Transcript for:
Growth Mindset and Stress Reappraisal Insights

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr David joerger Dr David joerger 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 AG es 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 and performance in cognitive and physical Endeavors Dr joerger 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 note captions during today's discussion Dr Jer 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 Jer 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 arero press arero press is like a French press but a French press that always Brews the perfect cup of coffee meaning no bitterness and excellent taste Aero press 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 3 minutes I started using an aerop press 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 aobi Frisbee in any event I'm a big fan of Adler inventions and when I heard he developed a coffee maker the Aro press I tried it and I found that indeed it makes the best 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growth mindset for a number of years so I'd love to know how you define it yeah so it's it's simply the belief that your abilities or your potential in some domain can change um 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 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 is really kind of a stressful idea of all the uh studies on growth mindset um including yours ones that you've participated in um what one or two kind of highlevel results um 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 um or everyone should know that Carol dwac is the originator of the growth mindset idea um as a field and she deserves um tremendous credit for that so yeah um so when you stand back from the field given that it's 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 uh 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 uh 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 colle ready courses from a short intervention happened you know just one or two times no reinforcement so so that there's a lot of reasons why that's true that sounds magical and and outrageous and there are a lot of mechanisms but that just demonstrates the overall value of the phenomenon and we 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 is it are we handpicking schools where you could get the best effects no random sample of schools did we post talk 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 newbound and Carol DW that David did uh when he was a graduate student at Stanford um 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 it can't change um 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 Etc right in a growth mindset though mistake is like part of the process it's 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 dry how do you cope with that initial failure and he found that both fixed and 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 what are they doing what are their strategies how can I improve both of them then recovered self-esteem and look 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 like how am I going to get better and I I just 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 what can I learn from them so the open 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 from being honest that's the mindset I want like kids they have as they go through life very interesting I'm going to ask you more about this looking down or looking up yeah um in terms of performance but before I do that I have questions about these brief uh 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 yeah um maybe just a top Contour of uh 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 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 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 at 5 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 talked to your son 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 Etc but then the second step is saying that to you at a time when it's possible for there to be a 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 um there are three big things that are in every intervention and the term that Greg Walton the Stanford Professor uh colleague collaborator um 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 that's 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 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 like my brain can grow Etc so the three points are like scientific information stories or the 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 uh which is a 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 and the growth mindset that's where we draw on the metaphor that the brain is like a muscle that um 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 one self 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 is interesting it sort of suggests that that we have brain circuit that underly growth mindset type behaviors and thinking and that just storing into those can potentially um lead to better decision-making and behavior I mean obviously it can't create new skills um 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 uh writing a story about um the effort going into duny basketball and learning how and then Translating that to a more um realistic sense of of ability that allows me to then go practice more is that sort of what you're referring to yeah so the in 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 lay people like not not scientific theories but just our intuitive theories for explaining the world help us anticipate what something means so the the idea from basic developmental psychology is that human beings are walking around with kind of Prior belief about objects about motion about you know number and then later about complex social structures like whether people are looking down on me how where I stand relative to others and also lay little lay Theory 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 if you understand the theory someone has then you'll understand the meaning they'll make about a future experience um and therefore well and the reason meaning matters is because the 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 um and so the 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 uh stories are kind of like theories in motion this is why you know like what's the point of war in peace right war in peace is is really a theory of of great leaders in the war um and there's any English phds I'm sure they'll tell me that that's oversimplified version of what to sto was doing but you learn the theory in a narrative way right so this is the 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 the this person or even I experienced difficult 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 like make a difference here are the steps that I took and then it improved so it's a very like the simplest freay tags 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 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 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 called the recursive process that you 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 um stress or anxiety response you know the um the friction that one feels when they can't perform something well or when things feel overwhelming or confusing um and I think the analogies to physical exercise apply but I feel like they're Limited in the sense that I like the the idea that the brain is like a muscle that it can grow and get stronger I think the um the key difference to my mind is that you know like working out with weights um 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 um with cardiovas ular 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 um 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 um we're doing it wrong yeah um as opposed to stimulating the growth right and so I are there any studies that point going to um Bridging the relationship between the physiology you know that 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 at 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 um in the in the gym yeah I mean I think that that you're right um you know the standard growth mindset message does have reappraisal components specifically around something Carol D 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 uh 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 uh then people are going to quit right if if I tell if you believe effort out to 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 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 what You' said is you can't just abstractly tell someone your brain as 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 um 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 uh my my daughter is 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 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 they'll they'll it's like the growth mindset isn't going to get them to the skill development right or at least to the mental well-being of feeling like they have confidence and can do well so um in some 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 crumb and Jeremy Jameson's Labs who were building on lots of great appraisal psychologists Wendy Mendes and others to say okay in the inevitable experience where if you 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 uh work in the last four or five years yeah could you tell us more about this uh stresses 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 how we had this Insight is actually kind of interesting too uh but just the basic idea as um you know people who've heard about ali crumb would know and Jeremy Jameson is that you know a 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 um that idea on its own is is kind of revolutionary for people people tend to think that your physiological arousal is this objective experience that is universally bad Ali Crum calls that a stress is debilitating belief um 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 in Doom and and it will always interfere with your performance and and and the implication therefore is if you were about to do well on whatever you're doing going to do then you wouldn't feel that way right um 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 you know 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 of just being stuck in your own mind and and and interpreting your arousal in the most negative possible light so um 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 um 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 what the point of that is um 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 d-stress or 10 tips for de-stressing and it'll be like go on a walk drink chamomile tea like and the the the underlying implication is that if you're stressed then you need to distract yourself you need to get rid of that stress but an 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 the like 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 like go for a walk like I should get ready to kick ass the presentation you know and so I think what what alium 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 be enhancing belief and what's so interesting I think about this work and I want to give credit to lots of other people um is that if you're in the stress's 