EDUCATION

The Antidote to Our

Anxious Times Is a
Learning Mindset
by Carol Dweck
JULY 28, 2016

Through the election-season upheaval in the U.S. and the Brexit vote in the UK, working-class people
are making it clear that they’re worried about the future. And in one big way, their anxiety is
justified. Many of their job options — factory work, farm work, postal work, sales work — are
dwindling, and they’re wondering what will go next.

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 Who is speaking to them? The loudest voices both in the U.S. and abroad often are those that preach
hatred and exclusion. But hatred and exclusion will not bring employment.

The only long-term solution is to create what I and my colleague David Yeager, of the University of
Texas at Austin, call “a nation of learners” — a nation of people who seek challenging tasks, know
how to wrestle them into shape, and know how to see them through. Right now the U.S. is not a
nation of learners. People want to learn, but they underestimate what they can do.

In a new study of 19,000 high school students across the U.S who were asked to construct a math
worksheet, we found that most of them chose the easiest possible problems, even though they knew
they would learn nothing from them. But there was a silver lining: When students participated in an
online workshop, their behavior changed. This workshop taught them two things. First, they learned
a growth mindset, the idea that through hard work on hard tasks they could improve their brains and
abilities. Second, they were asked to think about the contribution they most wanted to make in life,
whether to their families, their communities, or society. They were then taught how to use their
growth mindset, and their stronger brains, to help accomplish that. These students no longer shied
away from difficulty. Compared with those who hadn’t done the workshop, they chose 30% more
problems that challenged them — problems that would improve their brains.

I have seen schools across the country working long and hard to embed a commitment to the
unlimited development of every student into their cultures. The result, in terms of motivated
learners and test scores, often is spectacular.

I have seen corporate cultures like this as well, cultures that have at their core a commitment to the
growth of every single employee, from security guards to senior executives. In research led by Mary
Murphy at Indiana University Bloomington, we found that employees at all levels in such companies
feel empowered and eager to learn, stretching themselves to take on new tasks within the
organization. Companies like these realize that we must commit resources to helping people update
their skills for today’s and tomorrow’s jobs.

In recent studies with Dave Paunesku and Sarah Gripshover at the Project for Education Research
That Scales (an applied research center at Stanford), we asked how adults could be encouraged to
seek job training. We consistently found two key ingredients: People had to know there were
desirable jobs available, and they had to understand that the skills for these jobs were acquirable.

In some studies we assessed whether people already had this knowledge — for example, did they
believe statements such as “It is always possible for a person to gain the skills they need to get a job
they like” or “Even if a person is not qualified for a job right now, it is always possible for them to
become qualified”? The people who held these beliefs were more likely than others to be seeking
both formal and informal job training.

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 We then conducted studies in which we told people about jobs that were available in attractive fields.
These people also learned that the requisite skills were acquirable and that the labor shortages
existed because not enough people had developed those skills yet. Imparting this knowledge
substantially increased the number of people requesting job information and significantly raised
their intention to pursue formal job training.

Organizations that are committed to providing such knowledge, along with serious training
opportunities, create a highly motivated, loyal, vital workforce. But even more is at stake.

Business leaders who openly acknowledge people’s concerns about becoming obsolete and who
invest resources in workers’ growth can help create a nation of learners — and perhaps resolve some
of the political chaos that’s bubbling around us.

Carol Dweck is the Lewis & Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and the author of Mindset: The
New Psychology of Success.

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