How to Master Growth Mindset to Improve Performance | Dr. David Yeager

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. David Yeager. Dr. David Yeager is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the world's leading researchers into mindsets, in particular growth mindset, which is a mindset that enables people of all ages to improve their abilities at essentially anything. He is also a world expert into the stress is performance enhancing mindset, which is a mindset that allows people to cognitively reframe stress and that when combined with growth mindset can lead to dramatic improvements in performance in cognitive and physical endeavors. Dr. Yeager is also the author of an important and extremely useful new book entitled 10 to 25 the Science of Motivating Young People. The book is scheduled for release this summer, that is the summer of 2024 and we provided a link to the book in the show, not captions. During today's discussion, Dr. Yeager explains to us exactly what growth mindset is through the lens of the research into growth mindset, and he explains also how to apply growth mindset in our lives. He also shares the research from his and other laboratories on the stress can be performance enhancing mindset and how that can be combined with growth mindset to achieve the maximum results. So while I assume that most people have heard of growth mindset, today's discussion will allow you to really apply it in your life, not just from the perspective of you, the person trying to learn, but also for teachers and coaches. In fact, Dr. Yeager shares not just the optimal learning environments for us as individuals, but also between individuals and in the classroom, in families, in sports teams, and in groups of all sizes and kinds. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is AeroPress. AeroPress is like a French press, but a French press that always brews the perfect cup of coffee, meaning no bitterness and excellent taste. Aeropress achieves this because it uses a very short contact time between the hot water and the coffee, and that short contact time also means that you can brew an excellent cup of coffee very quickly. The whole thing takes only about three minutes I started using an AeroPress over 10 years ago, and I learned about it from a guy named Alan Adler, who's a former Stanford engineer who's also an inventor. He developed things like the Irobi Frisbee. In any event, I'm a big fan of Adler inventions. And when I heard he developed a coffee maker, the aeropress, I tried it and I found that indeed, it makes the best possible tasting cup of coffee. It's also extremely small and portable. So I started using it in the laboratory when I travel, on the road.

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Dr. David Yeager, welcome.

Thanks for having me.

Can you tell us your definition of growth mindset? I think most people have heard of it. They have some sense of what it is, but you've worked very intensely on growth mindset for a number of years, so I'd love to know how you define it.

Yeah, so it's simply the belief that your abilities or your potential in some domain can change. A huge confusion is people think it means if you try hard, then you can do anything. But that's not really the idea. It's simply that under the right conditions, with the right support, change is possible. And you know, that ends up being a pretty powerful idea because the opposite is so stressful. Right. The idea that you are static, nothing about you can change, is really kind of a stressful idea.

Of all the studies on growth mindset, including yours, ones that you've participated in, what one or two kind of high level results stand out to you as the most striking, surprising, exciting, or meaningful? And here I will encourage you to discard with attribution. We know that, or everyone should know that Carol Dweck is the originator of the growth mindset idea as a field, and she deserves tremendous credit for that. So when you stand back from the field, given that it's mushroomed into this very large field now, and you look at that research, which results kind of stand out as like, wow, that's really cool, really meaningful, people should know about that.

What stands out to me a lot, first of all, is just the field experiments that the idea that you can distill a complex idea about the brain, about malleability, you can give it to a young person at a time when they're vulnerable and that that can give them hope and then they can do better at school or whatever. So our 2019 paper in Nature that Carol, Greg Walton, Angela Duckworth, a lot of us collaborated on, took a very short growth mindset intervention. Two sessions, about 25 minutes each for ninth graders. And we found kids were eight, nine months later, more likely to get good grades by 10th grade, more likely to be in the hard math classes. And the unpublished results find effects four years later on graduating high school with college ready courses from a short intervention that happened just one or two times. No reinforcement. So there's a lot of reasons why that's true. That sounds magical and outrageous and there are a lot of mechanisms, but that just demonstrates the overall value of the phenomenon. And in that study, we did everything we possibly could to address legitimate skepticism. Right. Are we collecting and processing the data in ways that could bias it? No third party? Are we hand picking schools where you could get the best effects? No random sample of schools. Did we post hoc decide on the Analyses that would make the results look the greatest. No pre registered. So that's a good like, okay, this phenomenon is not something that falls apart in the hands of anyone else besides a select few researchers. That's really. And we can go into that. But that doesn't explain the mechanisms. And I think that there are a lot of interesting growth mindset mechanism studies. My personal favorite is a very underappreciated kind of like indie rock study by David Nussbaum and Carol Dweck that David did when he was a graduate student at Stanford. And it's on defensiveness versus remediation. And the basic idea is in a fixed mindset, the idea that your intelligence cannot change you are the way you are can't change your goal in that fixed mindset is to defend your ego, to like hide your deficiencies or any flaws. Because if they're fixed and then they're revealed, then it labels you for life in some way as less than shame worthy, et cetera. Right. In a growth mindset, though, mistake is like part of the process. It's just an opportunity to grow. So David took that idea and then set up a study. And I think I have the details right. Where undergraduates did a task, they all did poorly. They were getting 20, 30% correct on this task. And the question is, what do you do before you do your second try? How do you cope with that initial failure? And he found that both fixed in mindset participants wanted to recover their self esteem. So you do poorly, you feel like crap. What am I going to do to feel better about myself? In a fixed mindset, they looked downward. So the people getting a 25, look at the people who got a 12. Like, I'm twice as good as these losers, right? In a growth mindset, they look at the people getting an 85 or 90, what are they doing? What are their strategies? How can I improve? Both of them then recovered self esteem and looked the same at post test. And I think about that a lot. Like how often in our society does something happen to us and we feel like garbage and you have a choice, like, am I going to look down on other people and say at least I'm not as bad as these losers? Or am I going to say how am I going to get better? And I love that because think of a ninth grader who bombs their algebra test. Am I like a no good dumb at math loser who's not going anywhere in life? Well, at least I'm not that burnout, right? Or is it like, how is anyone getting an A in this class, I'm not getting an A. What's happening? What can I learn from them? So the open and openness and willingness to self improve, I think is the underwriting mechanism. And I, and hardly anyone cites that study, but I think about it all the time and it's the kind of thing that I like, if I'm being honest. That's the mindset I want my kids to have as they go through life.

Very interesting. I'm going to ask you more about this looking down or looking up in terms of performance. But before I do that, I have questions about these brief 25 minute, I think you said interventions.

Yeah, sometimes 25. Sometimes we do two sessions each about 20. 25. Yeah.

Can you give us a sense of what those interventions look like? I mean, it's incredible. These two sessions have positive effects lasting up to four years and perhaps even beyond maybe just a top contour of some of what these kids hear during those sessions.

Yeah, I mean, so the first thing to realize is that they're short and they have to do two things in order to have long lasting effects. One is I have to convince you to think differently at the end of the session. So I just have to persuade you over the course of 25 minutes to have a different mindset. That's sometimes hard. But then even if I do that, you then might have months or years between when I did that and when the outcome is measured. So how could you remember it and apply it and how many 25 minute experiences in your life you no recollection of? Right. I have lots. So I think, I think people are skeptical of the mindset style of interventions for two different, I think legitimate reasons. Like, I remember a very famous statistician came to my office at UT Austin and was like, I just don't understand these interventions. I mean, the other day I spent 25 minutes telling my son all the things he has to change and like how he's doing everything wrong and he didn't remember it five minutes later. How could someone remember your thing four years later? And I was like, did you hear yourself talking? Like, I'm sure the way you talk to yourself was like totally condescending and bad. So the, the first step is in that 25 minutes, how are you communicating in a way where someone's ears are open, where they're not feeling talked down to, ashamed, humiliated, et cetera. But then the second step is saying that to you at a time when it's possible for there to be what we call a recursive process or a snowball effect that's going to happen over time. So that's the stage setting. Okay, so now let's take the first part. 25 minutes. What am I going to say to you? Right, There are three big things that are in every intervention. And the term that Greg Walton, the Stanford professor colleague, collaborator, uses is wise interventions. That's the umbrella term of which growth mindset is one and a good one, but it's just one of many. For wise interventions, we often do the following three things. First is we present some new scientific information, some idea that almost in like a Gladwell way, is not, is not obvious and intuitive to the reader, but feels like new information and useful information. So the first is a scientific. The second is we present participants with stories from people like them who've used those ideas in their lives and found them useful. So in the concrete case of ninth graders getting growth mindset, it's like 10th, 11th, 12th graders who previously felt dumb, learned a growth mindset, then felt better. It's more complicated than that. That's the basic idea. And last, we don't just tell them the stories. We ask third, for participants to author a story so they write a narrative about a time when they struggled, a time when they doubted themselves and then remembered this idea that people can change, my brain can grow, etc. So the three points are like scientific information stories, or the technical term is descriptive norms. So you're giving people information about what's normal for people like you. And then the third is the writing which we call saying is believing, which is a term that. That's a popularized version of a term that came from classic social psychologist Josh Aronson, Elliot Aronson, who, who found in the work on cognitive dissonance 30, 40 years ago that one of the best ways to change someone's mind about something is to ask them to try to persuade somebody else so that we do those sort of things. So what is the science in the growth mindset? That's where we draw on the metaphor that the brain is like a muscle, that just like muscles get stronger when they're challenged and can, you know, recover, so too does the brain get smarter when it's pushed and challenged in a certain way.