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 it it changing your mindset about stress in turn changes how your body reacts which then becomes a different stressor that you can interpret um and so the big Insight was pairing the these ideas about reframing stress as an 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 is the growth mindset that causes you to like be open to the challenge in the first place I'd like to take a 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course gut health supports immune system health and brain health and it's supporting a ton of different cellular and organ processes that all interact with one another so while certain supplements are really directed towards one specific outcome like sleeping better or being more alert ag1 really is foundational nutritional support it's really designed to support all of the systems of your brain and body that relate to mental health and physical health if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs with your order plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman I feel like so much of what human beings struggle with um such as learning and performance our relationship to stress Etc could be resolved if we could overcome the deficit in language um here's what I'm thinking um 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 you know the way I think about is like a Continuum of 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 and 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 don't I can't come up with it on the Fly where you know 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 stress about doing it yeah and it it it's kind of a trivial um you know recasting of stress on the one hand but in terms of you know 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 I I again I don't a solution to this but I feel like everyone hear stress is bad you hear stress is 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 um catching that train that's you know soon to leave the station and I just wonder um 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 um 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 thwarting your goals or the exam the difficult conversation the um the going to for some people going to the doctor or the dentist the hard conversation with you know with somebody you care about it could be um or a physical stressor right like a football game or you know running a marathon right so anything that imposes demands on your body and mind and therefore will require resources whether like you know 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 a stress response when they say stress they're like I'm really stressed right now well what 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 you know sympathetic nervous system evolved which was to Keep Us Alive from threats mainly physical threats and so if you have a stressor some de 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 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 we're very rarely confronted with those kinds of physical stressors these days it's often social stressors but a lot of social stressers are a threat of social death right like a ninth grader coming into high school getting bullied by all their friends and are excluded because the eth their friends in eighth 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 and same with a test same with you know presentation to senior vice president whatever it is stressor often in in our daily lives are not good or bad now of course there's traumatic stressors that you know are really bad for people um 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 in a high school and I used slides that Jeremy Jameson who was 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 did not I I strongly recommend different terminology uh so and I should I was a middle school teacher I should have known that you can't say that word in a in a high school so right yeah I think that that there needs to be a better language I think if people um of all ages understood the autonomic nervous system this aspect of our nervous system that um is on a Continuum that leads us to either be I guess at the extremes you would say um coma would be the deepest state of right parasympathetic yeah non- arousal then ascending from you know very you know deeply asleep lightly asleep groggy awake uh awake and alert um awake and alert to the point of being you know highly alert um and then you get into kind of uh low-level panic and then allout panic attack right I that's kind of the Continuum the autonomic Continuum I I feel like if people understood that and they 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 uh we'd have a better sense of whether or not we were in the correct maybe even optimal state for for dealing with challenge or uh or not and along those lines what is the optimal internal state for dealing with challenge that is um just outside our ability um you know 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 depends on if you're motivated and if you know a lot of things like but yeah I mean I think if you think of the autonomic arousal on just one axis mhm what where where you start running into problems we find is is that I think you're right that there's like you know coma to like some arousal or meaningful arousal but the 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 that's um 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 arous of measures like pre-ejection period right um could you explain pre-ejection period um it's it's just a it's a simple measure uh of just the sympathetic nervous system that we use in all of our studies so sympathetic just remind folks is one aspect of the autonomic nervous system um 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 um less alert would be um more contribution of the parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system and P is just a measure that we use in our laboratory studies um and and another could have been like skin conductance how it's which is a about the wet coming out of your skin and then we use an electrode to figure out how much is there um that uh 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 you know overcome or at least deal with that challenge on the positive side in the other higher rousel state which is threat and that's again you're highly 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 um here's a very practical example if you look at devices people are wearing to detect their stress that might say high or 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 n 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 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 resource to meet that demand um so I think my answer to the question is 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 are that's tight trading demand I think it's how do you pair a 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 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 them from a threat type response into a more challenge type response it makes sense if I think that um 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 yeah especially if I'm motivated I want the 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 it turns out that that actually helps people cope at a physiological level got it got it um we've been talking a lot about kind of the um the nuts and bolts of of growth mindset and stress is performance-enhancing uh mindset maybe we could um shift a little bit to the discussion about what you call the mentor mindset and and as we do that maybe we'll weave back in some of these some of these Concepts yeah yeah your book 10 to 25 um focuses heavily on uh social appraisal self appraisal basically the idea that we want to be liked and we don't want to be disliked and it um 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 um everyone loves a great report card nobody likes a poor report card so so um tell us about Mentor mindset and both for folks in the 10 to 25 age range but also for everybody you know um 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 steel and they coined a term that they called the mentors dilemma and the mentors 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 with withhold your criticism don't say the truth hide all the critical feedback and be nice and super supportive but 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 you know dictator who care doesn't care about human feelings or you are a like low standards wimp pushover that that's you know giving in to the like 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 leave the comments unaddressed so the solution to that in in that research on the mentors 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 um it means I like 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 um book of the late I think the pronunciation is Randy P for the last lecture no he was a computer scientist he developed a lot of um early online um portals for kids in particular um uh young women to learn programming I think it was called Alice um uh and he is known for what called the last lecture he was diagnosed with cancer he eventually passed away but he talked about um in his book um lessons that were important for life and one of the things that he said was um the the thing to worry about is not when your mentors and coaches um 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 right so that always that always rung in my in my mind yeah that what what I call the the person who just is is no longer maintaining high standards for you I call that a protector mindset that it's it's almost like it's going to be too much trouble to see you dealing with stress from being pushed that I am going to protect you from that stress I I maybe I care about you but I'm not going to not going to hold you to a high standard and I see that a lot um in coaches I see it in teachers I see it in parents um for me the 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 you know are going to be gone by the end of this um 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 Claud steel 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 then participants were less likely to think that the that that the professor was on their side in an artwor in some small studies we um we showed that even seventh graders when they get critical feedback on their essays are about twice as likely to implement the teachers'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 um I don't know like a magic phrase like I my joke my laugh Line 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 posted 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 Fe back in his book didn't site us but like you didn't sight us no Dan but also like magic Fe I'll say it so you don't have to not cool attribution is important it's just not it's not magic at all the the the magic of high standards and high support is not the 18 words it's I'm taking you seriously when 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 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 um Dr Becky Kennedy on here to talk about parenting yeah and she said um many important things but among them was the fact that um children perhaps all people want to feel real yeah and they want to feel safe yeah um an