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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
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Is intelligence innate, or can you boost it with effort? The way you answer that question may determine how well you learn. Those who think smarts are malleable are more likely to bounce back from their mistakes and make fewer errors in the future, according to a study published last October in Psychological Science.
Researchers at Michigan State University asked 25 undergraduate students to participate in a simple, repetitive computer task: they had to press a button whenever the letters that appeared on the screen conformed to a particular pattern. When they made a mistake, which happened about 9 percent of the time, the subjects realized it almost immediately—at which point their brain produced two tiny electrical responses that the researchers recorded using electrodes. The first reaction indicates awareness that a mistake was made, whereas the second, called error positivity, is believed to represent the desire to fix that slipup. Later, the researchers asked the students whether they believed intelligence was fixed or could be learned.
Although everyone slowed down after erring, those who were “growth-minded”—that is, people who considered intelligence to be pliable—elicited stronger error-positivity responses than the other subjects. They subsequently made fewer mistakes, too. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, I did something wrong, I should slow down,’ but it was only the growth-minded individuals who actually did something with that information and made it better,” explains lead author Jason Moser, a clinical psychologist at Michigan State.
People who are not so inclined, however, can change their approach, Moser adds. “A growth mind-set is about focusing on the process—as in the experience—rather than only on the outcome,” he says. “Setbacks are opportunities to gain information and learn for the next time, so pay attention to what went wrong and get the information you need to improve.”
This article was published in print as "The Oops! Response."
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9 Comments
Add CommentDoesn't it seem more likely that people who think "smarts are malleable" feel that way because they are better learners, and they are positive about it for the same reason? I don't see how we get from correlation to causation here, and I'm more inclined to interpret the results reverse of what the article concludes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow about an experiment that compares how people perform on a test like this before and after they've had some kind of training in the "growth" mindset. (How to train them? I'm not sure.) If they could be properly compared against a control group, one might be able to separate out whether there's any improvement due to a change in mindset.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOnce again, scientific methods seem to make special allowances for psychologists...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor those who are interested in judging the research based on the entire article rather than just a summary of it, I found the full version linked here:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://cpl.psy.msu.edu/publications/
("Mind your errors: Evidence for a neural mechanism linking growth mindset to adaptive post-error adjustments.")
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyes i would have to agree with the idea of growth factor. one must tune themselves to everyday living while finding a balance within themselves to actually grow in intelligence. so i would have to say to promote more synaptic transmissions in the brain one would need to learn multiple languages at one time while multitasking in many areas of interest. this will bring about the childlike state of mind we once had that is susetible to massive growth. the diet plays an important role in this factor also. so we can say we are what we eat.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIQ test questions are simply logic problems. By studying and applying logic in daily life we are increasing are IQs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgreed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree. But this type of intellectual functionality does not apply for all the individuals, in the brezil, poor persons kill ones to the others for the teamses of soccer while its mothers die in the door of the public hospitals without medical attendance and the government takes off mount of money of the Health to construct stadiums, in infinite a vicious cycle… Intelligence is a gift for few, well few!
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