PSYC1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Carol Dweck, Motivation, Mindset
19 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Motivation, achievement and how to talk to kids
Praise, motivation and achievement in school
Misconceptions about self-esteem
• Since 1969 The Psychology of Self-Esteem
• Massive social movement emphasised children's self-esteem as the central factor in
determining a successful childhood, then life
• People thought if children have high self-esteem -> try hard, achieve, have friends
• Focus on cultivating high self-esteem
• Hoeer….teenagers ith high self-esteem often drink and do drugs, violence can be
caused by feelings of narcissistic self-entitlement
• Constant indiscriminate praise -> more fragile self-esteem, instead of sense of earned
secure self-esteem
• Cross-generational research showed US uni students born >1982, are more concerned
with self-image and status
Rewarding and praising children
• Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation
o Intrinsic - working because one likes it
o Extrinsic - working to achieve reward
• Immediate reward can shift an intrinsic to extrinsic motivation
• What if not immediately rewarded in future? -> lose all motivation
• Motivation and goals
o Intrinsic motivation -> mastery goals (desire to master skill for its own sake)
o Extrinsic motivation -> performance goals (desire to perform for other's sake),
relative to peers, how well you are evaluated
o Students with mastery goals shown to perform better
Person praise - Carol Dweck
Dangers of "person praise"
Benefits of "person praise"
• e.g. "You're so smart"
• Encourages "entity mindset" - suggests
intelligence is fixed, innate, little effort
required for good grades
• Associated with performance goals, want
to avoid looking dumb
• Leads to lack of effort, inability to cope
with failure
• "You did well because you
worked so hard"
• Encourages growth mindset -
intelligence is a skill achieved
with hard work
• Associated with mastery goals,
children want to get better
• Increased effort in face of
failure
• Yr 5 students solved puzzles
• Half give process praise and half given person praise
• Children given option of second harder set of puzzles or another easy set of puzzles
o Most person-praise kids took easy puzzles -> didn't want to be embarrassed
o Most process-praise kids took hard puzzles -> wanted to learn
• Next set was very hard. All children failed
o Person praise = stressed, strained, sad
o Process praise = enjoyed process, want to improve
• Results
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