important concept that I think many people heard and and are really internalizing I I know I am um for sure and this idea of feeling real has to do with um not just feeling seen but that U people believe us even if they disagree with us yeah like they they believe us she has another thing that's super profound is uh 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 going to yell at me or I'm going to be a pushover and then they're going to 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 the coach the parent I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors waking up waking up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditations mindfulness trainings yoga needer sessions and more I started meditating over three decades ago and what I found in the insing years is that sometimes it was very easy for me to do my daily meditation practice I was just really diligent but then as things would get more stressful which of course is exactly when I should have been meditating more my meditation practice would fall off with waking up they make it very easy to find and consistently use a given meditation practice it has very convenient reminders and they come in different durations so even if you just have one minute or five minutes to meditate you can still get your meditation in which research shows is still highly beneficial in addition to the many different meditations on the waking up app they also have yoga Nedra sessions which are a form of non-sleep deep rest that I personally find is extremely valuable for restoring mental and physical Vigor I tend to do a Yoga Nidra lasting anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes at least once a day and if I ever wake up in the middle of the night and I need to fall back asleep I also find Yoga Nidra to be extremely useful if you'd like to try the waking up app you can go to waking up.com huberman to try a free 30-day trial again that's waking up.com huberman I want to get back to some of the the mechanics of had to go about that but why do you think this stuff is so hard like like if we think about um I don't know kind of a curbside evolutionary uh Theory um meaning I don't have any formal training in evolutionary psychology you could step back and say like 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 our communities Etc and and now a number of things are outsourced and um and so here we have this notion of strivings but then again you know we went from Hunter gather uh culture to writing war in peace and everything else um Technologies of all kinds so you know there must be something in the human brain that um causes us to strive and what we're really talking about here is striving in our relationship with striving um so if we were to step back and just say okay what do you think determines whether or not someone uh feels they can do better is it early success you know I they tried at something I mean everyone most everyone I assume who tries to learn to walk walks um learns to speak speaks you know they're rare exceptions but um you know what do you think this whole thing about strivings is about and when we talk about growth mindset stresses enhancing mindset the mentor mindset um I mean are we trying to get back to activating systems that are hardwired within us and that have been kind of um masked by daily life um 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 um I'm often reminded of something I heard from Ron doll who's a neuroscientist at Berkeley and not Ronald doll the the children's not rald doll Ron Ron doll although Ron is just just so such an awesome guy it's like just polymath who can do everything and just so curious and generous uh he uh what he always says to me is like look is like David what do you think the human brain wants to do like I 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 um and a change yeah a change from the state and 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 as 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 the at least in the animal studies as you know often it's like how do I either feel better or avoid you know 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 mill you you're a part of and and that comes a lot from your contribution value if you think in our evolutionary history like the being ostracized and alone is certain death in ancient human culture 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 you humans can't sleep in trees because our muscles aren't don't contract when we're uh asleep unlike animals and so you're just Exposed on the ground if you're alone eventually you're going to die right so the the fear of moving from a 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 like 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 adolescence and so they overdo it thinking through like how 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 dop energic system of course is like driven in part by changes in Gad maturation Ron likes to talk about these great studies of song birds of how do they learn the meeting calls and if song birds 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 M and they die alone interesting yeah I'm familiar with that um with that literature there's a great uh unfortunately now passed away uh biologist who was first in the UK and then uh was up at UC Davis uh Peter maror and who studied the U the bird song learning yeah and it's it's um it's amazing yeah it's amazing work and it mimics a lot of the uh the development of human speech although not exactly like there's this babbling phase yeah where babies and birds experiment with different to tones and they're they're learning to use the fings and larynx or you know in Birds it's a slightly different system yeah and some birds are seasonal singers but I I wasn't familiar with this result that the testosterone drives a kind of obsessive uh practice Yeah it's obessive practice in order to demonstrate well status but really your value I mean there it's mate value right right but I think the same thing is true for lots of things that teenagers trial could be playing guitar you know uh 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 get to your question about why do people strive to get better I think in adolescence you look around in your social millu and see what counts for status not in a superficial way it sometimes happen 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 Mish mashed um but I think also people will uh in adolescence I feel like um kids find their Niche and then try and Excel within that Niche yeah you know as opposed to high school or Junior High School being um one huge hierarchy yeah you know there's kind of these sub hierarchies yeah Dan McFarland is a sociologist at Stanford did this really interesting study with the ad Health Data and you turns out you could characteriz the social hierarchies in different high schools by kind of single pyramid high schools versus multi- pyramid high schools and there's way better adjustment in the multi- pyramid high schools because there's many roots to status The evolutionary psychologist Bruce Ellis talks about having many roles and I I like that because in the old model you know if 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 you know Mean Girls type of behavior um Bob Ferris sociologist at Davis finds that the most bullying in high school is the people that are like the 6th 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 spolsky's work on primate troops yeah yeah the alphas are stressed but the the sub Alphas are they have options yeah um and this is true for female and male animals um just as it's true we were talking about testosterone a few minutes ago an obsessive practice I'll remind people that um in women uh 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 in men so the the statement about testosterone and obsessive um uh learning uh or efforts to learn it I have to imagine is not restricted to males or females and I think I understand as a man praising testosterone that I could come across but I I so I always need to remember that the research is is very interesting on t uh Evelyn Crohn's lab um 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 incumbant prefrontal cortex Etc areas associated with reward yeah yeah and pursuit motivation yeah yeah and um and they also have 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 going to Ary is 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 tea throughout adolescence um the the increase is equally predictive which is another way of saying it's just as important for these social learning things in girls and and T by the way is just a a really testosterone testosterone is a really good proxy other hormones are involved too they're just more complicated like DHEA you could um 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 it's not we're not making claims specifically about testosterone it's just like a really good proxy for where you are in gonat maturation in both boys and girls gonat maturation really matters 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 uh testosterone increase for both boys and girls is predictive of striving if it's a steep upward you know yeah line then then that that's associated with more striving in a given practice to the extent that like neural activation during a social reward task or a risk-taking task is a proxy for striving and 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 um or lots of different things the reason I ask is that you know the the notion of growth mindset is so attractive it's such a sticky idea um 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 that you know what we're really talking about here is an algorithm that can be directed at different uh Pursuits as opposed to growth mindset is applied in one context and not another um so what what of that um people who are incredibly good at accessing growth mindset in one domain of life does that mean that they'll be good at accessing gross mindset in another domain of Life what's the the um the carryover or the spill over it's a great question it comes up a lot um the Michigan State psychologist Jason moer 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 you know 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 said 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 that I not really help you so um 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 how parents 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 cuz 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 raas 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 as talk about research at a party and he's like oh yeah math ability can change you don't have to be done with 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 I 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 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 the closer to the domain the better because they're going to see the application otherwise they have to use it by analogy and an we know analogic reasoning is is tough cuz it's Hit or Miss we love stories of people that have come from a place of being really back on their heels um or even just dissolved into a puddle of their own tears too uh doing well again maybe even soaring again it's sort of the the the common thing is that this is the the classic