How Feedback Affects Performance - Andrew Huberman - Growth Mindset

[Music] welcome to another episode of after skool I'm Andrew huberman professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine and the host of The huberman Lab podcast growth mindset is the idea that we can get better at things that is that our abilities are not fixed but rather that our abilities are malleable and the beauty of growth mindset is that it forces es us to step back and ask ourselves some simple questions these are questions that you could ask yourself right now and in fact I highly recommend you do you could ask yourself for

instance what have I been told I'm really good at you should also ask yourself what have I been told I'm really poor at that I'm just not good at what have I told myself I'm really good at and what have I told myself I'm really bad at and then a second set of questions is what am I good at and why did it come naturally to me did I apply myself for many years meaning did I apply a lot of effort to learning that thing or perhaps both right and then it's also important to ask

yourself why am I not good at other things is it simply because you've never applied yourself at those things or is it because you tried and had an early failure or perhaps you tried and tried and tried for many years and you continued to fail at that thing or you just didn't reach a level of proficiency that made you want to pursue it further in asking yourselves those questions you are asking yourself not just what you're good at and bad at and why you should also be thinking about where the messages of being good at

something or being bad at something arrived from did they arrive from outside you meaning from your parents from your coaches from your teachers or was it the case that despite a lot of positive feedback you just sort of decided you weren't good at something or conversely was it the case that despite a lot of negative feedback that you would never be good at something or that you weren't good at something that you continue to persist because there's certainly people like that the more negative feedback they get the more they dig their heels in to prove

themselves as capable of becoming good at something so I do recommend as we March forward in this conversation you think about those questions what am I good at what am I bad at why am I good at those things why am I bad at those things and ask yourself to what extent your labels that is your identity is attached to the things that you are good at or bad at and the reason I'd like you to ask yourself those questions is that next we're going to talk about research from Dr Carol D's laboratory that was

really the seed of the entire field of growth mindset it relates to a specific set of experiments that really show that the specific feedback we get meaning whether or not we get feedback that is attached to our identity like a label like smart or great athlete or talented sends us down a very different path of performance in the short and long run as compared to whether or not we receive feedback that's based on effort meaning you tried really hard or you really seem to apply yourself under conditions where you're getting the right answer over time

because you simply refuse to quit those are two very Divergent sets of feedback and as you'll learn in a moment the sorts of feedback that we get especially early in life or early in an Endeavor so this doesn't just apply to young kids this applies to adults too who are taking on a new skill or are trying to expand on an existing skill those two Divergent forms of feedback get integrated into our core beliefs about what we think is possible for us in a given Endeavor and the great news is we can also modify those

core beliefs simply by changing the feedback that we give ourselves the research paper I'd like to discuss briefly that beautifully embodies the runway that led to the discovery of growth mindset is a paper from Dr Carol dck as well as her colleague Claudia Mueller and the title of the paper essentially says it all the title is praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance right that should be surprising that praise for intelligence can undermine motivation and performance I would have thought and I think many people probably believe that if you tell a child or

an adult that they're really good at something and you're genuine about that feedback meaning they're performing well and you say great you're doing really well you're so smart you're so talented that their performance would continue to improve that it would bolster their motivation to engage in that activity which hopefully they enjoy that it would serve to encourage them right the kid thinks not only am I engaging this activity but I'm getting positive feedback presumably from people that I care about or whose opinion I care about wouldn't that serve to elevate performance it does not in

fact the exact opposite happened so I'll just give you a few of the key takeaways from this study the way it was done is very interesting they essentially gave feedback about performance that was linked up with a child's intelligence telling a kid they're smart they're talented that they can learn things really easily or that they're very good at learning this sort of thing and they called that intelligence feedback or they gave them what was called effort feedback the simple way to think about effort feedback is that it's more attached to verbs as opposed to labels

so effort feedback consists of things like you tried really hard on that problem it was great the way that you applied effort it was great the way that you persisted it was great the way that even when you got the wrong answer you spent 10 minutes thinking about it and then you tried again and again or in some cases even if they didn't get the right answer telling them well even though you didn't get the right answer it's really terrific that you continue to try Okay so intelligence feedback was the sort of feedback that was

