Anyone who follows this blog and my (our) work knows that I’ve previously nuanced the hype surrounding the Growth Mindset. Not because the idea—intelligence can be developed—is absurd, but because the interventions aimed at it rarely make a significant difference. The average effects on learning gains are small and often difficult to replicate. I would immediately add that it’s best to look at the impact on your pupils or students, and if there’s no success, do something else. But what if the problem isn’t just that it yields little, but also that it can cause more harm than we think?

A new study by Cheng-Kai Sheu and Woo-kyoung Ahn (Yale University, H/T Christian Bockhove!) exposes precisely that risk. They conducted four experiments (total N = 785) in which participants were taught either a Growth Mindset or a fixed mindset. Then they are confronted with situations in which someone fails on an intellectual task. The results are remarkably consistent: those who have just learned that intelligence is malleable judge more harshly. People in the Growth Mindset condition placed more blame on the person who failed, felt that person had put in less effort, and therefore saw the failure as a personal shortcoming – even when the tasks were relatively difficult, or when the failure had negative consequences for others.

The explanation is both logical and painful: if you believe everything can be learned with sufficient effort, failure quickly becomes a moral issue. Anyone who stumbles should have tried harder. The research shows that this mechanism is not just theoretical: even when participants receive precisely the same information, the Growth Mindset leads to a lower estimated effort, and therefore more blame.

The authors are concerned, not about the idea of a Growth Mindset itself, but about the way that message is often conveyed in practice: too often without nuance, without attention to context or structural obstacles. And precisely because of that, the message sometimes becomes harsh instead of hopeful. “If you really want to, you can do it” sounds good—until you say it to someone who wants to but can’t.

Perhaps that’s the most important lesson. Not that we should stop encouraging effort or growth, but that we should take a critical look at the potential downside. Because a mindset designed to empower students shouldn’t lead us to punish them when they stumble. Let alone to judge others for what they haven’t learned, can’t handle, or simply couldn’t overcome.

Abstract of the research:

Research on growth mindsets, essentially the malleability of intelligence through effort, often highlights their benefits of boosting performance and reducing achievement gaps. Acrossfour studies (N = 785), we investigated the unintended consequences of the growth mindset, hypothesizing that its emphasis on intelligence as controllable would lead to greaterblame toward others for intellectual failure, compared to the fixed mindset, which views intelligence as largely innate.Study 1 found that participants primed with the growth mindsetassigned more blame for low-difficulty intellectual failuresthan those primed with the fixed mindset. Study 2 showed this effect diminished when intellectual failures involved highly challenging tasks. Study 3 highlighted the harm caused by individual’s intellectual failures and found that participants in the growth mindset condition still assigned greater blame thanthose in the fixed mindset condition. Study 4 explored a possible mechanism, finding that a growth mindset, compared to a fixed mindset, increased blame by leading participants to perceive less effort from the protagonist in the vignettes, even when both conditions were faced with identical intellectual failures. These findings underscore the need for nuanced implementations of the growth mindset.