American uh 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 yeah some people crash and burn but it seems like everybody loves a comeback story right I know something about that um the the uh the hero's journey the the um hero of a thousand faes is that the that's the Joseph Campbell um yeah um and it's written into so many movies and books and and real life uh uh stories I can't help but superimpose today's discussion onto something like that right that um you know that life is a series of um efforts to apply growth mindset from learning how to walk right presumably is part of that right I don't know any child that just stands up and walks um early on to to the things that we we really think uh we can perform well at to um finding ourselves like really back on our heels and and so are there any data um or theories even that point to the use of growth mindset and stress is 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 um 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 we're a low achieving student and we're going to 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 you already have straight A's we can't give you more A's it's impossible right but um you know in 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 might make you right now need a growth mindset more but it might make it harder for you to act on it and so the 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 and one is like Baseline why do you need it and the other is over time what's going to help you keep using it so to be very concrete about this in uh in one paper we published in 2019 uh the national study of learning mindsets it was published in nature we evaluated growth mindset in this large National sample and the the question wasn't does it work on average the question was where does it work and for whom as we had there were lots of replications already and and sometimes people tried it and like well didn't work here okay well what's that's a puzzle how do we figure that out and the finding was low achieving students in high schools um that had more supportive classroom culture where you got where you got the long run effects and in the in the 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 you go with mindset it's like great give me pre-cal oh we don't offer that here right or it's a toxic environment in some way the 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 you 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 going to like change inequality like you're going to 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 might it could do something and uh psychologists are skeptical sociologists they're like look how how often do we have huge changes in law and policy but people don't 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 together 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 um 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 and that comes deeply from Carol D'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 right this is classic Allison kopnick you know Susan Gman 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 and 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 you once you do that if they're also in a context where you can act on that love 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 in 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 um kind of like no deep Notions of the human Spirit like we are a species that um seems to organize our experience in terms of of stories of ourselves and others but that um when it comes to things like strivings and learning um 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 um and what we're talking about today is being forward Center of mass at least in certain areas of life I mean that the fact that the reward systems of the brain where you mentioned them earlier these misol liic reward Pathways that basically deploy dopamine um and other things of course um are so associated with striving and achieving striving and achieving and presumably underly much if not all of our human evolution assuming we're still evolving lately sometimes I wonder but um some people would argue we're Devol devolving but I I would argue we're still evolving um especially with this new burst in AI it's all about math nowadays folks a few years ago it all about neuroscience and Neuroscience is still really important and the two share but it's all about math lately um so I 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 um 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 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 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 that's a profound question I think that's that's a good one to debate that what what I've been really taken by recently is Carol dak'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 amydala and 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 fadis 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 amydala the mesolimbic that's this unruly horse that the Chariot 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 rondall and others argue this that um the affective regions are often the teacher and the prefontal 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 right it's I have four kids it's usually because there's a toy at the other side of the room that they really really want and 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 the motor learning is the effect of the desire in the goal Pursuit and what what Carol argued is that feder's had is totally wrong it's not that the prefrontal charioteer is taming the emotional it's really that the the affect part is training the prefrontal to be better at pursuing the goals that matter in the social millu that you have and a lot of people like um Adriana Galvan and Jen feifer and Nim Tottenham in the Adolescent space have shown this and I don't understand all the details fully but the 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 then they and where you could get temporal ordering then you could start seeing actually that especially in adolescence it's the the affective regions are training or teaching or telling the prefrontal regions what to do so I guess the the that's a long way of answering the question of I think that 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 here but that's how I that's how I see it yeah I completely agree that emotions Drive the more um let's call tactical circuitry of the prefrontal cortex of course we should be fair to the the Neuroscience the prefrontal cortex is part of the lyic system people often think because it's in the cortex it's higher order and um that's simply not true but um well if we both agree and it sounds like we do that emotions Drive tactical decisions that drive action and learning um maybe we could talk about the two major types of emotions um that one could imagine one is um I really want the toy I really want the piece of food I really need um something for survival or for well-being and so I'm going to be be motivated and then the prefrontal cortex will work out the strategies and um balance out the relationship to stress Etc and remind ourselves that stress can be performance- enhancing and eventually we we we get the thing or the skill or the whatever the other would be um fear fear of social shame fear of staying in a place that's not good for us financially emotionally socially Etc um is there any work that um identifies whether or not the the core emotion driving motivation is relevant and is there role for growth mindset there that's interesting um I guess it put simply um take it down out of the Ivory Tower a little bit which is what we're doing here anyway um you can do things out of love you can do things out of fear you do for both reasons too yeah um you can do things to um 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 presumably it's both yeah but are is there any um 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 conoman who just passed away his work with Amos tersi took on a version of this question in prospect theory and it's the idea of does the does the fear of a loss motivate us more than the prospect of a gain right 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 a numerically equal like a mathematically equal gain um and so a lot of people have used that information in various ways and 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 to avoid a to be afraid of a loss it's honestly a problem with 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 a thousand I didn't win mathematically it's the same Delta um but uh but but I think that the way that behavioral economic work gets applied is to appeal to people's kind of basist and most you know fearful responses to things and if you think about what what drives a lot of excellence in in moral examp too um it it's this chance to feel like you've made a big contribution to others and 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 uh 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 you know that I think 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 and my 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 uh 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 inter 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 then people conform to the wrong Norm so in my work what I try to emphasize is is not that we're not afraid of losses and and the narrow short-term gain that you know that we're avoiding uh or the short-term loss we're avoiding but like I I really do think that people are capable of far more like beautiful contributions to the world when we assume that that's what they want and we create opportunities for them to do that I've seen that so much um if you look at some of the best managers right it's it's not just if you screw up you're going to lose your bonus like that's not what the best managers in the world are doing right 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 like that's what the best managers do and coaches too this uh for my book I interviewed the NBA's best shooting coach this uh basketball player uh named Shane Bader who played college in 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 championships and constantly drafted players who were talented but had a bad jump shot so Kawhi Leonard is in example where fell late in the first round because people thought Couldn't Shoot Tony Parker is another example when Tony Parker used to shoot Greg papovich 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 it's like a golfer superstitious about their shot and he's like you know the the number one thing I have to do is build trust because I can't critique a player 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 it's he doesn't motivate with the 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 cutthoat 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 if it worked to just motivate with the fear of loss that's what he would do because they would do whatever is effective it's a 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 um or the world yeah or the world yeah I guess yeah pick your um pick your scope of impact could be for art for intellectual history it's it's a classic Victor Frankle argument of man search for meaning right as the as Victor frankl's leaving the 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 