This idea that writing a story about oneself or about others in which one succeeds can be useful toward building growth mindset in, you know, in basic terms, I think that's what, what you're, what you're referring to. I think it's interesting. It sort of suggests that, that we have brain circuits that underlie growth, mindset type behaviors and thinking, and that just storing into those can potentially lead to better decision making and behavior. I mean, obviously it can't create new skills simply because, you know, I can't write a story about me being able to dunk a basketball and then expect that I can dunk a basketball, because at present I can't. But the idea of writing a story about the effort going into dunking a basketball and learning how and then translating that to a more realistic sense of ability, that allows me to then go practice more. Is that sort of what you're referring to?

Yeah. So in a 2016 paper in PNAS, Greg Walton and I explained these types of interventions as a. We call them a lay theory intervention. And the idea there is that laypeople like not scientific theories, but just our intuitive theories for explaining the world help us anticipate what something means. So the idea from basic developmental psychology is that human beings are walking around with kind of prior belief about objects, about motion, about number, and then later about complex social structures, like whether people are looking down on me, where I stand relative to others, and also little lay theories about adversity. What does it mean when I have to put in effort? What does it mean when I fail? So the idea is that if you understand the theory someone has, then you'll understand the meaning they'll make about a future experience. And therefore. Well, and the reason meaning matters is because the way you interpret something then affects how you respond to it. Right? So if I see someone and they're doing something innocuous, but I interpret it as a threat, do I call the police? You know, do I run away? That's my interpretation that's causing it. Right. And so there's a long way of saying it turns out one of the best ways to preset someone's meaning and give them a different theory is to give them a different story. Stories are kind of like theories in motion. This is why, you know, like, what's the point of war and peace? Right. War and Peace is really a theory of great leaders in the war. And if there's any English PhDs, I'm sure they'll tell me that's an oversimplified version of what Tulsa was doing. But you learn the theory in a narrative way, right? So this is a classic idea throughout human history. Great writers and authors give us theories through narrative. Right? And so we're just taking that simple human fact and doing it in a 10 minute activity. And the lay theory in a person's mind that when Things are difficult. It can change, can be taught with a very simple narrative, which is this person or even I experienced difficulty on something that mattered to me. That difficulty didn't determine my entire future, because actually there were steps that I could take in order to make a difference. Here are the steps that I took. And then it improved. So it's the simplest, Freytag's pyramid. And even though that simple story is available to all of us, you could look in culture and see it, you also see the opposite lay theory all the time. And so without, absent our intervention, it's not like people couldn't end up with a growth mindset, but they wouldn't kind of know what to sort for or what to look for. So we give them some touch points for a very simple of, like, frustration. Things can change. Then they got better. And we think that once people do that in our writing exercises, they're more likely to see that pattern out in the world. And if you see that enough and then you take the actual steps to get better, then it starts becoming true for you. And that's what I call the recursive process that we give people a starting hypothesis about the world. They go out, try things, struggle, fail, it improves. Then they see that that's true, and then they can keep acting on that over time.

I feel like so much of getting better at things involves reappraising the stress or anxiety response, you know, the friction that one feels when they can't perform something well or when things feel overwhelming or confusing. And I think the analogies to physical exercise apply, but I feel like they're limited in the sense that I like the idea that the brain is like a muscle, that it can grow and get stronger. I think the. The key difference to my mind is that, you know, like working out with weights, you get some sense of the result you're going to get because there's like a lot of blood flow into the muscle. So it's like a hint of what's possible with cardiovascular exercise. Like, if we run hard up a hill, there's that moment where your lungs are burning, etc. And anyone who understands exercise knows that that's the signal for adaptation, such the next time you can do the same thing without the burning of the lungs, right? When it comes to mental work and learning, I think we immediately assume that if we're not performing well, if we're getting confused or overwhelmed, that somehow we're doing it wrong, as opposed to stimulating the growth. And so are there any studies that point to bridging the relationship between the physiology, the stress response, and the mindset that allows one to say, okay, this is really hard. And I keep failing and failing and failing at this math, at this language learning and writing this essay, whatever it is. And that's exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. It's like the burning of the lungs, or it's like the failure to complete another repetition in the. In the gym.

Yeah, I mean, I think that. That you're right. You know, the standard growth mindset message does have reappraisal components, specifically around something Carol Dweck has called effort beliefs, which is very simply the belief that if it's hard, it means you're doing the wrong thing. And that follows naturally from the fixed mindset idea that ability can't change. And I think it's very important to point out the centrality of that effort belief, because people have tried to apply growth mindset but simplified it in a way of just saying, basically, try harder. Right? Or, I believe in you. If you try hard enough, you can do anything. Right? But if your natural inclination is to view the need for effort as a sign that you are doing the wrong thing, which is. That's the default interpretation, then people are going to quit, right? If you believe effort outs you as lacking potential, and then I say, you need to try hard, I'm saying you don't have potential. That basic insight is very poorly misunderstood in the field, and it's led to tons of misapplications of Carol's work. And then people are like, well, this thing doesn't work well. Okay, but you haven't addressed the effort belief. So I think that the first type of response to what you've said is you can't just abstractly tell someone your brain is a muscle and assume that magically. Then in the midst of stress and frustration and confusion and. And all those negative experiences that you're going to immediately say, yes, I love doing this, and this is great. But then there's also the physiological component, as you're saying. So when we're stressed, frustrated, you know, confused, your heart starts racing, maybe your palms get sweaty, right? You start your breathing, you know, starts getting heavier. My. My daughter, who's 13 before, like a cello audition, it's like, I have butterflies on my stomach. I don't, you know, what does this mean? And I think that growth mindset research didn't always deal with the visceral experience of stress and frustration. And I think in a world in which someone hears the growth mindset message and says, yes, Now I'm going to go challenge myself. I'm going to be, I'm going to embrace stress and frustration, do the mental equivalent of, you know, running ladders or running up a hill. Then they feel that stress. But if they don't know how to interpret that, it's the growth mindset isn't going to get them to the skill development or at least to the mental well being of feeling like they have confidence and can do well. So in some research that we've done in the last few years, what we've tried to do is to marry together the growth mindset idea with great work originally coming out of Ali Crum and Jeremy Jamison's labs, who were building on lots of great appraisal, psychologists Wendy Mendez and others to say, okay, in the inevitable experience where if you fully believe our growth mindset and then now you load your plate with challenges but now you've got a physiological stress response, how are you going to appraise that better? And that's kind of been the new frontier of growth mindset work in the last four or five years. Yeah.

Could you tell us more about this? Stress is enhancing mindset. I think it's a really interesting one, especially when it's woven in with the growth mindset.