tied to labels of identity things like smart talented Etc whereas effort feedback was tied to verbs choices behavioral and cognitive choices that children made in an effort to learn or get better at something so in this study which included over a 100 children they either got the intelligence type feedback or the effort type feedback or there was a control group that didn't get either the intelligence or the effort type feedback and then they looked at a number of different outcomes so I'll just highlight a few examples of what they found first of all the kids

that got the intelligence-based feedback when they were then later offered problem sets that were either challenging or were of the sort that they knew they could perform well on they tended to select problems that they knew they could perform well on these where what were referred to as performance goals in other words they picked problems that allowed them to continue to get the praise that they had received previously about being smart or talented whereas the kids that got feedback about their strong effort when later presented with problems that were either easy or hard more often

than not they pick the harder problems that stood to teach them more so that strike it says that if you tell a kid that they're smart or talented and that's the reason why they perform well when they encounter challenges they are likely to go with the least amount of challenge so that they can continue to receive that praise or feedback whereas if you receive praise and feedback for your strong effort then later you tend to pick environments problem sets Etc that allow you to exert the very effort that got you the praise in the first

place so in both cases these children are essentially attached to to the praise right in some sense I mean we like to think that they enjoy these activities and they're benefiting from them as well but in both cases the praise really serves to reinforce a certain pattern of behavior but in the case of giving intelligence feedback the kids are really just trying to reinforce being told that they're smart or talented as opposed to reinforcing the engagement in the activity that got them the praise in the first place and the converse is also true when kids

are told hey you really tried hard and that's great or I like how you persisted or you're so persistent I can really see how persistent you are in trying to get the right answer even if you don't get the right answer well then when you present those kids with additional challenges they work very hard to stay in Challenge and guess what no surprise the kids that are rewarded for effort and that continue to pick harder problems outperform the kids that are given the intelligence praise and feedback by a large margin so what does this tell

us this tells us that the narratives that we hear from others of course reinforce certain patterns of behavior what else does this tell us this tells us that if you're a parent or teacher you have to be very careful about giving feedback to a child that is attached to their identity around an Endeavor especially if they're performing well at that endeavor right now of course if a child is not performing well at something you also don't want to tell them that they're stupid right you don't want to tell them that they're deficient right but that's

a rare occurrence in the classroom one would hope that's a rare occurrence par on the field one would hope but what's very common very very common is that when we see children or adults performing well we tend to give them identity labels as a way to try and reinforce whatever Behavior we observe and we like now the other thing they looked at in this study were the actual raw performance on cognitive problems and these data I must say are just so interesting they took the kids and they gave them all the same problem sets and

all the kids AC Ross the board whether or not they were getting intelligence praise or effort praise or they were in the control group were performing more or less the same way they were getting some of these questions right some of these questions wrong then they gave them praise after they completed those problems they either got intelligence praise you're so smart you're so talented or they got effort praise you tried so hard you really persisted that's fantastic then later they gave them another set of problems and they looked at performance now remember the first time

around all the kids got some of the questions right and some of the questions wrong so there's room for improvement for everybody what they found was absolutely striking the kids that were in the control group so they didn't get any specific form of Praise they perform more or less the same way as they did before so if they were getting 75% of the answers right the first time they got 75% of the answers right the second time the kids that were in the intelligence praise group their performance went down significantly whereas the kids that were

in the effort praise group their performance increased significantly okay so this is a biral effect where giving intelligence praise reduces performance and giving effort praise improves performance which is absolutely striking and tells you everything you need to know which is if you're a parent you're a teacher and of course as we all give ourselves feedback rewarding yourself for effort is the best way to improve performance rewarding yourself based on identity labels so smart so talented you're a great athlete Etc all that stare in the mirror and do self-affirmation stuff can actually undermine performance and in

fact it does undermine performance it may not do it right away but eventually it does and in a moment I'll explain why the other thing this study looked at that I just have to mention is this notion of persistence so remember earlier I said that the kids that got intelligence praise tended to pick easier problems down the line whereas the kids that got effort praise tended to pick harder problems it turns out that the kids that got intelligence praise also tended to take on fewer problems overall they tended to limit the total number of challenges

that they engaged in whereas the kids that got the effort praise that you work so hard you're so determined that was so impressive how you just kept going even when you got some answers wrong those kids not only opted for harder challenges they not only performed better but they also took on many more challenges so these data really make clear that the effort praise is the way to go now I know many people have heard this whole thing about don't reward the person reward the effort reward the verbs as I'm referring to it but it's