it's not the fear of death it's the the meaning of the work he could do for the world if he survives yeah I think um I'd like to hover on this for a minute or two because I think it's really important I realize we're getting more philosophical than operational but we have data on this it's a um yeah I I'd love to hear it that's one of the things I'm really enjoying about this conversation the moment I think it's going to be abstract or or that you've got uh you got it all there in in in that brain um yeah let's talk about this the pro uh that when when we feel back on our heels or we're flat footed meaning we're not doing well I 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 or just diminishment is going to be the best thing so what what are the data on this yeah so um well first just look at correlational studies in these Global surveys of Happiness um in 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 um 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 um so that that's just correlation now experimentally what we did in some work this was started with my first adviser at Stanford Bill Damon who studies purpose in life is we ask the question of when you're going through something tedious boring frustrating what motivates you to keep going and we 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 Etc with the Knowledge and Skills we call that our purpose condition a couple things make that different from this the standard narrative but but I think ultimately intuitive one is the standard narrative is if you try hard in school or at work or whatever it is in suffer now then one day there will be a kind of financial compensation so you're you're suffering now in a way that will bring material reward in the future that 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 into the future and how bad is their punishment right now so there's all kinds of affective tradeoffs that are hard for anyone or especially hard for 13 year olds right 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 that 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 a 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 gonna 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 like 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 you know or even when I'm driving to the homeless shelter right and I think it 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 Dello and Dave penescu 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 um 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 um more very boring math and watched fewer videos and played less Tetris when they were given this purpose message uh before the task it's in our 2014 paper and what I I of always think about that's the kind of paper I wanted to go to graduate school to work on but I 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 and adults think the only way you could ever get that is by imposing our will and and with this kind of authoritarian um 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 and in the paper we cite Victor Frankl where you know the person who knows the why for their existence is able to Bear anyhow mhm and I I think about that 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 um you know we've parsed dopamine circuits and we've talked about motivation and reward we've talked a little bit about growth mindset in a Solo episode but never before have I really understood the um the why component the meaning component and and I love how it marries so much of what we hear in kind of like you know pop culture psychology with real data like we're finally uh thanks to you being here meaning we're finally um in the guts of it um 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 I then then people say well past a certain amount of money you don't get any happier and I would argue that um uh it's true money can't buy happiness but it can definitely buffer stress yeah not all forms of stress and money itself can get people into more stress but um anyone that says you know past blank number of dollars there's no incremental increase in happiness I I I just don't see how that could be given inflation and you know that treats humans like linear functions I think that's a simplification right if higher purpose is best defin is making a meaningful contribution to the world um to a community to the or maybe at the scale of the world maybe at the scale of a family or or um or what have you a classroom and the thing that you said before that seems so important is that the moment that you attach uh 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 yeah 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 going to I'm going to be the best I'm going to be the best I'm going to be the best but um and one perhaps can then feel that progress when one is making it and feel like they're ascending that that staircase but something additional must come about when we're invoking this this feeling of contribution um and I think this isessential to our Evolution as a species because we didn't develop an 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 to 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 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 in 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 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 it 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 um or anything like that I remember when I was a at Stanford as a graduate student I worked in the lab of John kosnik who is you know famously detail oriented when whenever we want to go in really deep into something and go beyond what any other scientist would do our joke name for that is giving it the full kosnic because in he's in Communications political science and uh 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 very extremely like what adjectives should you pick to label those in a survey item and so the task was to find every time that human beings have rated adjectives on a zero to 100 scale in the history of Science and then average across all those to choose optimally spaced adjectives like not at all a lot a little so we had a lab full of undergraduates at Stanford who are used to you know creating startups and running nonprofits and this is very tedious work for them so how do you get them to Super pay attention to all the details and not get it wrong where we really going to trust their work it it's not by saying you know you're going to get into law school if you do this because it's not really true and they be like there's a lot of other ways for me to get into law school that's that don't involve going to journals from the 19 20s to rate adjectives right instead what I started doing was give them what I call the save the world speech which is like look we're g to write this paper and it's going to be the kind of paper that no one would have done because it's so tedious but if it's trustworthy thousands of people would know how to have more accurate measurement and they're going to be so grateful for that but not only that there will be Skeptics and the Skeptics are going to look in our supplement they're going to find mistakes and then they're going to email the editor and they're going to say why did you let the sloppy work into the journal and that happens all the time I mean I don't know much you follow what's happening behavioral scientist uh behavioral scientists these days but like you know if you have an influential finding that's the norm is people should scrutinize it they should kick the tires and they're going to find it and they're going to you know out you and they're doing more of that now like with Pub Pier yeah which I think is great Pub Pier is awesome um Pub Pier folks is where um papers are evaluated online people find um sometimes outright errors um and sure there are those like sleuthing for for like yeah you find fraud for fraud but most of what's put there is stuff like um you know differences in interpretation or or somebody will suggest that you know the authors could have done a better analysis or that maybe their conclusions were a little too far-reaching based on a particular set of methods it's good for science I mean there's a lot of uh bad intentioned sleo thing that is trying to find circumstantial evidence to make someone look bad is that true but yeah really yeah that's a shame because the the the whole purpose of it is to better the work not to uh I'm assuming the whole purpose of pup here is to to better the work and of course um point out you know where there are real errors in in the the historical literature right um well I think that the the yes there well there there's a new way to become famous in science which is to like you know find errors which again is really valuable if you successfully do it but there's enough room for interpretation that someone can um with circumstantial evidence only make it look like something's really bad and then cause an alarm and it causes all kinds of problems uh however that for for me at least in our lab that if you always assume that someone will look at your work with the worst possible intentions and will ask for every file how did it get from qual Trix into your paper just assume that all the time then that means you need to pay as much attention to the file that was downloaded and how it was processed in every you know part of the pipeline has to be documented um you just have to do that and so that working with crosx lab that's that's the process that we adopt it and there's all kind people email they like wait this show me this finding like okay here's the link to the server here's the syntax you can go find it etc etc so good scientists should do that and so the the possibility of scrutiny and catching fraud should motivate everyone to treat it as though it's inevitability and therefore you know be careful in your process convincing 19-year-old Stanford undergraduates that that is likely to happen you know and that therefore you need to pay super close attention to the details that's that was my task as a lab manager and so there it was a mix of the fear of Shame and humiliation but also ideally the contribution that our work will make and we had the hardest working Ras we ever had that summer and that's not an empirical claim that's you know I say that not I didn't randomize the undergrads to that but that experience kind of gave me the idea for the purpose studies was you know assume people want to do good work but all else equal they're G they might find an easier way to do it and then motivate with an appeal to how this work could make a difference how other people could be influenced by it and also if you don't take it seriously it'd be a really big deal it' be really bad and I I think about about that a lot because in we don't often appeal to the contribution value of the work we appeal to this you know getting a good grade and impressing people and uh and that's less important for me than did I get a skill and did I do high quality high integrity work so what you're basically saying is that if we attach our motivation to the give to the the contribution that we're going to make it actually makes the process much easier or at least more rewarding along the way um as well as um by definition contributing uh more positively to society