Yeah. So let me tell you kind of that on its own. And then, and then the, the story of how we had this insight is actually kind of interesting too. But just the basic idea, as you know, people who've heard about Ali Crumb would know and Jeremy Jameson, is that, you know, an experience of your heart racing, your palm sweating, anxiety in your stomach, that is itself a new stressor that then needs to be interpreted and appraised by the person experiencing it. That idea on its own is kind of revolutionary for people. People tend to think that your physiological arousal is this objective experience that is universally bad. Ali Crump calls that a Stress is debilitating belief. And I think that's a good, that's a good label for it. It's this idea that that heart racing palm, sweaty butterflies in your stomach is a sign of your impending failure and doom and it will always interfere with your performance. And the implication therefore is if you were about to do well on whatever you're going to do, then you wouldn't feel that way. Right. Ali Crumb calls us being stressed about being stressed and that I think it's a really common experience right now where people are like, wow, if I was a confident, good person who was about to do well, I wouldn't be sitting here Feeling so stressed about how stressed I am. And it becomes this metacognitive layered loop of just being stuck in your own mind and interpreting your arousal in the most negative possible light. So that stress is debilitating belief. Doesn't people aren't like wrong for having come to that belief because it's everywhere in our culture. One thing I do in my class a lot is I just have people Google image search, stress management memes, and first of all, a surprising number about cats. I don't know why people think cat pictures are like the way to convey complex scientific ideas. Like, it'll be like a cat with like a cookie jar and it'll be like growth mindset. I don't understand what that the point of that is. But you know, page two or three after all the cats, then you get to a lot of things that are. You'll see a person with a battery that's empty and it's like they didn't DE stress or 10 tips for DE stressing. And it'll be like, go on a walk, drink chamomile tea, like, and the underlying implications that if you're stressed, then you need to distract yourself. You need to get rid of that stress. But alternative explanation in the growth mindset world is, well, maybe you have something that's very important to you and you've pushed yourself to embrace some challenge in a really admirable way and that has filled your plate in some way. If I was about to give a presentation to a senior vice president at work and I'm stressed about it, I should not like go take a bubble bath and go for a walk. I should get ready to kick ass the presentation, you know. And so I think what, what Ali Crumb and others have identified is that you can think differently about that stress. You can say, this is actually a sign that I'm preparing to optimize my performance. And maybe the heart racing isn't my body being afraid of damage, maybe it's my body getting more oxygenated blood to my brain and my muscles to like help me do really well. And that's called a stress can be enhancing belief. And what's so interesting I think about this work, and I want to give credit to lots of other people, is that if you're in the stress as debilitating mindset, you don't realize that there's an alternative. You just think that that's the way it is. So it never occurs to you to say, oh, this stress is helping me, right? But once you tell people this, what happens is in our studies, we actually see a change in stress physiology. Changing your mindset about stress in turn changes how your body reacts, which then becomes a different stressor that you can interpret. And so the big insight was pairing these ideas about reframing stress as an inevitable force that's going to destroy your goal pursuit into a resource to be cultivated, and pairing that together with the first step, which was the growth mindset that causes you to like, be open to the challenge in the first place.

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So much of what human beings struggle with, such as learning and performance, our relationship to stress, et cetera, could be resolved if we could overcome the deficit in language. Here's what I'm thinking. We're talking about reframing stress to make it performance enhancing as opposed to performance diminishing. I wonder if we replace the word stress with just like, levels of arousal, but then people hear arousal and they think certain kinds of arousal. So what we want to do is. The way I think about it is like a continuum of readiness. But then that doesn't work because readiness.

Could be readiness for sleep, which is.

A low level of arousal. You don't want to be highly alert, then you're not ready for sleep. Right?

Yeah.

So there's a real deficit of language where I think if there was some other word, I can't come up with it on the fly. Where one's internal level of readiness as opposed to stress. And maybe it looks a lot like autonomic arousal, where heart rate is increased and blood pressure is increased. And people would say, oh, yeah, that's my body being ready for something as opposed to stressed about doing it.

Yeah.

And it's kind of a trivial recasting of stress on the one hand. But in terms of kids learning about life and stress and arousal and these internal signals and adults learning about those and incorporating those into their life goals, I think it would be pretty meaningful. And again, I don't have a solution to this, But I feel like everyone here, stress is bad. You hear? Stress isn't enhancing. Okay, great. But I think it's really about developing a language that lets us interpret what's going on in our bodies and compare that to what we are facing in the moment and just decide, is this well matched or poorly matched to what we need to do?

Is it great for going to sleep?

Is it great for learning? Is it great for catching that train that's soon to leave the station? And I just wonder why the deficit in language.

Yeah, I think it's a profound question because small changes in language perpetuate problematic lay theories because they have the baggage on them. And I think that. Let's think this through. So what the psychophysiologists like to point out is that there's a distinction between the stressor, which is the. Let's call it the internally or externally imposed demand could be something that's thwarting.

Your goals or the exam, the difficult conversation, the. The going to, for some people, going to the doctor or the dentist, the.

Hard conversation with somebody you care about. It could be. Or a physical stressor, like a football game or running a marathon. So anything that imposes demands on your body and mind and therefore will require resources, like metabolic resources to do well, that's a stressor. Okay. Then there's your appraisal of it. That's what you name it, how you interpret it, how you frame it in your mind. And then there's your response. People in general conflate the stressor with the stress response. When they say stress, they're like, I'm really stressed right now. Well, really what you mean is that there were stressors. You appraised them as more than you can handle. And then you had a threat type stress response, which means that your body is preparing for damage and defeat. And that is like an inheritance of how the sympathetic nervous system evolved, which was to keep us alive from threats, mainly physical threats. And so if you have a stressor, some demand praise is something you cannot handle. And then your threat type response, your body's basically assuming you're going to lose whatever physical fight you're in. Like the bear is going to, you know, tear you apart. And then your main goal at that point is to stay alive and like bleed out more slowly. Right? So you end up with more blood kept centrally in the body cavity, less in the extremities. Right. The body releases cortisol because it's an anti inflammatory. It's going to like help with tissue repair 45 minutes down the road. So there's a whole like, cascade of physiological responses that come in part from the mental appraisal that this stressor is more than you can handle. Now, we're very rarely confronted with those kinds of physical stressors these days. It's often social stressors. But a lot of these social stressors are the threat of social death. Right. Like a ninth grader coming into high school getting bullied by all their friends and are excluded because their friends in 8th grade now treat you like you don't exist. Right. The threat of social death is pretty bad, Right. Or you're a new legal associate and you've filed your first brief and all the partners are like, this is garbage. We're not going to send it to the client. Right. Like all of a sudden you're on trial socially in front of these people who could cut you loose at any time. That's a very vibrant social stressor that evokes the same kind of physiological response as we suppose a physical one would. Right. And so we're very careful to distinguish in our studies, a stressor from the stress response. Because often the stressor isn't really a bad thing. Like, you know, getting critical feedback on your first legal brief as a junior associate. Well, that could be awesome. It could be like, oh, great, I Have these awesome partners at my great law firm are now giving me personalized feedback that's useful. Or I'm a ninth grader and I have to make new friends, but I don't know, that's maybe you need new friends. Like that could be a good thing. Right. And same with a test, same with, you know, presentation to senior vice president. Whatever it is. Stressors often in our daily lives are not good or bad. Now of course there's traumatic stressors that, you know, really bad for people.

But.

Then the appraisal is really where there's a lot of leverage. And if you think that the stressor is inevitably bad and that your response to it is always harmful, then it's really hard for you to think that you have the resources to meet the demand that you're facing and you end up in this threat cycle. So in a lot of our research, what we try to do is give people a different story to tell themselves about a stressor and about their response, so that way they end up in a better place. Now, I don't know what that better language is, but I will say I once gave a talk at a middle school and a high school and I used slides that Jeremy Jameson, who's my collaborator, had sent me that had the word arousal on it on every single slide. And that was a big mistake in a room of like middle school kids.

Right.

I strongly recommend different terminology. And I was a middle school teacher. I should have known that you can't say that word in high school.

Right? Yeah. I think that there needs to be a better language. I think if people of all ages understood the autonomic nervous system, this aspect of our nervous system that is on a continuum that leads us to either be, I guess at the extremes, you would say coma would be the deepest state of parasympathetic. Yeah. Non arousal. Then ascending from, you know, very, you know, deeply asleep, lightly asleep, groggy, awake, awaken alert. Awaken alert to the point of being, you know, highly alert. And then you get into kind of low level panic and then all out panic attack. Right. I mean that's kind of the continuum, the autonomic continuum. I feel like if people understood that and they under and they could simply ask, okay, where, where is my body and mind along that continuum and then compare it to whatever it is they face, then we'd have a better sense of whether or not we were in the correct, maybe even optimal state for dealing with challenge or not. And along those lines, what is the optimal internal state for dealing with challenge? That is just outside our ability. Maybe in an exam where I can naturally get 85% of the answers correct, but maybe 15%. I think this is what the machine learning and AI tells us is probably the appropriate level of difficulty for something in order to best learn. I know that's probably.

Yeah. Depends on if you're motivated and if you know a lot of things. But yeah, I mean, I think if you think of the autonomic arousal on just one axis where you start running into problems, we find is that I think you're right, that there's like coma to like some arousal or meaningful arousal. But it's the middle to the end part where there's two different tracks and one track is very high arousal. But you're terrified of the damage and defeat and the humiliation and the failure. And so that's demanding all your attention. That's what we call threat type stress. There's another version that is again very high arousal. But that's like you're stoked and you feel confident you're going to do well. And that's also very high arousal. And if you just look at arousal measures like pre ejection period. Right.

Could you explain pre ejection period?

It's, it's just a. It's a simple measure of just the sympathetic nervous system that we use in all of our studies.

So sympathetic, just to remind folks, is one aspect of the autonomic nervous system has nothing to do with sympathy. Just the more alert means more, more contribution of the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system. Sorry, it's a mouthful. And then less alert would be more contribution of the parasympathetic arm or the autonomic nervous system.

