American Scientist

In the premiere episode of Wired for This, we're discussing mindsets, grit, resilience, and what it takes to make seeable change in your life.

We’ll hear from Paul O’Keefe, 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 affect 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.

TRANSCRIPT

[Music: Wandering by Nat Keefe FADE IN]

[Celia]
Welcome to Wired for This—a deep dive into how we think, believe, change, and connect.
In this limited series, we’ll explore 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.
Today, we’ll hear from Dr. Paul O’Keefe, a social psychologist and associate 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. Dr. O’Keefe also directs the Mindsets and Motivation Lab and serves as an associate editor at the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. From American Scientist, I’m Celia Ford, you’re listening to Wired for This.

[Paul O’Keefe]
The dirty little secret in my field is that a lot of us conduct me-search. The reason we conduct certain work is because it affected us at some point. And certainly in my case that was true.
Elementary school was great. It goes pretty smoothly. And then middle school hits and everything changes: You’re graded more harshly. More is expected of you. And we very reliably see that this is where a lot of students take a big hit. I definitely did.
I started to question my competence. It seemed that some people just had it, and maybe I didn’t. It was profoundly crippling to me. It felt like I was imprisoned. I didn’t know how to work my way out of it.
So, I did what a lot of kids did. You focus more on not looking stupid. It wasn’t about learning and working hard to learn — it was about survival. Toward the end of high school I had a series of experiences that all brought to light that my own beliefs were what was holding me back. It wasn’t my genetics. It wasn’t this or that. It was what was in my head.
I decided to experiment with myself. What if I did really work hard? Would I be a fantastic student? Sure enough, I really focused, and I started to become a good student. It got me out of that bubble that I was living in that said, “whatever level of intelligence you have is just what you have.” It broke me out of that. I realized that I had so much more potential than I ever thought. Of course, you start thinking, if this is true for me, isn’t it true for so many other people?
My interest in psychology really stemmed from that – how incredibly motivating it was to learn that intelligence and other things were malleable, that they could be improved upon. You weren’t stuck at some level. That’s what I’ve been studying ever since.

[Celia]
I do think that a lot of people are trapped in that feeling that intelligence is something that you either have or you don’t. It does hold a lot of people back.
I know that you study mindset specifically, which is one of those concepts in psychology that I think that I understand until I try to define it myself, and then I only land on, “mindsets are how I set my mind?” I think I know what I’m talking about, but then I try to put words to it and I don’t. So I’ll ask you. What are mindsets exactly?

[Paul]
When we think about mindsets, we’re talking about belief systems. Fundamental beliefs people have about themselves, about other people, about the world. These beliefs that we develop, they influence how we interpret our experiences. They indicate how we should respond in certain situations. In other words, they’re lenses through which we take in a lot of information.
We’re not these objective observers of the world. Everything is being filtered through our own psychological processes. One of those that’s very important is our fundamental beliefs, our pre-existing beliefs. And a subset of these beliefs we have has to do with the malleability of things.
We can have fixed mindsets about certain things, or a growth mindset. Fixed mindset suggests that an attribute or some aspect of the world is fixed. It’s not going to change. A growth mindset refers to the idea that there’s something that’s changeable or improvable.

[Celia]
Can you tell me more about the tools that your research group uses to study squishy, nebulous concepts like mindsets and goal pursuit?

[Paul]
At the most basic level, we have developed questionnaires.

[Celia]
These questionnaires ask people whether they agree with statements like, “You might be able to learn things here and there, but your core intelligence level won’t really change.” Or, “You can be exposed to new things, but your core interests won’t really change.”

[Paul]
We can use them to predict certain outcomes. Resilience. Aspects of goal pursuit. Success and so forth. That’s at the very basic level. In the laboratory, we might want to teach people a certain mindset that might last a temporary amount of time and give them some tasks.

[Celia]
One way they do this: give people an easy-to-read research article about something like the malleability of intelligence, or how interests can be developed.

[Paul]
What that does is it puts them in a very temporary mindset where they’re thinking along those lines of that type of mindset and its usefulness. In the field, which is something that I do a lot of, we do interventions. The purpose there is a bit different. We’re not trying to do something temporary. Instead of changing people’s minds in the short run, we’re looking to really fundamentally change the way people think about something that will help them in a much more adaptive way. For those we use a technique called wise interventions. These are usually very short. It’s some light reading and reflective writing exercises. But everything in that intervention is really designed to get them to really truly think about, say, the way they think about the nature and workings of intelligence or interests very differently. We use a lot of what we understand in the psychological literature to make that change happen.

[Celia]

We'll be right back.

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[Celia]
You mentioned that when faced with challenges, some people tend to give up more quickly than others do. This may not be a permanently ingrained trait. It’s something that we can change if we want to. What factors shape how resilient we are, and how can we adapt how resilient we are?

[Paul]
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, what that failure suggests to them is that they’ve maxed out. They’ve hit their ceiling. For them, they’re not resilient in this case. But if you look at it from the perspective of someone with a growth mindset of intelligence, you get a bad grade. It’s a bummer. But you think, okay, I didn’t get it yet. Maybe I need to work harder, longer. 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 would keep trying. I would be resilient to those failures. When we talk about grit, this has a lot to do with perseverance and liking what you’re doing. A growth mindset is really feeding into that type of disposition, where you’re more gritty. Because your entire framework for understanding a situation like this, where you’re experiencing setbacks or failure, it’s all leading to this very logical outcome that says, “I can figure this out.”

[Celia]
It sounds like failure is an important, necessary part of learning and growing. I wonder how we can create environments, maybe in the classroom or in the workplace, that make failure feel less scary to people.