um it's causing me to reflect on what we normally um perceive as like high achieving individuals um so often it seems like we hear the stories of like the Steve Jobs is and I I really enjoyed that book by Walter isacon and that story very you know impressed by right uh his contributions all complicated person as is often the case with people that make big contributions it seems um or people in the political sphere or people in the academic sphere or the sports sphere you know most often we we think of them as striving for themselves maybe for themselves and their family and then there are these people that really stand out as as these um uh shining examples of like Martin Luther King or you know and others where we just are kind of in awe of how um Mission driven they were for for the greater good um what sort of work um is being done to encourage that kind of mindset the contribution mindset growth mindset through contribution mindset I just coin that contribution mindset um that's more words in there right exactly that's all it needs more mindsets um but the contribution mindset because I think at least in this country um we're we are often raised to rever people that make big contributions but then we get really absorbed into that person's story yeah right it's like the story of the person and what made them tick and then that there's a lot of ego it you know and and they or they have a kind of obsessive nature to them um and we we don't know what goes on in other people's minds you know we're so I must say there's a certain arrogance in our in all of our perceptions of others like that we know what they're why they're doing what they're doing like half the time we don't even know why we're doing what we're doing yeah um but I think you get the idea here what I'm imagining is a more um benevolent world where people also enjoy striving more and the striving process itself while hard has meaning and people are not egoist but where there's a bit more balance like are we getting a little bit like we you know kind of um looking at this through rosecolor glasses or I think it's possible I like to think it's possible yeah I mean I think that that the the version that in in which people are purely pro-social and self-transcendent and have no self-interest you know is not super realistic and it's not actually what our data are finding so what we find is is that adding this pro-social contribution argument has a big effect but if you do it absent any plausible benefit the person would get it tends to not be motivating so it's the combination of let's just take the school case I'm going to learn something gain a new skill I'm G to get a job that I enjoy and that gives me freedom and make a contribution to others we found it was the addition of the pro-social part to the self-interested part now if if it was do XYZ and you know make lots of money far in the future and then give that money away that didn't work because that's still the same logic of sacrifice now for later Financial reward which then has an exchange value of some ambiguous you know amount in the future that one didn't motivate kids or students to want don't tell the philan universities depend heavily on philanthropy especially nowadays uh um and we're grateful to them that they support so much good work so you're saying that that they um it makes sense that there needs to be some component of self-interest right like jobs loved design right um presumably uh folks like uh Elon and and others love the the mechanics of what they do building Rockets building um electric cars and things like that but then there this pro-social thing the the idea that that the world could be better and different with these things in them uh yeah if you did if you did the work right I mean a good example is is my friend Danielle kic who ran empathy Lab at Google for a while and before that worked at at Apple and uh and other places you know you could think that designing products at a large tech company is purely about is that product going to sell a lot make a lot of money Etc and that's obviously part of the value for the shareholders and so on but um you know her philosophy was always okay what is what's going to happen with the user what does the user need is there life going to be better with this product and that often led to design choices that made the product even better and more profitable and I think there are a lot of examples of that where you know when when the team is trying to create something that is high quality but with integrity and ethics that are going to benefit people people are willing to put in extra hours they're willing to solve a puzzle do better work um I think there are a lot of examples of that that's on the product design side I also want to talk about the management side so one of the people I followed from my book is a manager at company she was at Microsoft now she's at a place called service now and I just studied how she mentored young employees her name is Steph akamoto and um she has this great story about a a really awesome 25ish employee 25-year-old is employee showed up and had come from teaching Teach for America and now is in HR at Microsoft and Steph could immediately tell her name is salony uh she's going to be bored by her regular job she's going to be able to do more than what she had to do but as a manager you can't say as the first thing you need to do twice your job for the same amount of pay that's like not a good management philosophy so instead it was a conversation all right what's a contribution you want to make to the company where in making that above and beyond you're going to learn a new skill that's going to help you move up the ladder right so that in your next performance review you're going to look like a superstar like a total over performer and so the time they were running GL manager development and so um what they decided was don't just deliver the programs well which Steph thought uh she could do well but also create a dashboard to track everyone's progress so every new hire would they would know where they are in the management process and it was Global during the pandemic so kind of a complicated time anyway she did her regular job really well and created this whole dashboard which brought value to the company big contribution but then when it came time for performance evaluations she could say like you're already performing at a level two levels up that gave her promotional velocity she moved up she left the company for a while now is the chief of staff HR at Microsoft right kind of in in in line to to lead Microsoft and then what about Steph well Steph's team overperformed so which was incentivized but then she gets to go home saying like I use my time as a manager to change someone's life and that brings her so much joy and she and it's just so much fun you know as a teacher to have some of our time with young people lead them to on a on a path they wouldn't have been on otherwise it is a total blast to Mentor someone and change their lives so I think that's a good example of it's an everyone's long-term self-interest to contribute to both the company and the people around you but no one's being a martyr they're not you know really like it's also everyone's compensated so you need to think about of course is the company gonna pay you if you help others improve and there important questions that we ask there but I just think that's a good example where we have a false psychom if it's either good for me or I'm a martyr helping others but like the best work is both and then it feels awesome because you both Chang people's lives and you are compensated for it and that's great um certainly has been my experience that doing things that I love like learning and organizing and distributing information um with the specific intention of people benefiting from it um should they choose to use it uh or apply it or think about it is um The Best of Both Worlds yeah certainly let's talk about this other phenotype um the people that um and and they do serve a role in in the world um folks that um who seem whose sole purpose seems to be to critique to identify errors and um and I think in the case of catching like real uh like fundamental flaws and stuff play play a key role we we need those right yeah and it's kind of unfair we that that as a scientific field we force a small group of people to have to police everybody else's work ideally they wouldn't have to do that job and so there's a lot of value in the people who have developed very honest and high integrity tools to find mistakes yeah I think some of the AI tools for finding um errors at least in PH you know in in data sets right like the images in a neuroscience study where you can tell that the images have been all or plots like I remember a few years back the Reinhardt shown cases of the he was like this wonderin who published I was like crazy numbers like eight or 10 papers in science and nature per year and then I think it was actually um similarities in the noise the random quot in quotes noise plots that eventually led to the the like the understanding that like there was Data duplication or something anyway I I don't remember how it went yeah it's important to correct the liter that way right but then there seems to be at least online there and and on social media there seems to be a um kind of a short-term incentive I have to imagine there's some incentive for people just being really critical like I I was thinking about this the other day um what kind of mindset would one have to just randomly go put a nasty comment on social media like if you just think about it not about an issue you're particularly vexed by or somebody's stance on like that that makes sense right people get get aggravated and yeah they but just think about the mindset there like oh you got your life you have time and you're going to go like say mean things right like like to me it's just inconceivable um to do that online like to go and just post that stuff but but clearly there's something there's some incentive built built there and I don't think this is a new thing I'm I'm guessing that before we had online culture within medieval societies and there were these these elements exist within us um and that there must be some reward they must feel some reward um but it's not it's not generative it's not Building Society when appropriately placed I guess we're saying it provides a uh corrective mechanism um but what do you think that's about and is there any literature on on this kind of thing yeah well not the exact example of um being a total jerk on online I mean I I can't imagine doing that and cuz who has the time I mean I had four kids coach baseball I don't know how I'm going to like police other people unless it's relevant to my work and I think someone's like not having integrity and what they're doing I'm like you guys are being sloppy then I might say that but um what I what I find compelling is a beautiful new book by Mary Murphy called cultures of growth who was trained at Stanford under Claude steel uh was also trained by Carol DW just came out a week ago and it's getting tons of great press and in her work what she finds is that fixed mindset can be a cultural variable like a a more a leadership variable not just in the mind of the individual