American Scientist

This interview was featured in episode 1 of Wired for This, a limited podcast series from American Scientist exploring the psychology of human behavior and neuroscience: what drives us forward, what holds us back, and how we navigate a world bursting with noise, contradiction, and complexity (scroll to the bottom of the page for the full podcast). Paul O’Keefe is a social psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at the University of Exeter Business School. His research examines how psychological barriers—particularly beliefs about abilities, interests, and opportunity—shape the goals people pursue and their potential to achieve them. He and his team design growth-mindset interventions, tested through randomized controlled field experiments, to help people thrive in work, education, and health contexts. O’Keefe also directs the Mindsets and Motivation Lab and serves as an associate editor at the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. This conversation with host Celia Ford has been edited for length and clarity.

You primarily study mindsets. Can you explain what those are?

When we think about mindsets, we’re talking about belief systems—fundamental beliefs people have about themselves, other people, and the world. Beliefs that we develop become lenses through which we take in a lot of information. A subset of those beliefs has to do with the malleability of things.

We can have fixed mindsets about certain things, or growth mindsets. A fixed mindset suggests that an attribute or some aspect of the world is not going to change. A growth mindset refers to the idea that there’s something that’s changeable or improvable.

This work was pioneered by psychologist Carol Dweck, who ran experiments, often in classrooms, where she observed that given very challenging tasks, some students would be really excited about the challenge—failings, setbacks, and frustrations didn’t put them off. Other students gave up at the first sign of difficulty. They were in the same classrooms, same teachers, and same situations, but had two completely different responses. She concluded that people who believe that intelligence is malleable see failures as surmountable.

What factors shape a person’s resilience?

As you might suspect, there’s so much that goes into what would make people resilient. Let’s take a student in a class who got a bad grade on, say, a math test. That’s going to be demoralizing for anyone. Nobody wants that. But you might have two students in the same classroom who are reacting very differently. Someone with a fixed mindset, who believes that their intelligence cannot improve, will believe they’ve hit their ceiling. They’re not resilient in this case.

But someone with a growth mindset about intelligence might get a bad grade and think it’s a bummer. But then they’ll think, “Okay, I didn’t get it yet. Maybe I need to work harder. Maybe I need a better study strategy. But I believe, fundamentally, that the nature of intelligence is that I could become smarter, so it only stands to reason that I should keep trying.” That student would be resilient to failures.

Grit has a lot to do with perseverance and liking what you’re doing. A growth mindset feeds into that type of disposition, because your entire framework for understanding a situation where you’re experiencing setbacks or failure leads to telling yourself, “I can figure this out.”

You also tell people to stop trying to find their passions and to start developing passions instead. Why is that important?

My colleagues and I started to question what it really means to “find your passion.” Hidden within that is something possibly problematic: If passion is something to be found, then that means it already exists and you just need to uncover it. And people believe that when they do find it, it will be fully formed, raring to go, and that everything is going to be easy from there on out.

When encountering a difficulty, the people with a fixed mindset, who minutes ago said they were fascinated by a topic, now on average said they didn’t like it. They had an expectation that passion would provide them with limitless motivation and inspiration. When it didn’t, they may have reevaluated and said, “I guess I was mistaken. This isn’t an interest of mine after all.” But when we asked people with a growth mindset, they told us that pursuing passion can be a difficult, developmental process. Given that, why wouldn’t there be setbacks? So they maintained interest, despite reporting the same perceived difficulty.

When we think about how this would apply to the real world—in situations like taking on new roles at work, or taking new classes at school, or thinking about the kind of person you hope to grow into being—people who believe that a spark of interest will carry them might just give up. People with a growth mindset never expect pursuing a potential passion to be easy, so it doesn’t affect their interest.