And pep is just a measure that we use in our laboratory studies. And another could have been like skin conductance, which is about the sweat coming out of your skin. And then we use an electrode to figure out how much is there. Those kinds of measures can't distinguish what we call a challenge type state. That's almost like people have heard of flow where you're optimally balanced between important challenge you care about and resources and ability to overcome or at least deal with that challenge on the positive side. And the other high arousal state, which is threat. And that's again, everything's highly engaged, your whole stress system, but you don't think you can deal with it. So the, that becomes really important because here's a very practical example. If you look at devices people are wearing to detect their stress, that might say higher, low arousal, but it can't distinguish between super good positive challenge type stress and really negative threat type stress. One of the examples that psychophysiologists like to say a lot, I got this from Jeremy Jameson, is imagine you're at the top of a double black diamond about to ski down. If you are a good skier, your heart rate isn't probably low, you're probably amped up, you're stoked, you're like, this is awesome. I can't wait to do this. You're fully confident, you're going to make all the turns and have a blast. If you're a terrible skier, you're just imagining the yard sale that's about to happen. You're about to crash, you're going to fall down the mountain, you might die. Also, high arousal, if you're wearing like the regular watch that will just detect sympathetic nervous system activation. It wouldn't be able to tell the difference between really stoked to do something positive and terrified of like crashing and dying. And so we, I like that example because often in social situations or performance situations, you want to be high arousal to perform your best. But you, you want your perception of that demand, the demand that's requiring your body to respond to be matched with an equal belief or what we call appraisal of your resources to meet that demand. So I think my answer to the question is, well, I think it's not so much about what's the optimal amount of demand, right? So that the 85% likelihood of success rate problems or that's titrating demand. I think it's how do you pair a necessary level of demand for whatever goal you have with the perceptions of the resources. And sometimes those resources are your internal, like just confidence, you know, or sometimes it's your ability to reappraise and other times it's material resources. Like, do you have a, it could be in, in real life, do you have a friend that you could turn to? Or it might be, have you been trained in a way where you're able to overcome this? Do you have enough time? So resources can be a big bucket. And that's kind of the magic is because resources are appraised by the mind in our interventions, we can give you a different way of viewing your resources. So that way people feel like they can meet the demand and that pushes them from a threat type response into a more challenged type response.

It makes sense. If I think that the stress, for lack of a better term, and the effort is going to get me where I need to go, eventually I'm going to Be far more willing to invest the effort, especially if I'm motivated. I want the thing that lies at the finish line.

You basically take the demand, which was your intense stress and worry, and turn it into a resource in your own mind. And it turns out that that actually helps people cope at a physiological level.

Got it. Got it. We've been talking a lot about kind of the nuts and bolts of, of growth mindset, and stress is performance enhancing mindset. Maybe we could shift a little bit to the discussion about what you call the mentor mindset. And as we do that, maybe we'll weave back in some of these concepts. Your book 10 to 25 focuses heavily on social appraisal, self appraisal, basically the idea that we want to be liked and we don't want to be disliked. And it's. And it hurts when people say mean things about us or when we hear negative feedback, especially if it's provided publicly. But ultimately, what we do with that information is what determines, you know, whether or not we grow and move forward. Yeah, everyone loves a great report card. Nobody likes a poor report card. So tell us about mentor mindset, and both for folks in the 10 to 25 age range, but also for everybody you know, because it's clear that this impacts us throughout our lifespan.

Yeah. So the, the, the work I write about comes out of a dissertation led by Jeff Cohen at Stanford in the 90s with Claude Steele. And they coined a term that they called the mentor's dilemma. And the mentor's dilemma is the idea that if you're a leader, a manager, a coach, teacher, whatever it is, parent, it's very hard to simultaneously criticize somebody's work and motivate them to overcome and embrace that criticism. And the reason it's a dilemma is because the leader, on the one hand, wants to maintain high standards by being critical, maybe in order to help the person grow. But that could crush the person's motivation. The alternative is withhold your criticism, don't say the truth, hide all the critical feedback, and be nice and super supportive. And that meets your goal of being friendly and caring. But it doesn't help the person grow. So it feels like we have to walk through the world stuck between two bad choices. Either you're a demanding autocratic dictator who doesn't care about human feelings, or you are a low standards wimp pushover that's giving in to the wimpy demands of the weak next generation. And neither of those have uniformly positive connotations. And the classic example in Jeff's work was a student at Stanford who writes a first draft of an essay and then gets really harsh critical feedback from a professor, are they willing to revise their work or do they say, this teacher hates me, they're biased, I dislike them, and leave the comments unaddressed. So the solution to that, in that research on the mentor's dilemma has been to say two things. One is appeal to the very high standard you have for someone's work. But also always accompany that appeal to the high standard with an assurance that if they implement the feedback and use the support, that they're capable of meeting the high standard. I like to think of it as like, if you go to the roller coaster and they say you have to be this tall to ride. Right. So just saying you have to be this tall and you're not see you later isn't reassuring to somebody. Right. But if you can say, here's the standard and I believe you can meet it, but it's going to be hard, that means a lot. It means I'm taking you seriously. It means I believe in your growth. And it's a kind of leadership practice that makes growth mindset be something that comes to life and feel true. It's not just an idea in your head that you're growing. It's like, I live in a social world where people are going to push me to grow and not leave me alone.

Are you familiar with the book of the late. I think the pronunciation is Randy Pausch for the Last Lecture.

No.

He was a computer scientist. He developed a lot of early online portals for kids, in particular, young women, to learn programming. I think it was called Alice. And he is known for what's called the Last Lecture. He was diagnosed with cancer. He eventually passed away, but he talked about in his book lessons that were important for life. And one of the things that he said was the. The thing to worry about is not when your mentors and coaches are pushing you, it's when they stop pushing you that you should really worry, because that means they've basically given up on you. So that always rung in my mind.

Yeah. What I call the person who just is no longer maintaining high standards for you, I call that a protector mindset, that it's almost like it's gonna be too much trouble to see you dealing with stress from being pushed, that I am going to protect you from that stress. Maybe I care about you, but I'm not going to hold you to a high standard. And I see that a lot in coaches. I see it in teachers, I see it in parents. For me, the opposite problematic version is what I call an enforcer mindset. This is like, here's the standard and I'm going to hold you to it, and it's up to you to meet it or not. Right? That's kind of like the college professor that says, look to your left, look to your right. Half of you are going to be gone by the end of this. For me, the solution is to think about taking the best parts of both of those two. What's the high standards, high support. So enforcer. Great, you've got the standards, let's add your support. Protector, you care a lot. Great, let's add the standards. And what Jeff Cohen and Claude Steele found in their initial study is that students were far more likely to view negative criticism as a sign that the teacher cared for them if it was accompanied by a transparent and clear communication of these two elements of high standards and high support. If it was just the critical feedback, the professor could have meant the same positive thing, I'm caring about you. But they didn't make it clear to the person. Then participants were less likely to think that the professor was on their side. And in our work, in some small studies, we showed that even seventh graders, when they get critical feedback on their essays, are about twice as likely to implement the teacher's critical feedback with even a very short invocation of the high standards and the high support. So to get to your question about mentor mindset, at some point, I got worried that our experiment on high standards, high support messages, which we called wise feedback in those studies, would be viewed as, I don't know, like a magic phrase. Like I, my joke, my laugh. This is a lame laugh line, but I'm a professor, so that's the best I can do. My laugh line was always, I just live in fear that Pearson and other textbook companies are going to sell wise feedback posts. Notes say they can magically erase the achievement gap. Right? And I always said that as a joke. And then two things happen. One is a popular author, a guy named Dan Coyle, literally called it magic feedback in his book. Didn't cite us.

But, like, you didn't cite us.

No, Dan, but also, like magic feedback.

Let'S say it so you don't have to not cool. Attribution is important.

It's just not. It's not magic at all. The magic of high standards and high support is not the 18 words. It's, I'm taking you seriously in a moment when you're vulnerable and I have power over you. That is just so deeply human and so powerful. But there's nothing about the magic words. It's the experience of dignity and respect when you are questioning whether you are either worthy of it or going to be given it by authorities.

It's interesting. We had Dr. Becky Kennedy on here to talk about parenting, and she said many important things, but among them was the fact that children, perhaps all people, want to feel real and they want to feel safe. An important concept that I think many people heard and are really internalizing. I know I am, for sure. And this idea of feeling real has to do with not just feeling seen, but that people believe us even if they disagree with us like they. They believe us.

She has another thing that's super profound is the the kind of two things argument that I can both have high expectations for my kids and love my kids. And I think that's a very good version of wise feedback, mentor mindset that as parents it either feels like I can expect a lot of my kids, but then I'm a monster and they're gonna yell at me or I'm gonna be a pushover and then they're gonna be unruly. And I think part of her wisdom is to help explain to parents how you can do both of those things.