and when that's the culture then she finds uh people are more willing to try to uh make everyone else look like an idiot so that you don't get attacked that's the summary finding and um there's a kind of deflection strategy that if I if I trash other people for being idiots then it'll make other people think twice before they mess with me and so but it creates the very toxic culture that they're trying to escape which is the threat of their own you know Intelligence being attacked so it's totally counterproductive and she uses the example of Microsoft and the Balmer era where you'd go into meetings and you'd get yelled at if you made any mistake and you weren't allowed to talk talk and they would like literally flip over a table and yell at you and people would leave the room crying um and uh this there's a lot of accounts of this is a very public information and um one of the things SAA nadela did when he came in was to chain what he said uh he said we have a culture of know at alls and we need a culture of learn at alls and um has the virtue of ending in the same words so it's it's uh piy but I kind of like that idea and so Mary describes how in this culture of um genius she calls it you don't just get the hypercriticism you then the the the consequence of that is unethical Behavior where you hide mistakes or lie about things because you're worried about being outed as not a genius so the the culture of fearing mistakes gives rise to the kind of unethical hiding type of culture now the the lay person could draw a line between that and like the and Bing and other like failed products you know that's I'll leave that to organizational Scholars to decide if that's the story but at least the cautionary tale is like Boeing is another example where Calhoun when he came in as a CEO changed the incentive scheme at Boeing to be something called stack ranking which is where you fire the bottom 10% every six months or a year who within your group so if your your group might be higher performing on average than some other group but the bottom 10% of your group are getting fired okay and this is goes back to uh ge it's a jack Welsh policy anyway so that happened you know two years ago and look what's happened in the last two years now he's out right you have all these mistakes where people aren't going and finding the problems now again I'm not boing I can't you know as a sci as a scientist I can't say that that is the cause but the argument in Mary's book is that when you have organizations like that culture of Genius you hide mistakes and then you have unethical behavior in order to um conceal those and then you don't fix them but in what she calls a culture of growth you're like willing to examine mistakes because they're not indicative of a sign that that they're not indicative of your overall inability to do well they're like part of the process of growing as a group super interesting um you said Mary Murphy cultures of growth yeah interesting it seems everybody worked with Carol dwick you uh Claude steel Mary Murphy friendship group it's a an amazing Group by that I mean I have no friends except people I work with you've uh clearly landed in a great group nonetheless um this is very interesting um so people who are hypercritical or spending enormous amount of time being critical just for being critical sake are are ma are masking they're cloaking themselves um it's a form of Self Protection yeah um that's that's her that's the claim and I think there's some pretty good suggest evidence of that yeah' be interesting if if online like everyone had to put some of their CV in their Mast head you know it's like it's sort of like what have you done as you're attacking because that would differentiate the people like Elizabeth Bick for instance who I think that's her name who's a u considered one of the um best uh data evaluation um people right she runs an her Twitter account is they essentially she shows errors in papers and and I think the goal there is to offer people the opportunity to not necessarily retract although in some kisses are track but to alter the papers right and addendums and things that um to say where you know so that that's like the the the appropriate use of of critique right she's not doing it to to cloak anything else presumably yeah as opposed to people that just run around trying to poke holes in everything that they see it's cynicism really it's kind of a it's kind of an like online cynicism well I think it's it's easier to be skeptical than it is to like eventually believe in something after being convinced and so I think there's a there's a default toward well I don't believe that and we get that sometimes with growth mindset they're like well what do you mean 50-minute intervention has a well okay but all the things you're complaining about are things that we addressed in the study so at some point you have to just say you believe in the process of science or you don't and I understand if there were initial studies that didn't follow the process of science or left big holes to be addressed but at some point it's like well we did what you asked for so I don't know what to tell you sorry mhm yeah I know the growth mindset field has come under a bit of of of a not attack but um critique um I know this because in researching the solo episode and this one you know it's one always has to be careful about relying on Wikipedia too much because it's the use of editors Legacy editors and um I'll go on record saying that there's a ton of bias in even within the Legacy editors I just by the way I'm now I just got my page vandalized even more but I've sort of given up at this point because things are clued together out of context and so I like if I look at growth mindset on Wikipedia there's a lot of supportive evidence and then you can get like two paragraphs of like of critique right and so for the uninformed they don't know how to weigh that yeah right which is why we basically need a new system well they kind of want to say on one hand on the other hand you know but then um yeah and there's no there's no real waiting we don't know the expertise of these people where they're gleaning from blogs or whatnot and look I think it's a great concept I think that it's just um I I to me at least um seems that there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that growth mindset and related mindsets that talked about today have have immense value I think um it's also good to have competing opinions in in any field um but I think it as as we're kind of parsing motivation um for people that um really want to make a I don't know feel their best do their best make a contribution to the world it seems like the default state that the the fast food the junk food um the slur the slurpie the Twizzlers and the and the Snickers bar there I just got myself in more trouble by naming name brands the junk food um is uh is in hiding by critiquing because I think maybe there's the man in the arena thing you know um that it's easy to be a spectator it's hard it's hard to try and do something real yeah I think that going back to this question of like are you willing to reveal your mistakes or not the Mary writes a lot about great exemplars in her book Jennifer Duda who's uh you know developed crisper famously has a lab that's hypercritical in the lab but then the work stands you know well in public um and it's someone who could have every incentive to just turn out as many papers as possible and you know for profit Etc but instead and I've actually interviewed one of the postdocs from that lab and it's just like an amazing scientific Enterprise that I I write about this astrophysics lab vanderbelt um with a guy named Kavon stassen who it's just a Legend um he so as you know a lot of people would be thrilled to have one nature paper in their lives like he had five last year right but uh what he does is uh Mentor the probably the most diverse group of physicists in in all of America and he developed what are called Bridge programs where students often graduate students of color or students who had low GRE scores low socioeconomic status they're pre- admitted to a master's program physics at a local HBCU Sally black College University and then if they do well then they're pre- admitted to the physics PhD program and it's a now well-known idea but the basic concept is in the old days you look at just your GRE scores and say are you smart enough to be a physicist or not and what he argued was that the coin of the realm for professional physics is publishing professional physics and if you come into a lab and you can analyze data and write a paper and publish it in a journal then you're a physicist so he has people come for two years regardless of your Gres but as long as you have kind of grit and resilience and a drive as you're saying and lets them work in labs and it turns out about about 85% of students end up getting admitted to the PHD program and then they do well so the first ever black first author on a nature paper in physics is his student right so like a ridiculously high proportion of racial diversity at Nasa are graduates of his program his laboratory right and is at Vanderbilt his is at Vanderbilt it's it's called the Fisk um uh vanderbelt Fisk um graduate program bridge program at any rate for my book I interviewed him and I was like well that's your admission so what happens there's still five years when people have to learn to be a physicist and every day they have a different thing they do so Monday is a journal Club Tuesday is a coffee but the the lifeblood of the lab is Wednesdays lab meetings where you as a trainee put up your figures in your paper in over Leaf which is like a wizzywig editor for scientific papers and everyone critiques your stats your tables your figures your narrative and everyone's just looking at your work and critiquing it and these are all top physicists in the lab and that sounds terrifying and it kind of is initially but then by the time they present at the conference they've heard everything and they're doing that far before they're spending three months doubting themselves unable to complete the paper etc etc it's like you just have to do that you have to face that fear so it's very demanding but it's super supportive and they don't pull punches in terms of the critique of the content it's it's but it's never in question whether the comments are coming from a place of believing your potential to be a great physicist and what I like about that is that you're not like it doesn't feel good at that time to have be critiqued publicly but it feels necessary and you kind of know that you will measure up at the end of that process and that it's formative I think that's fundamentally what a lot of people I think misunderstand about what it takes to help someone become better they think either I have to be a monster to critique you or I just have to pull my punches but like you can be like stassen's lab and be super demanding and super supportive and and then people grow sounds like the the key thing is to make sure that one is gleaning critique from um the correct sources and this is one of the the major issues with kind of just um open online critique while attractive because of the lack of barriers it it means that you have to be a selective filter right I mean