actually pretty rare that we hear effort rewarded in everyday settings and it is very common for us to overhear intelligence praise or Talent praise you know a kid comes home with a trophy and we tell them you're a great athlete right kid comes home with a great report card you you're so smart congratulations a kid comes home with some sort of win in their world and we tend to give them a label because we like to think that that label will get internalized and they'll start to view themselves as a winner we tell them you

can do anything you're a winner you're a winner and of course you don't want to tell children or yourself or any other adult you're a loser right we do not want to do that you don't want to undermine performance that way but it's very clear based on This research and a lot of other papers similar to it that we all have a giant blind spot sitting in our psychological field when we are getting and receiving praise that really it is the sort of Praise that attached to the very efforts that led to the results that

will lead to even improved results over time okay so this paper is really truly important it's a landmark paper in the field of psychology motivation learning and performance and that's why I'm discussing it in such detail here but it actually includes one additional piece of information that I also think everyone should know about and that is the tendency for children who get intelligence praise to misrepresent their performance on subsequent efforts what do I mean by that in this paper they had the children perform on a given task and then they either got intelligence praise you're

so smart you're so talented or effort praise you work so hard you're so diligent and then they had them do a series of other tasks and then report their results to other kids and what they found is that children who get intelligence praise when they need to report their scores either by walking up to the board and putting a little Mark where their particular score is or telling a another student what their score was or even writing it down on a piece of paper covertly so that's it's not visibly being compared to all the other

scores the kids that got intelligence praise tend to lie about their score and as you could imagine they tend to lie in the direction of making themselves appear as having performed better than they actually did so this is a pretty Sinister aspect of intelligence praise that we don't often hear about even if you've heard telling a person that they are smart or talented can ultimately undermine performance rarely if ever do we hear that telling someone that they're smart or talented can increase the probability that that person is going to misrepresent their performance in the future

whereas the kids that receive the effort praise do no such thing they Faithfully represent their performance so just to illustrate how important the findings in the study really are the paper was published in 1998 but just two years prior in 1996 there was a survey of parents asking to what extent do you believe that intelligence is fixed and 85% answered that they thought that intelligence was fixed that means they believe that the brain was sort of a vessel of fixed size that of course when we're born into the world it's kind of empty we don't

have any knowledge but that the job of schooling was to teach kids things and reveal an intelligence capacity that was innate and that couldn't be increased upon whereas nowadays we really understand mainly through our deeper understanding of neuroplasticity and how the brain learns that indeed the brain can learn and that intelligence is not fixed however in 1998 when these studies were done most people were of the core belief that intelligence is fixed that it cannot be improved upon and these results really drive home the fact that the type of feedback we get about our performance

even when our performance is good can undermine our future performance or if we receive feedback of the effort praise type the you tried so hard you're so persistent type that our abilities can indeed improve and when you look at any intelligence test if you look at a standard IQ test or you you know go way out onto the other end of the Continuum in terms of intelligence testing you look at emotional intelligence it is very clear that anyone and everyone can improve their scores on those exams and in fact can improve the various aspects of

intelligence because in fact there are many different forms of intelligence through dedicated effort I know many of you are listening to this with an eye toward the tool tools meaning you want to know what the tools are that you can Implement well earlier I had you ask some questions what are you good at what have you been told you're good at and how did you arrive at being good at those things I also encourage you to think about what you've been told you're bad at or less good at and what you tell yourself you're bad

at and less good at and how you arrived at that conclusion right now I'd like you to ask yourself what is your typical narrative when you are engaging in things that you believe you are good at and what is your typical narrative meaning your internal dialogue in your head when you're engaging in things that you are not good at or if you're not engaging in those things when you think about engaging in those things and the tool that's very effective to apply even just in your own mind is to start shifting your narrative from those

performance narratives towards effort related narratives if you attach effort verbs to why you got good at something as well as why you are not good at something well then there's only room for improvement thank you for joining for this special episode of after skool if you'd like to learn more tools for mental health physical health and performance check out the huberman Lab podcast which is available on all platforms YouTube Apple Spotify anywhere podcasts are found also check out huberman lab on both Instagram and Twitter there I cover science and science-based tools some of which overlaps

with the content of the huberman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content of the huberman Lab podcast we are also huberman lab.com that's our website and there you can find links to all of our social media and all of our podcast episodes