The hockey players were specifically
complimented on the number of times they checked an opponent.)

Sincerity of praise is also crucial. According to Dweck, the biggest mistake parents make is assuming students aren’t sophisticated
enough to see and feel our true intentions. Just as we can sniff out the true meaning of a backhanded compliment or a disingenuous
apology, children, too, scrutinize praise for hidden agendas. Only young children—under the age of seven—take praise at face
value: older children are just as suspicious of it as adults.

Psychologist Wulf-Uwe Meyer, a pioneer in the field, conducted a series of studies during which children watched other students
receive praise. According to Meyer’s findings, by the age of twelve, children believe that earning praise from a teacher is
not a sign you did well—it’s actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. They’ve
picked up the pattern: kids who are falling behind get drowned in praise. Teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an
extent that they believed it’s a teacher’s criticism—not praise at all—that really conveys a positive belief in a student’s
aptitude.

In the opinion of cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, a teacher who praises a child may be unwittingly sending the message
that the student reached the limit of his innate ability, while a teacher who criticizes a pupil conveys the message that
he can improve his performance even further.

New York University professor of psychiatry Judith Brook explains that the issue is one of credibility. “Praise is important,
but not vacuous praise,” she says. “It has to be based on a real thing—some skill or talent they have.” Once children hear
praise they interpret as meritless, they discount not just the insincere praise, but sincere praise as well.

Excessive praise also distorts children’s motivation; they begin doing things merely to hear the praise, losing sight of intrinsic
enjoyment. Scholars from Reed College and Stanford reviewed over 150 praise studies. Their meta-analysis determined that praised
students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use
of praise and students’ “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers
have the intonation of questions.” When they get to college, heavily-praised students commonly drop out of classes rather
than suffer a mediocre grade, and they have a hard time picking a major—they’re afraid to commit to something because they’re
afraid of not succeeding.

One suburban New Jersey high school English teacher told me she can spot the kids who get overpraised at home. Their parents
think
they’re just being supportive, but the students sense their parents’ high expectations, and feel so much pressure they can’t
concentrate on the subject, only the grade they will receive. “I had a mother say, ‘You are destroying my child’s self-esteem,’
because I’d given her son a
C.
I told her, ‘Your child is capable of better work.’ I’m not there to make them
feel
better. I’m there to make them
do
better.”

While we might imagine that overpraised kids grow up to be unmotivated softies, the researchers are reporting the opposite
consequence. Dweck and others have found that frequently-praised children get more competitive and more interested in tearing
others down. Image-maintenance becomes their primary concern. A raft of very alarming studies—again by Dweck—illustrates this.

In one study, students are given two puzzle tests. Between the first and the second, they are offered a choice between learning
a new puzzle strategy for the second test or finding out how they did compared with other students on the first test: they
have only enough time to do one or the other. Students praised for intelligence choose to find out their class rank, rather
than use the time to prepare.

In another study, students get a do-it-yourself report card and are told these forms will be mailed to students at another
school—they’ll never meet these students and won’t know their names. Of the kids praised for their intelligence, 40 percent
lie, inflating their scores. Of the kids praised for effort, few lie.

When students transition into junior high, some who’d done well in elementary school inevitably struggle in the larger and
more demanding environment. Those who equated their earlier success with their innate ability surmise they’ve been dumb all
along. Their grades never recover because the likely key to their recovery—increasing effort—they view as just further proof
of their failure. In interviews many confess they would “seriously consider cheating.”

Students turn to cheating because they haven’t developed a strategy for handling failure. The problem is compounded when a
parent ignores a child’s failures and insists he’ll do better next time. Michigan scholar Jennifer Crocker studies this exact
scenario and explains that the child may come to believe failure is something so terrible, the family can’t acknowledge its
existence. A child deprived of the opportunity to discuss mistakes can’t learn from them.

Brushing aside failure, and just focusing on the positive, isn’t the norm all over the world. A young scholar at the University
of Illinois, Dr. Florrie Ng, reproduced Dweck’s paradigm with fifth-graders both in Illinois and in Hong Kong. Ng added an
interesting dimension to the experiment. Rather than having the kids take the short IQ tests at their school, the children’s
mothers brought them to the scholars’ offices on campus (both in Urbana-Champaign and at the University of Hong Kong). While
the moms sat in the waiting room, half the kids were randomly given the really hard test, where they could get only about
half right—inducing a sense of failure. At that point, the kids were given a five-minute break before the second test, and
the moms were allowed into the testing room to talk with their child. On the way in, the moms were told their child’s actual
raw score and were told a lie—that this score represented a below-average result. Hidden cameras recorded the five-minute
interaction between mother and child.