And indeed one can, right? I think. But it requires having a kind of dynamic stance or dynamic mindset as the the teacher, the leader, the coach, the parent. I'd like to take a brief break.

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I want to get back to some of the mechanics of how to go about that. But why do you think this stuff is so hard? If we think about, I don't know, kind of a curbside evolutionary theory, meaning I don't have any formal training in evolutionary psychology, you could step back and say, I don't know, maybe we just used to be so busy from morning to sleep that we didn't really have time to do anything except the stuff we needed to complete in order to feed our families and take care of our communities, et cetera. And, and now a number of things are outsourced. And so here we have this notion of strivings, but then again, we went from hunter gatherer cultures to writing War and Peace and everything else, technologies of all kinds. So there must be something in the human brain that causes us to strive. And what we're really talking about here is striving and our relationship with striving.

So if we were to step back.

And just say, okay, what do you think determines whether or not someone feels they can do better? Is it early success? You know, they tried at something? I mean, everyone, most everyone, I assume, who tries to learn to walk, walks, learns to speak, speaks. You know, they're rare exceptions. But, you know, what do you think this whole thing about strivings is about? And when we talk about growth, mindset, stress is enhancing mindset, the mentor mindset. I mean, are we trying to get back to activating systems that are hardwired within us and that have been kind of masked by daily life? Or are we trying to kind of better ourselves and our species through, you know, like really trying to do something that's never been done in human history before. Right. It's a big, It's a big question.

It's a big question. But I mean, I think that, that all I can do is conjecture, you know, as a scientist. But the. I'm often reminded of something I heard from Ron Dahl is a neuroscientist at Berkeley.

Not Ronald, all the children.

Not Roald Dahl. Ron. Ron Dahl. Although Ron is just, just so. There's an awesome guy. It's like just polymath. He can do everything and just so curious and generous. He. What he always says to me is like, look, it's like, David, what do you think the human brain wants to do? Like, I don't know, feel good? He's like, no, wants to feel better. And I think what he was trying to get me to see is that it's the kind of pursuit of some kind of delta.

A change.

Yeah, a change from the state. And I think the argument is that even if you are, if what you thought was your biggest need, if that was satisfied, then there's always like another thing I think is part of the argument. And so. But it's also this idea that if you think of the human brain as trying to learn at all times, like what is it trying to learn? And at least in the animal studies, as you know, often it's like, how do I either feel better or avoid feeling worse in a lot of ways. And I think that as I think about adolescence, that's a period where your theory of how to feel better is dramatically changing because you're no longer fully cared for by adults. Right. All of a sudden your criteria for feeling good about yourself is your social standing, not just in your parents eyes, but in the eyes of the community and the milieu you're a part of. And that comes a lot from your contribution value. If you think in our evolutionary history, like being ostracized and alone is certain death in ancient human cultures. Right. I mean, you can't. The tribes wandering around in the savannah, you're alone. At a minimum, you have no one to watch out for you when you fall asleep. And so. And humans can't sleep in trees because our muscles don't contract when we're asleep, unlike animals. And so you're just exposed on the ground. If you're alone, eventually you're going to die. Die. Right. So the, the fear of moving from parents taking care of your safety all night to now you have to trust peers to take care of you and watch over you. That comes to the forefront of young people's minds, the kind of. The minute puberty strikes. And so what it means to feel better often is that I'm socially valued by the group. There's something they're going to keep me around for some reason now they don't often keep score in an explicit way. I mean, now things are on social media, maybe they're kind of keeping score. But like the rules of how you're doing socially are so implicit, you have to read between the lines. They're inferred. Social hierarchy is very complex for adolescents. And so they Overdo it, thinking through, like, how am I standing? Like, where am I relative to others? Now that process is started by puberty and we know from lots of species work that it then leads to changes in the brain. So the dopaminergic system of course is like driven in part by changes in gonado maturation. Ron likes to talk about these great studies of songbirds of how do they learn the mating calls. And if songbirds don't have testosterone when they are learning the mating calls, they don't do the like over the top obsessive practice. So they don't master them and then they don't mate and they die alone.

Interesting.

Yeah, I'm familiar with that. Yeah, with that literature. There's a great, unfortunately now passed away biologist who was first in the UK and then was up at UC Davis, Peter Marler, who studied the birdsong learning.

Yeah.

And it's, it's amazing work. Yeah, it's amazing work. And it mimics a lot of the, the development of human speech, although not exactly. Like there's this babbling phase.

Yeah.

Where babies and birds experiment with different tones and they're learning to use the pharynx and larynx or you know, in birds it's a slightly different system.

Yeah.

And some birds are seasonal singers, but I wasn't familiar with this result that the testosterone drives a kind of obsessive practice.

Yeah, it's obsessive practice in order to demonstrate status. But really your value, I mean there it's mate value. Right. But I think the same thing is true for lots of things that teenagers. It could be playing guitar, you know, could be gymnastics. I mean, think about how many of their Olympic athletes are like 14, right. And they're waking up at 4 in the morning, they're practicing obsessively. How many like pro social hackers who take down evil foreign governments. Right. Are teenagers. Right. There things that, that take so much practice and so much learning happen at the exact same age as adults are saying these kids are lazy and don't want to work. Right. So I tend to focus on, to get to your question about why do people strive to get better. I think in adolescence you look around in your social milieu and see what counts for status. Not in a superficial way that sometimes happened, but often in a deeply meaningful way. What am I going to bring to the table?

One would hope.

And then.

Well, I remember junior high school being far more superficial, but I'm 48, so I remembered it in the kind of the John Hughes film era where people were very divided in terms of jocks and skateboarders and rockers and nerds. Now it seems a little bit more mishmashed, but I think also people will, in adolescence, I feel like kids find their niche and then try and excel within that niche. As opposed to high school or junior high school being one huge hierarchy. There's kind of these sub hierarchies.

Yeah. Dan McFarlane is a sociologist at Stanford. Did this really interesting study with the ad health data. And it turns out you could characterize the social hierarchies in different high schools by kind of single Pyramid High Schools vs Multi Pyramid High schools. And there's way better adjustment in the multi pyramid high schools because there's many routes to status. The evolutionary psychologist Bruce Ellis talks about having many roles and I like that because in the old model, you know, if there's one pyramid and you're kind of near the top but not at the top, you've got a lot of incentive to destroy reputations, be mean girls type of behavior. Bob Farris, sociologist at Davis, finds that the most bullying in high school is the people that are like the 60th to 85th percentile on popularity. It's like you're near the top, but not all the way at the top.

Yeah. This maps very well to Robert Sapolsky's work on primate troops. Yeah, the alphas are stressed, but the sub alphas are. They have options. And this is true for female and male animals, just as it's true we were talking about testosterone a few minutes ago in obsessive practice. I'll remind people that in women they actually have more adult women have more testosterone than they do estrogen. If you look at a pure nanogram per deciliter comparison. It's just that overall it tends to be on average less than than in men. So the statement about testosterone and obsessive learning, or efforts to learn, I have to imagine, is not restricted to males or females.

Yeah. And I think I understand as a man praising testosterone that I could come across. I always need to remember that the research is very interesting. On T eveline Crone's lab did these great studies where they had kids starting age 10 to like 25 and they had them come in the lab twice and they took testosterone levels, but also had them do a bunch of tasks in the scanner and you can look at nucleus accumbens, prefrontal cortex, et cetera.

Areas associated with reward.

Yeah.

And pursuit, motivation.

Yeah, yeah. And they also had them do risk taking tasks. And what they find is that in both Boys and girls. Testosterone goes up over time, starts a little earlier in girls because gonadarchies one or two years before boys. But the change score from one point to the next was equally predictive of neural reactivity during risk taking tasks for both boys and girls. So although boys end up with higher T throughout adolescence, the increase is equally predictive, which is another way of saying it's just as important for these social learning things in girls. And T, by the way, is just testosterone. Testosterone is a really good proxy. Other hormones are involved too. They're just more complicated, like dhea, you could study as well, but that's part of the same metabolic pathway of cortisol and testosterone. So it's just messier and harder to interpret. So we're not making claims specifically about testosterone. It's just like a really good proxy for where you are in gonadal maturation. And both boys and girls, gonadal maturation really matters for. For this kind of status, social seeking part of your brain.

Yeah. So if I understand correctly, the slope of the line of one's testosterone increase for both boys and girls is predictive of striving. If it's a steep upward line, then that's associated with more striving in a.

Given practice to the extent that neural activation during a social reward task or risk taking task is a proxy for striving. And that's what, that's what a lot of people have argued. Yeah.

