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Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation (1998) [pdf]

psychology.stanford.edu

91–100 of 166 posts

Re: Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation (1998) [pdf]

#91
post #2

TL;DR: If you're interacting with a kid, try to avoid saying, "you're so smart!" and instead say, "You've picked this up really quickly" or "you're such a hard worker". If you tell a child they are smart then they will stop trying either because they assume they can get by on their intelligence or because they are afraid of failing and loosing your praise about how smart they are.

I grew up in a line of engineers and problem solvers.

As a kid when I'd do something cool and show my parents/relatives, they didn't neither of these approaches - no talking about how smart I was, nor about how much work I'd done. We just talked about how cool whatever the cool thing was.

It was great.

Re: Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation (1998) [pdf]

#92
post #20

He is also fucking lucky... Which helps ! Winning the startup lottery does not equal being a life role model. I would not generalize on such people.

I agree with your general point, but debating the merits of a specific celebrity's success is slightly in bad taste for this site, and in any case this has drifted far from Dweck's work.

One of the hard things about Hacker News is making sure that interesting topics get discussed, instead of getting pulled into a stronger gravitational field. Satellite digressions are often ok, but having every discussion land on the same old popular planets (what, Jupiter again?) is tedious.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12234163 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation (1998) [pdf]

#95
post #82
post #48

I can confirm that. When i was child, every teacher said to me and my parents that i am so gifted, so smart. And i thought i am so smart that i don't need to spend so much time on school like others. So i missed on school a lot. In high school there were classes on which i was less than 50% throughout the semester. And it was ok, i needed only 2 last weeks to pass all the tests. In last year i did the same, again i n…

The lesson being: be normal and normal only, otherwise you will be made so, through intoleration, discrimination and assimilation . Public school system is for average people, and I don't mean anything hostile saying that. You are, on the base of your story here, above average in your intellectual capacity, and don't need to go through the chores others need to go through to succeed your class. There's nothing unjust…

No need to apologize, you are 100% right.

Re: Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation (1998) [pdf]

#96

in China, we tell our kids that he/she is crap and he/she better work hard now. or the crappy kid next door is going to crap on him/her.

Seems like that would be psychologically damaging. It's certainly how helicoptor parents are seen in the US.

Re: Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation (1998) [pdf]

#97
post #41
post #16

This is utter bullshit. Let the fucking kid enjoy some self-esteem. Focusing on improving his "motivation" instead of his well-being is manipulative and can backfire in so many ways. Just let him be. Fuck the productivity way of life.

When I was constantly praised for being intelligent, but criticized for my real failings, I didn't got high self-steem. I got instead self hate, and extreme amounts of Hubris, of the sort that I believed myself so intelligent that I could tell a very high ranked government official that she was dumb, without consequences. (I was 15 during that incident, caused some crazy mess)

well, was the government official really dumb though?

the lesson is "don't piss of people with power over you that are willing to use it". that's a tough lesson to learn and is practical advice for survival in this world. there is value in truth though. learning better strategies for telling the truth is very valuable.

Re: Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation (1998) [pdf]

#98
post #28
post #16

This is utter bullshit. Let the fucking kid enjoy some self-esteem. Focusing on improving his "motivation" instead of his well-being is manipulative and can backfire in so many ways. Just let him be. Fuck the productivity way of life.

> This is utter bullshit. Let the fucking kid enjoy some self-esteem. You don't think a person can have self-esteem based on their work ethic?

false dichotomy. a person can have self-esteem based on EITHER or BOTH of those characteristics.

Re: Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation (1998) [pdf]

#99
post #2

TL;DR: If you're interacting with a kid, try to avoid saying, "you're so smart!" and instead say, "You've picked this up really quickly" or "you're such a hard worker". If you tell a child they are smart then they will stop trying either because they assume they can get by on their intelligence or because they are afraid of failing and loosing your praise about how smart they are.

But doesn't every praise, every comparison create a narrative for the child. A narrative that the brain learns to lean on and uses to form self-identity ( hard-worker, good boy ect). for example, Now the child has learned associate praise( and love) with being a hard worker. This is now his framework for his life, a prison he can never escape. I think this a form of child abuse, to destroy child's spirit with praises…

There is a difference between praising effort when effort is needed, and praising pointless effort that is just self-punishment.

Later in life children will be put in situations were being unable to work effectively and put in effort will have really bad impacts on their lives. Preparing them to be able to cope is for their own best.

That does not equate to teaching them to be good little worker drones regardless of their own happiness.

> kids already have great deal of intrinsic motivation why do we need to praise him.

Because not receiving praise and positive attention is soul destroying and leads people to seek other ways of getting attention. In the absence of positive attention, any attention - including punishment will do.

Got a kid? Try ignoring them, and see attention-grabbing behaviour escalate dramatically in an amazingly short time span. From my son was 2 and to this day (he's 7), withdrawing attention has been our primary means of discipline, and it is scarily effective. When he was 2-3 we'd limit it to ignore him for 20-30 seconds at a time.

(In fact, it works with adults too - just try shifting your body away from someone to punish behaviour you find rude or offensive. It's crazily effective with most people)

So given that you almost certainly will praise your children if you want them to thrive, the question is what to praise to help them do as well as possible.

Praising them for effort does not mean praising them only for that, or praising them for working too much. It means praising them for effort in preference to praising them for results. But also praise them for other things, including ensuring they get enough rest and take time to play.

Re: Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation (1998) [pdf]

#100
As an aside, I think this sort of upbringing is a significant contributing factor to the personality type that shows up frequently in the most toxic online groups (MRAs, gamergaters, PUAs, etc). In my glimpses, it's been abundantly clear that many of them are highly intelligent and not much else: single, with shitty jobs, no exceptional skills, and dim prospects for the future. But because they grew up being told they were going to be rich and happy because they were so smart, it's clearly the rest of the world's fault that they didn't end up with the life they feel entitled to.
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