you can see this in um online comments people some people are very impacted by them and then other people say oh yeah well that's some person in a basement or that's a you know like who what have they done and you know but some people just have a thinner skin than others and um but when you're in a in a community where clearly everyone cares about the mission the outcome the physics Etc um then you can put trust in the critique uh by the way I find it really interesting that um this lab at Vanderbilt has focused mainly on motivation and drive um as the key thing as opposed to some uh standardized score metric or something uh or prior experience when I was starting my lab as a junior Professor back before being at Stanford at UCSD UC San Diego senior colleague of mine said when picking students um you have to really evaluate many things right ethics how they do the work etc but the the main thing uh was is just drive are they driven yeah and um yeah that turned out to be the case yeah I think it's it's hard I mean it's it's such a case-by casee decision you know like you don't pick that many students over your career so you don't get to really learn but I think I had a college when I started who was like just told me they just sort by GRE right away like just by standardized squore by standardized testore I was like well I would never do that he's like how about this how about you take all the low gr students and I take all the high ones and see who students do better yeah I I feel like um standardized tests in some cases are necessary but not sufficient yeah that there's this other thing this like nuance and um I mean coming up with great experimental ideas or there's just so many examples of people people that just weren't good at standardized tests that just kicked ass in their in their various Fields but but there is a correlation there typically I mean I think my issue it like in in a perfect world standard test scores would be great for Equity because there would be people who didn't get great information in high school about where to go to college or started out in the wrong major and eventually figured out don't have great gpas or didn't go to a great college but they have tremendous ability and they deserve a shot and so I think that that argument for grees is makes a ton of sense the the problem is that you can just pay to have someone teach you how to take the GRE and your scores can go up a huge percentage and so it the GES end up being a proxy either for the training you got now or it's appr proxy for how good your 10th grade math teacher was because it's mostly testing 10th grade geometry and so again that's going to be a function of what neighborhood you grew up in and how good your high school teachers were so what I don't love is like I I would love test scores if they were about meritocracy and and equality of opportunity but they often end up being just a proxy for kind of advantages you already had so um ultimately though for Kavon the uh setting aside the GRE in physics was like a hypothesis ultimately the proof in the that needed to be in the pudding was did the students admitt it under an alternative means end up producing great physics and in that case the answer is absolutely yes and so for me it's like yes consider it or not for admissions but what are you doing with the students when they arrive how are you mentoring and how are you training and how are you breaking the link between whatever advantages might have had in the past and the work that they can do in the future if they're if they're driven we've been talking a lot about data and other people um I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you a little bit about you um uh no pressure to to share anything you don't want to share but um of all the things you could study of all the contributions you can make you decide to focus on this notion of mindsets and and essentially um trying to figure out how people can be their best for the for the greatest good of the world this would be the way I would describe it um is that just inherent in your in your wiring or was there something about your experience coming up that makes you value that in particular or um did you happen to just uh resonate with with uh Carol and folks um and feel like hey this would be a great place to place my efforts yeah well that's an impossible question to answer because there's no I have no counterfactual so a real causal inference person wouldn't allow me what so one this is a this is a digression but uh so my only real precocious skill is that I can do the splits which sounds like a weird thing to do but I can it's my party trick at at weddings you always could uh or you do gymnastics as a kid I did but not seriously not for very long and one time someone another academic he was like you can do the splits that's super weird I'm like yes it is weird and uh and he was like how can you do that I was like well as a kid I was in gymnastics and then I stretched all the time and he was like that is the dumbest causal story I've ever heard in my life there's no way that that is the single even the most important cause right and I just thought I think about that as like my whole life I've been I've been posed with this puzzle of why do I why can I do this weird thing and I told myself that and I don't think that's even remotely true I think this for whatever reason it just kind of developed so I can't fully answer your question about why I like got super interested in in this work but I will say that out of um College I I thought I was going to be a lawyer and that's because my my college major was something called the program of liberal studies which is a great books major where you read the great works of history and philosophy and stuff yeah and you read them in order and so and there's no lectures allowed you and you can't even read the introduction to the book so you just have to like read Hume and pretend like you can understand it and K and stuff like that and you argue with other 19-year-olds about what it might mean and uh I loved it it was great I still don't know what Kant was talking about but I'll figure that out at some point but then with PS the joke is probably law school which is the answer to the question of what are you going to do with this liberal arts major and so I thought that's what I'll do but at the last second I just had a change of heart and so I went and taught in a really low-income school in Tulsa Oklahoma and I ended up being the 6 through eight uh English teacher the k through eight basketball coach I coached um or k38 PE coach and then I coached basketball and ran the book club and I like ran the the Cat 5 cables to fix the internet in the Attic you know and it was great I worked like 100 hours a week I made $12,000 a year was a lot of fun had a great time and at the end of it I thought now I'm going to go to law school and uh when I was doing my applications um a friend of mine died of cancer it got saroma it was real quick it was like six months and we all went back uh to college and were there for a service and I remember being in the airport and I picked up Jeffrey Sachs end of poverty which a popular book at the time and just thinking like here's a guy who like I don't know was doing something pretty mundane macroeconomics but he was spending all his time talking world leaders in other countries out of you know crushing debt that was causing poverty and it's like taking whatever precocious skill he had and using it for others and I thought law is not my Jeff Sach skill but what I I do know how to do is motivate teenagers like that's how I spend all my time and so I thought I just want to do I want to do this science of motivating young people like as much as possible so then I went to Stanford I'd never taken stats before never taken psychology but I just like tried to become like a wild man learning as much as I could and thankfully in my third year Carol started working with me and like we kind of haven't looked back since what an awesome story so totally Mission driven and and post talk causal inference so who knows if that's actually the story but that those are those sequence of events did occur though post causal inference I guess you can map on to that famous uh Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford where he's basically saying you can't connect the dots um going forward only backward so it all makes sense looking back exactly you know this led to that led to this led to that but going forward we're we're kind of stumbling in the dark a bit um well I must say I I and everyone else's are so grateful that you made that choice or those choices um clearly the work you're doing is is having a huge impact I I covered a few of your papers on the solo episode on growth mindset and you mentioned nature and um the the fact that most people don't uh publish there at all let alone once or twice or several times in their career you've had an amazing run lately and um youve just had this this incredible Arc of of papers in this in this area of which can be distilled down to I think um forgive me if this doesn't capture it all but uh figuring out um how people can be the best version of themselves for their own lives and for the world right I mean that's essentially what we're talking about here and I love the way you incorporate the neuroscience and the and the motivation literature and um and you're so good at attribution as something that we we should all model ourselves around um it's really an incredible literature and um I'm excited to read the book uh 10 to 25 genuinely excited this notion of a mentor mindset and um how we can bring out the best in ourselves and others it's a it's phenomenal that you're doing this work um please keep going and um I'm speaking on behalf of myself and everyone else I say you know thanks for taking time out of your busy research schedule and teaching schedule to come here and um teach millions of people about what you do and what they can do to be their best so thank you so much well thanks well we're just getting started and uh it was great to be here I did I I'm I missed baseball practice tonight so not for me but for uh nine-year-olds um an apology to your nine-year-olds yeah okay oh cuz there's more there many of them on the team okay this is back in Austin okay um when's their next game couple three or four weeks so we have plenty of time we're still learning how to throw and hit we'll get there well depending on when this episode comes out you can let me know if they won or lost and and um apologies to the process that's right well I um that game is important um and uh but I can assure you that the the information that you you've given us today is is is sure to make a huge difference in people's lives live so thank you so much thanks for having me thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr David joerger to learn more about his research to find links to his social media accounts and to learn more about his upcoming book 10 to 25 the science of motivating young people simply go to the links in our show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us please also subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up 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thank you for your interest in science [Music]