Do you think that striving reflects the action of a, you know, kind of a basic neural circuit that then can be applied to other things or lots of different things? The reason I ask is that, you know, the notion of growth mindset is so attractive. It's such a sticky idea because. Or I think because one imagines, okay, if I can get really good at one thing, chess, then I can apply the same kind of relationship to the internal state of stress or arousal or what have you when trying to navigate a new. A new environment of another kind, a physical practice or a relationship challenge or something of that sort that, you know, what we're really talking about here is an algorithm that can be directed at different pursuits as opposed to growth mindset is applied in one context and not another. So what of that? People who are incredibly good at accessing growth mindset in one domain of life, does that mean that they'll be good at accessing growth mindset in another domain of life? What's the carryover or the spillover?

It's a great question. It comes up a lot. The Michigan State Psychologist Jason Mosher studied this and they measured growth mindset about your intelligence, the classic one, your personality, your morality, your social relationships, your emotions, etc. And the question is, is there kind of like one growth mindset that applies in all the different ways, or are there totally narrow mindsets that have nothing to do with each other, or is it something in between? And the finding was that there is an overall association. If you think one trait can change and be developed, you tend to think another trait can be changed and developed. And just empirically, it's hard to separate that from people's general tendency to disagree or agree with items that could be what the common factor is. But it kind of makes sense. However, there's also very domain specific mindsets. So there are people who think, yeah, I can get smarter, but I can't change my shyness, and other people who think my relationships are never going to get better, but I can learn to play the cello and vice versa. And when you want to predict behavior, turns out that the closer you are to that domain, the better the prediction is going to be. So if I want to know if you're going to quit playing the cello or not, I'm going to ask you your cello mindset, that's going to do way better than in general, can human qualities change? But if I'm going to intervene, at what level should the intervention happen if I only change your cello mindset? Well, you're right. Like, what if cello isn't your thing in life now? Are you going to be fixed mindset for your relationships in school? And did I not really help you? So the kind of the empirical answer currently is if it's a domain that someone could be really defensive about, it's better to be a little vaguer about it. Classic example is Iran Halperin's work on the Israel Palestine conflict, which is obviously a big issue right now. Their science paper in 2011 changed mindsets about group conflict in general. Can an ethnic group or a national group ever change? They didn't go to people in Israel and say, Palestinians can change because they're like, no, they can't, that's not, it's not possible. But if they said, you know, sometimes leaders change, and when leaders change, the group's priorities change and they become more amenable to negotiation. And when that happens, things can change. If that was done at a more general level, then both Israelis and Palestinians were more open to a peace process. So I think if it's something you're very defensive about, I, I tend to Think back up and do the more abstract mindset. Another example is I remember I was in graduate school at Stanford and One of my RAs was so excited about our work and he went to a party and talked about it. It's like that very Stanford thing to do is talk about research at a party. And he's like, oh yeah, math ability can change. You don't have to be dumb at math forever. And the person he talked to was so offended, she was like, are you telling me I could have done better in high school math? And I just didn't try hard enough and my life could be different. I could be an engineer right now. Like, I like my life. Why are you telling it was it went down this road of like, how dare you tell me it could have been different? And who knows, maybe he had bad delivery and had 14 margaritas and that's who knows what happened. But I think the idea is like, if someone's got a reason to think about that fixed mindset as comforting in some way, that they don't have to feel bad about something that could have been different, it's probably not smart to go after that in a very specific way. But if someone's not defensive, generally the closer to the domain the better because they're going to see the application. Otherwise they have to use it by analogy. And we know analogic reasoning is tough because it's hit or miss.

We love stories of people that have come from a place of being really back on their heels or even just dissolved into a puddle of their own tears too, doing well again, maybe even soaring again. It's sort of the common thing is that this is the classic American story, although it's true of people all over the world, I imagine.

Right. It's not always true in America either. But yeah, right.

Some people love the story. Yeah.

Some people crash and burn.

But it seems like everybody loves a comeback story.

Right?

I don't know something about that. The hero's journey, the hero of A Thousand Faces. Is that Joseph Campbell? Yeah. And it's written into so many movies and books and real life stories. I can't help but superimpose today's discussion onto something like that, right. That you know, that life is a series of efforts to apply growth mindset from learning how to walk. Right. Presumably is part of that. I don't know any child that just stands up and walks early on to the things that we really think we can perform well at to finding ourselves really back on our heels. And so are there any data or theories even that Point to the use of growth mindset and stress as enhancing mindset in coming from a real place of deficit. Not just from trying to do better and learn new things, but from a real place of deficit, a real place of challenge. I think it's important for our audience to hear because I think a number of people do feel back on their heels in one or more domains of life.

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think that the data suggests that growth mindset becomes most relevant to your next behavior the more challenge you face. And so for a long time what that meant is if you maybe were a low achieving student and we're going to evaluate growth mindset by looking at your grades, you should see bigger gains for low achieving students compared to high achieving students. Part of that could be an artifact. If we already have straight A's, we can't give you more A's. It's impossible. Right? But in general, psychological treatments like a growth mindset tend to work better for people who counterfactually wouldn't have them and could plausibly benefit from them. Where the story becomes more interesting is that often your kind of own individual difficulties are associated with your environment. And the environment is really what allows you to apply your growth mindset over time. So it might make you right now need a growth mindset more, but it might make it harder for you to act on it. And so for people who like complex three way interactions, the idea is that a treatment for growth mindset should work best for individuals who face the most challenges but are in the most supportive environments. One is like baseline, why do you need it? And the other is over time, what's going to help you keep using it. To be very concrete about this, in one paper we published in 2019, the National Study of Learning Mindsets, it was published in Nature. We evaluated growth mindset in this large national sample and the question wasn't does it work on average? The question was, where does it work and for whom? Because there were lots of replications already and sometimes people tried it and like, well, it didn't work here. Okay, well that's a puzzle. How do we figure that out? And the finding was low achieving students in high schools that had more supportive classroom culture where you got the long run effects. And in the four year results, it's low achieving students in high schools that offered more advanced courses. So if you're a low achieving student eager with mindset, it's like, great, give me pre calculus. Oh, we don't offer that here. Right. Or it's a toxic environment in some way. Their teachers are untrained, they're first year teachers, there's lots of poverty in the school. If you don't have the structure to support the striving, you don't get the long run effects. Especially if the effects you're looking at are increases in equality of opportunity. So for me, the message is like, think about growth mindset and psychological interventions as one tool in a toolkit to help people achieve their goals. But we can't forget about the entire field of sociology. That tells us a lot about the allocation of resources through which people can even be afforded the chance to pursue their goals. And so what I like about that finding, which by the way came from a collaboration with sociologists who thought you psychologists are absurd. They're like, you think your little mindset is gonna change inequality? You're gonna make an argument to 15 year olds and that's your plan for improving the American economy. That's absurd. I was like, well, I don't know, you could do something. And psychologists are skeptical of sociologists. They're like, look, how often do we have huge changes in law and policy, but people don't take advantage of the resources that are available to them. Let's change the behavior so they take advantage. We kind of came together and said, what does it look like to consider both the structure and the internal psychology? And I think this was a very important point because people tend to choose one or the other. Either we're going to lobby for new laws to reallocate resources, or we're going to optimize the psychology of the individual. And I think our perspective is to find ways to bring those two together and kind of do both. And ultimately it's not a deficit based perspective of you have a deficit. And we're fixing that. Growth mindset is more like, well, it's an asset based perspective. What I mean by that is we're not giving someone motivation in growth mindset. We're presuming people already kind of want to do well. They want to impress others, they want to be meaningful, they want to contribute. But there's a barrier. The barrier is when you strive and then inevitably struggle. If you're pushing yourself beyond your abilities, people make you feel dumb for that struggle. So we are, we're trying to remove that cultural and social barrier that's preventing people from their natural goal pursuit. And that comes deeply from Carol Dweck's original work at the intersection of developmental and social psychology. The basic claim in developmental psychology is the human being is an active learner who's trying to figure out the world. This is classic Alison Kopnick, you know, Susan Gelman. Infants are meaning makers trying to interpret the world and wanting to do well. And eventually they're socialized into beliefs that prevent them from acting on that basic neural desire to learn, grow, develop, et cetera and growth. Mindset is really, it's not trying to be a magic pill to give an unmotivated, disaffected kid a shot in the arm of adrenaline so they go out and learn. No, it presumes agency and love of learning and kind of like Dr. Becky said, presumes the goodness in kids and tries to remove whatever kind of garbage beliefs they've learned from social context. And then our long term studies then show how once you do that, if they're also in a context where you can act on that level of learning, then you can see long run effects that are far more than what a lot of people have said you could get even a disadvantaged context.

