Fixed or Growth Mindset?
Measured in two places, because people are rarely the same in both
The idea is simple enough to have travelled everywhere: some people treat ability as something you are given and others treat it as something you build. What usually gets left out is that the belief is not one belief. Most people hold quite different views about whether skill can change and whether character can change, and the second one shapes how you treat other people rather than how you treat yourself.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about what you actually believe, not about what you would say in a job interview.
What it measures
Two beliefs. Mindset about ability is whether you think skill and intelligence can be substantially developed. Mindset about people is whether you think character can. High means the growth end on both. They are related but not the same, and the combination is more informative than either.
Based on: Implicit theories of ability and of personality (Dweck), with the replication record stated
Possible results
About ability
Whether skill and intelligence can be built.
About people
Whether character can change.
Common questions
So is growth mindset useless?
No - it is small, which is a different thing and gets reported as the same thing. A small average effect can still be worth having, particularly since the 2019 national experiment found the benefit concentrated in students who were struggling, where a few percentage points matter. What is not supported is the strong version: that a belief change is a substitute for teaching, resources or practice. The trouble came from selling a modest finding as a transformation.
Why are my two scores different?
Because they are different beliefs and most people have never had to reconcile them. The common pattern is growth about skills and fixed about character - you believe you could learn to code and you also believe your brother-in-law will always be like that. It is worth noticing because the second belief is the one that does the most damage to relationships, and it is much less examined than the first.
Can I change my mindset?
The belief itself shifts fairly easily - a short reading exercise moves it, which is exactly why the intervention studies are easy to run. Whether the shifted belief then changes what you do is the part that turned out to be weak. If you want the behaviour that growth mindset is supposed to produce, it is more reliable to go at it directly: ask for feedback on something specific this week, and stay with one difficult task past the point where you would normally conclude you are not suited to it.
Sources
- Dweck, C. S. (2000). Self-theories: Their role in motivation, personality, and development. Psychology Press.
- Sisk, V. F., Burgoyne, A. P., Sun, J., Butler, J. L., & Macnamara, B. N. (2018). To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses. Psychological Science.
- Yeager, D. S., Hanselman, P., Walton, G. M., Murray, J. S., Crosnoe, R., Muller, C., et al. (2019). A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement. Nature.
An honest note The replication record here is worth knowing in some detail, because this idea has been oversold harder than almost any other in psychology. Two meta-analyses in 2018, covering 273 studies and over 365,000 students for the correlational part, found that mindset relates only weakly to achievement, and that interventions designed to shift it produced an average effect of about d equals point zero eight - enough to move a typical student from the fiftieth to the fifty-third percentile. A large pre-registered national experiment in 2019 then found a real but small effect concentrated in lower-achieving students, and a 2023 synthesis reached the same modest place while noting substantial publication bias in the literature. So: the distinction is real and worth knowing about yourself. The claim that adopting a growth mindset transforms outcomes is not supported, and the version sold in schools and corporate training is considerably larger than the evidence.
Try one of these next
What Is Your Moral Compass Made Of?
The five things people mean by wrong, and which ones you actually feel
How Utilitarian Is Your Moral Thinking?
Harming one to save many, and caring about strangers as much as friends, are not the same question
How Easily Do You Justify Bending the Rules?
The quiet reasoning that lets decent people do things they would normally condemn