Can intelligence grow? What we know today about the "growth mindset"

"I'm not a maths person." "I have no ear for languages." Many of us carry sentences like these about ourselves, often since school. The question that has intrigued psychologists for decades is this: does the belief itself affect what we achieve?

Two ways of seeing ability

The American psychologist Carol Dweck distinguished two views people hold about their abilities. In the first, intelligence and talent are fixed amounts: you either have them or you don't. In the second, they develop through work, good strategies and help from others. Dweck called them a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.

The idea makes sense. If you believe a mistake shows your limit, you avoid challenges. If you believe mistakes are part of learning, you accept them more easily. Her book Mindset (2006) became very well known, and schools in many countries launched programmes to "teach" a growth mindset.

What the evidence showed

Over the years, researchers began to measure the effect on a large scale. In 2018 a team led by Victoria Sisk published two meta-analyses. The first, covering more than 365,000 students, found that the link between mindset and school results exists but is weak. The second, on programmes designed to change mindset, found a very small average effect. The effect was clearer among students from low-income families.

A year later, David Yeager and colleagues published in Nature an experiment with a nationally representative sample of US secondary school students. An online programme lasting less than an hour slightly improved the grades of lower-achieving students and increased enrolment in advanced mathematics. But the effect depended on the setting: it was clearer where the culture of the classroom also supported effort.

A growth mindset is not a magic key. It is a seed that grows only where the soil allows.

What we can take from it

The evidence suggests we should treat the growth mindset not as a slogan but as something that shows up in concrete actions:

• Add the word "yet". "I don't know this" becomes "I don't know this yet". The change is small, but it turns a verdict into a state.
• Praise the strategy, not the talent. "I liked how you broke the problem into steps" helps more than "you're so clever".
• Look for new strategies when you are stuck. The same effort, repeated without change, is not growth. Growth comes from well-directed effort and from the help of others.
• Build an environment that allows mistakes. At home, in class or at work, people risk learning only when mistakes are not shamed.

The limits

Believing you can grow does not erase real differences between people, nor the conditions they live in: poverty, lack of time, good or poor teachers. When the growth mindset is used to tell people "if you didn't succeed, you didn't try hard enough", it turns into an accusation.

Perhaps the most honest lesson of this scientific debate is this: our beliefs about ourselves matter, but they are only part of the story. The rest is written with work, method and help.