It's so interesting because what we're talking about here is psychological theory playing out in the real world, but also deep notions of the human spirit. Like we are a species that seems to organize our experience in terms of stories of ourselves and others, but that when it comes to things like strivings and learning, are really always in a constant state of either being more, to borrow the words of a friend of mine, either back on our heels, flat footed or forward center of mass. Right? And what we're talking about today is being forward center of mass, at least in certain areas of life. I mean, the fact that the reward systems of the brain, you mentioned them earlier, these mesolimbic reward pathways that basically deploy dopamine and other things, of course, are so associated with striving and achieving, striving and achieving, and presumably underlie much if not all of our human evolution. Assuming we're still evolving lately, as sometimes I wonder. But some would argue we're devolving. But I would argue we're still evolving, especially with this new burst in AI. It's all about math nowadays, folks. A few years ago it was all about neuroscience and neuroscience is still really important and the two share. But it's all about math lately. So I like to just think of the human animal as so different than the other animals of the planet. Like we're the curators of the planet. The house cats might be striving, but they're clearly not doing as well as we are in terms of managing the way the world goes. So what do you think that this is like a basic algorithm within human beings to look at ourselves, look at the environment, see challenges, overcome challenges, develop technologies? It's just kind of like a. It's like the same way my bulldog used to like to gnaw on things. You know, you like to chew and pull. We just want to learn and grow. Do you think it's inherent to who we are as a species? Maybe even what sets our species apart from all the others?

I mean, that's a profound question. I think that's a good one to debate. What I've been really taken by recently is Carol Dweck's secret life as a neuroscientist. She has this great psych review paper that contradicts a lot of received wisdom about prefrontal planning regions of the brain and the kind of amygdala in the hippocampus, the, you know, the affective regions and the memory creation regions. And the. The classic argument, and going back to Plato and the Phaedrus, right, is that the rational acting part of the brain plans out what it wants, makes all these calculations, and then has to tame the emotional part in order to make those goals into a reality. And so the emotion, you know, the amygdala, the mesolimbic, that's this unruly horse that the charioteer has to harness. You know, and I think that Carol argued, and I think other people have argued too. I've. I've seen Adriana Galvan and Ron Dahl and others argue this, that the affective regions are often the teacher and the prefrontal is the student. And that makes sense if you think about how humans are goal directed. Think about how a kid learns to walk. They don't do that for theoretical reasons. They don't just, like, look at people walking and be like, I want to learn how to do that. I have four kids. It's usually because there's a toy at the other side of the room that they really, really want, that I don't want them to have. And the only way for them to go get it, because I won't get it for them, is for them to learn how to walk. So the motor learning is the effect of the desire in the goal pursuit. And what Carol argued is that Feodor's head is totally wrong. It's not that the prefrontal charioteer is taming the emotional. It's really that the affective part is training the prefrontal to be better at pursuing the goals that matter in the social milieu. That you have. And a lot of people like Adriana Galvan and Jen Pfeiffer and Nim Tottenham in the adolescent space have shown this. And I don't understand all the details fully, but the argument that I've heard is that once the scanning studies were able to switch from FMRI focused on simple activation to studies looking at connectivity where you could get temporal ordering, then you could start seeing actually that especially in adolescence, it's the affective regions are training or teaching or telling the prefrontal regions what to do. So I guess that's a long way of answering the question of I think goal pursuit is fundamental to human nature. And I think that the brain and our adaptation is designed to help us learn how to be a lot better at pursuing whatever goals will help us survive in our environment. And the brain has to be adaptive to that environmental input because the environment's always changing. If it had only one way of pursuing its goals, then we would never survive. So it has to be the case that the planning, rational, observing part of the brain is actually responsive to what works in your context for goal pursuit. So again, I'm summarizing other people's work here, but that's how I see it.

Yeah, I completely agree that emotions drive the more, let's call it tactical circuitry of the prefrontal cortex. Of course we should be fair to the neuroscience. The prefrontal cortex is pretty part of the limbic system. People often think because it's in the cortex, it's higher order. And that's simply not true. But, well, if we both agree, and it sounds like we do, that emotions drive tactical decisions that drive action and learning, maybe we could talk about the two major types of emotions that one could imagine. One is I really want the toy, I really want the piece of food. I really need something for survival or for well being. And so I'm going to be motivated and then the prefrontal cortex will work out the strategies and balance out the relationship to stress, et cetera, and remind ourselves that stress can be performance enhancing and eventually we get the thing or the skill or the whatever the other would be. Fear, Fear of social shame, fear of staying in a place that's not good for us financially, emotionally, socially, et cetera. Is there any work that identifies whether or not the core emotion driving motivation is relevant and is there a role for growth mindset there?

That's interesting.

I guess put simply, take it down out of the ivory tower a little bit, which is what we're doing here anyway. You can do things out of love, you can do things out of fear. You do for both reasons, too. You do things to please yourself, you can do things to please others, you can do things to avoid others being disappointed in you, you being disappointed in yourself. And presumably it's both. Yeah, but is there any. I'm dying for you to tell me that when we do things out of love, we learn faster, but maybe that's not the case.

Well, I don't know. I mean. So two thoughts. One is just, you know, honoring. Danny Kahneman, who just passed away. His work with Amos Tversky, took on a version of this question in prospect theory. And it's the idea of does the fear of a loss motivate us more than the prospect of a gain? And their argument is that both can be motivating as well as the possibility of a loss, but that losses loom larger, that people are more willing to take a risky gamble to prevent a loss than they are to get numerically equal, like a mathematically equal gain. And so a lot of people have used that information in various ways. And I think that that has led people to conclude that the prospect of a gain doesn't mean anything. But that really wasn't ever the point in prospect theory. It's just that it's a little more powerful to avoid, to be afraid of a loss. I don't see a problem with thinking like, yeah, losses are a little worse. You know, if I already had $1,000 and you took it away feels a little worse than the chance to win 1000, I didn't win. Mathematically, it's the same delta, but, but, but I think that the way that behavioral economic work gets applied is to appeal to people's kind of basis and most, you know, fearful responses to things. And if you think about what drives a lot of excellence in moral exemplars, too, it's this chance to feel like you've made a big contribution to others. And I don't think people are afraid that they didn't help as many people as they could have. And maybe that drives some people, but I think just the, the affective forecasting of one day I'll feel good because of the meaningful work I did for others. That was high integrity when no one else would have seen it. I think that's really motivating for a lot of people, and I think we underappreciate that and therefore we appeal to very narrow self interest. And my favorite theorist on this is Dale Miller, is at the Stanford Business School, and he calls it the norm of self interest that if you look around it looks like everyone's behaving for only very narrow, short term self interested reasons. And because you think that's the norm, then you yourself kind of respond to those incentives and then you then in turn create that norm even more that other people see. But it's not a state of affairs that anybody really likes. Everybody kinds of prefers a pro social world where people are helping others. But if you think that's just a really weird thing to do and not normal normal, then people conform to the wrong norm. So in my work what I try to emphasize is not that we're not afraid of losses and the narrow short term gain that we're avoiding or the short term loss we're avoiding, but I really do think that people are capable of far more beautiful contributions to the world when we assume that that's what they want and we create opportunities for them to do that. And I've seen that so much. If you look at some of the best managers, right, it's not just if you screw up, you're going to lose your bonus. That's not what the best managers in the world are doing. They're like, let's do something no one's ever done before. Let me support you to do it and then let me make sure that you look awesome in front of all the senior vice presidents because you did that. That's what the best managers do. And coaches too. This for my book, I interviewed the NBA's best shooting coach. This basketball player named Shane Battier, who played college and pro basketball, told me about him. And I interviewed Chip England is his name and he was at the San Antonio spurs, which they had a 17 year run of being a perennial contender for the NBA championships. It constantly drafted players who were talented but had a bad jump shot. So Kawhi Leonard is an example where it fell late in the first round because people thought couldn't shoot. Tony Parker is another example. When Tony Parker used to shoot, Greg Popovich would say that's a turnover every time. Chip England is the a great shooting coach, worked with them. There's lots of. Bill Barnwell had a great story about him, called him the shot doctor. And I interviewed Chip and I was like, Chip, how do you sell the vision to these players who are 18 to 21 are newfound millionaires. Everyone's saying you're the best, you're a first rounder. And they don't want to change their shot because if they do, they could mess it up, make it worse. Like a golfer superstitious about their shot. And he's like, you know, the number one thing I have to do is build trust because I can't critique a player's shot and make them change it if they think they're going to sacrifice more. So he's like, Dave, the first thing you have to do is sell your vision. I was like, well, what's your vision? He's like, he doesn't say if you don't change your shot, you are going to lose millions of dollars and be out of the league. So he doesn't motivate with a fear of loss. He says the average time in the league is two and a half years. Right. If you develop a great reliable jump shot where even as your athletic talents decline, you're still reliable. You're talking about a 10 year career. And then you're not just helping you, you're not just helping your family, you're helping your family's family. So even in the like money obsessed, cutthroat world of professional sports, the single best coach working with the top players appeals to the prospect of what you could do for others, not the fear of loss. And to me that's really telling. Like if it worked to just motivate with the fear of loss, then that's what he would do because they would do whatever's effective. It's like at some level an efficient market. But that's not what Chip England does. And I think the same is true for a lot of other great mentors and leaders.

So if I understand correctly, when we find ourselves. Back on our heels or flat footed, we want to focus on the prospect of what we can do for others. Like ultimately that's going to be the best.

Or the world.

Yeah, or the world. Yeah, I guess, yeah. Pick your pick. Your scope of image could be for.

Art, for intellectual history. It's a classic Viktor Frankl argument of man's search for meaning. Right as Viktor Frankl's leaving the concentration camps, what helps him survive? And it's the debt that he owes to the future, work that he wants to write, to share with the world. And it's not the fear of death, it's the meaning of the work he could do for the world if he survives.

Yeah, I think I'd like to hover on this for a minute or two because I think it's really important to realize we're getting more philosophical than operational.

But we have data on this.

Yeah, I'd love to hear it. Those are one of the things I'm really enjoying about this conversation, the moment I think it's going to be abstract or that you got it all there in that brain. Yeah, let's talk about this. That when we feel back on our heels or we're flat footed, meaning we're not doing well, maybe hard things have happened. Focusing on the prospect of what we can do for others, not just trying to avoid loss or further shame or just diminishment is going to be the best thing. So what are the data on this?

Yeah, so. Well, first just look at correlational studies in these global surveys of happiness and almost anyone you can think of. The best predictor of life satisfaction and well being is going to be the meaning of your life. In particular, the feeling like you're connected to others, you've contributed to others, that.

Your life mattered, that your life, there.

Was something of value in your life to others or to the world. Right. And so the just anecdotally, the advice I always give to people like going through depression or the risk of that is to focus on what you can do for others or what you have done. Right. So that, that's just correlationally. Now experimentally, what we did in some work, this started with my first advisor at Stanford, Bill Damon, who studies purpose in life is we asked the question of when you're going through something tedious, boring, frustrating, what motivates you to keep going? There are many possible answers to that, but we compared two different ones. One is the potential benefit you get out of that striving. So for a student in school, it's like the money you would get one day from working hard and doing well. An alternative though is what you could do with the knowledge that you gained by going through the hard learning. How could you contribute to others, make a difference, et cetera, with the knowledge and skills. We call that our purpose condition. A couple things make that different from the standard narrative, but I think ultimately intuitive one is the standard narrative is if you try hard in school or at work or whatever it is and suffer now, then one day there will be a kind of financial compensation. So you're suffering now in a way that will bring material reward in the future. The brain's not really designed to make that kind of calculation, right. It's like, well, how certain is the reward in the future, how far in the future to the future and how bad is their punishment right now? So there's all kinds of affective trade offs that are hard for anyone are especially hard for 13 year olds. So what a lot of school comes down to is an adult saying you need to suffer through 40 minutes per day of factoring trinomials because I said so. And I said it's good for your long term Future. So that one day in your 30s you can barely afford a mortgage. Right. This is not a compelling argument for most of America's youth. My opinion, the purpose condition though, is not about the exchange value of credential some long time in the future. It's more like right now you're getting a hard and kind of admirable skill that not everyone's going to get and you're going to then be prepared when the moment arises to do something of significance for others. Now that also is uncertain and in the future. But for things that are contributions, you kind of get to feel like a good person right now. The analogy I often use is if I'm going to make lunch for the homeless, I don't have to wait until they actually eat the food to feel like a good person. I feel like a good person when I'm putting it in the bag or even when I'm driving to the homeless shelter. I think our idea was you can move up the reward by making it a social reward right now rather than a material reward years into the future.

Because then the pursuit itself becomes the.

Reward right, right now. My and actually the more frustrating it is right now, the more I'm being a good person because it means it was a hard skill to acquire that'll prepare me to make a difference later. And so we we framed super tedious math. This is with Angela Duckworth and Sydney DeMello and Dave Panescu and others as Marlon Henderson, as a chance to gain a skill that helps you contribute versus a chance to learn how to get an A and make money in the future versus A control. And what we found was that the contribute to others version led to deeper learning, greater persistence, higher grades over time. And in one of our experiments, we gave them a choice of either doing super boring math or goofing off on the Internet. And we were secretly tracking what the websites they were going to. And we found that teenagers did more very boring math and watched fewer videos and played less Tetris when they were given this purpose message before the task. It's in our 2014 paper. And what I always think about, that's the kind of paper I wanted to go to graduate school to work on. But I think about it because if you think about Dale Miller's norm of self interest, nobody thinks to do the purpose argument. They're like, of course teenagers are shortsighted and Think about material rewards and all they want to do is either look cool or make money or whatever. But no, like in our studies, if you appealed to the chance to make a contribution right now, then they did the behaviors that adults want them to do. They didn't goof off online and instead chose boring math. And adults think the only way you could ever get that is by imposing our will and was this kind of authoritarian set of rules. But if you instead just appeal to the love of learning for the sake of others, then they're willing to kind of go through the suffering. And in the paper we cite Viktor Frankl, where, you know, the person who knows the why for their existence is able to bear any how. And I think about that a lot that we underestimate how willing young people are really anyone is to bear through things that are hard and difficult if they have a strong why.

I think this is one of the most important concepts, frankly ever discussed on this podcast. If I'm really honest, I think that we've parsed dopamine circuits and we've talked about motivation and reward, we've talked a little bit about growth mindset, and in a solo episode, but never before have I really understood the why component, the meaning component. And I love how it marries so much of what we hear in kind of like pop culture psychology with real data. Like, we're finally, thanks to you being here, meaning we're finally in the guts of it because we hear this like, oh, it feels so good to make a contribution.

But you know, people are also self.

Interested, people want money. Then people say, well past a certain amount of money, you don't get any happier. And I would argue that it's true money can't buy happiness, but it can definitely buffer stress. Not all forms of stress. And money itself can get people into more stress. But anyone that says past blank number of dollars, there's no incremental increase in happiness. I just don't see how that could be given inflation that treats humans like linear functions.

I think that's, that's the simplification, right?

If higher purpose is best defined as making a meaningful contribution to the world, to a community. Or maybe at the scale of the world, maybe at the scale of a family or what have you, a classroom. And the thing that you said before that seems so important is that the moment that you attach your goal to something that's for others, it makes the effort involved its own form of reward. Yeah, that to me is so important.

So, so important.

I kind of want to highlight bold underline and, you know, put a big exclamation mark after it because that's so different than, like, oh, you know, I want to be the top player on the team.

Yeah.

Which means that every bit of effort you put in, you're like, thinking, I'm gonna. I'm gonna be the best. I'm gonna be the best. I'm gonna be the best. But. And one perhaps can then feel that progress when one is making it and feel like they're ascending that staircase. But something additional must come about when we're invoking this feeling of contribution. And I think this is central to our evolution as a species because we didn't develop in isolation.

Yeah. I mean, we had to show our value to the group or else they would get rid of us. Right. I mean, that's what it meant to go from being a child to being an adult. And the think about what it just take basketball or whatever. Right. If I'm trying super, super hard and it feels impossible to me and I'm not getting better and it's purely for me, then I feel like a failure. It feels like my goals are not being met and they never will be met. Right. The effort feels terrible because it means something really bad about me. Right? Now imagine you're putting an effort for others. The harder it is, the more awesome it is because it's more noble. Right. You've done something that's super impressive and sacrificed your own happiness for others. Right. The social status of trying hard and failing for yourself is net negative because it's about shame, humiliation. I'm not good enough. The status of trying hard and failing and keeping going for others is like super net positive. Right. And I think that's what people fail to appreciate is especially someone young or even just early in a career. Right. Starting out. If you can reframe difficulty and failure as part of the process of doing something with high integrity for others, like, it changes the meaning of effort totally. And once you have a different meaning, then something that previously felt bad can instead be motivating. Whether it's the stress, like in our stress enhancing work, or the boredom you're undergoing. It's doing something super tedious or anything like that. I remember when I was at Stanford as a graduate student, I worked in the lab of John Krosnick, who is famously detail oriented. Whenever we want to go really deep into something and go beyond what any other scientist would do, our joke name for that is giving it the full Krosnick. Because. And he's in communications, political science. And there was one project I was supervising where this will sound ridiculous, but it was. What is the best adjective to use in a survey item? So say you want to go like how hungry are you? Not at all.