[Paul]
A lot of classrooms don’t do that so much. For example, a very typical classroom might grade students on a curve. Once you grade students on a curve, one, what you’re saying is that this is not about learning – it’s about being evaluated. And you’re going to be evaluated harshly, and what matters is not just your own personal improvement, if there is any. It matters how good you are compared to your classmates. These types of things can really create an environment that isn’t so much about learning, and where failure is terrible. It’s shameful and it’s embarrassing. It’s about performing. It’s about looking competent.

[Celia]
In one study, Paul and his colleagues tracked middle school-aged kids, who were used to regular performance-oriented classroom environments, in a summer program that was all about the love of learning — not grades or evaluation. They found that, in this summer program, kids focused more on learning, and stopped basing their self-worth on other people’s approval of their performance.

[Paul]
Then you track them when they go back to their school again, and you see that everything returns to how it was. A lot of what that environment did, in that summer program, is it minimized the importance of evaluation. We saw a lot of really healthy changes under that summer program. And it just shows how situational that can be, because they went back and everything went back to how it was.

[Celia]
So, what actually helps people stay motivated while slogging through a long-term project, like finishing college? It sounds like, maybe counterintuitively, de-emphasizing the perfection of the final product is helpful. What other strategies help people stick with hard things?

[Paul]
Having this fundamental belief and understanding that you can improve.
It’s not just good enough to have this mindset. Oh, I’m gonna go in there with a growth mindset! That’s very temporary. What I’m advocate for is, people need to understand that this is a more accurate way of how the world works, how intelligence works, how a lot of opportunities work. We need to fundamentally understand this. When you are confronted with those problems, you now have this understanding that, okay, this isn’t a dead end. This is a setback. This is an obstacle I can go over or around. I don’t have to just turn back and head back to the beginning. Having this mindset and maintaining it throughout the duration of your pursuits is extremely important.

[Celia]
I want to switch gears and talk about this great piece you wrote for Scientific American a little while back, where you told people to stop trying to find their passions, and start developing passions instead. I was absolutely taught to find my passion – was that wrong?

[Paul]
I was told to find my passion too. It’s very typical, common, ubiquitous advice. It comes from people we trust and look up to, like our parents, our teachers, our mentors, our commencement speakers. This is really well-intended advice. This is meant to inspire, meant to motivate. It’s meant to set people on a path for a life of fulfillment. Pursuing your passion should be related to living a fulfilling life.
But my colleagues and I in this work started to question–what does it mean to find your passion? Well, hidden within that is something possibly problematic. If it’s something to be found, then that means it already exists. It’s something within you, something inherent, and you just need to uncover it. That’s just not how interests and passions work. It’s much more accurate to say that they’re developed.
We started to examine people’s fundamental beliefs about the nature and workings of interests and passions. We found that a sizable group of people believe that their interests are inherent and just need to be found. And that when they do find them, they'll be fully formed, raring to go, and everything is going to be easy from there on out. But a lot of other people have a fundamentally different belief. They believe that interests are developed, that it takes time. You have to get involved.

[Celia]
Another lie, maybe, that I was told growing up is that if I did find my true passion, then I would be endlessly motivated to pursue it. This idea that if you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life. I do love what I do, but I still feel like I’m working plenty of days in my life. Your research, I think, suggests that’s not necessarily the case. Can you tell me more about that, and maybe any other misconceptions about passion that we need to address while we’re at it?

[Paul]
This is something that we examine directly. We wanted to know what people with a fixed and a growth mindset were thinking about a passion.
Those with a fixed mindset, we find that they think it’s just going to provide them with limitless motivation, limitless inspiration. Kind of like what we say about relationships. Love conquers all. This passion is going to conquer all.
But people with a growth mindset, we asked them, and they said, no, it can be difficult at times. It’s a developmental process. Why wouldn’t there be setbacks? Why wouldn’t there be challenges and frustration? Maybe some boredom and tedium. Of course. That is a more realistic way of thinking, but these are two very fundamentally different expectations of what it would mean to pursue a new interest or passion.

[Celia]
Back in 2018, Paul’s research group tested this out with a group of college students. They had people watch a fun video from the Guardian about black holes to pique their interest in astronomy - everyone said they loved it. [PAUSE] Interest: sparked. Then, they had those same students engage with the same topic, black holes, they just said they loved, but at a higher difficulty level: reading the first page of a scientific article about it [PAUSE] (not as fun).

[Paul]
Amazingly, the people with a fixed mindset of interest, who minutes ago said they were fascinated by this topic, now on average said they don’t like it.
The way we interpret this is that they had an expectation for what interest would do for them. It should have made for smooth sailing, and it didn’t. They may have re-evaluated this and said, I guess I was mistaken. This isn’t an interest after all.
But when we looked at the people with a growth mindset, they were still interested. They maintained an interest, even though they reported the same levels of difficulty in reading this article. They never had this expectation that it would be easy, and therefore that expectation was never violated.
When we think about how that would apply to the real world: taking on new roles at work, new tasks and responsibilities at work, or taking new classes at school, or when you’re thinking about the person you’re going to grow into being—if you have this idea that this spark of interest is going to carry you through it and make it easy, those people might just give up. They might not take that next class. They might not get that next promotion, because they just never liked it enough.
People with a growth mindset, they never expected it to be easy, and it didn’t affect their interest. They still liked it.

[Celia]
This makes me think about the math classes I took growing up. I really loved math when I was young, because it was taught in a fun, easy way. I was lucky to have great teachers. But as I carried on through school, going through plenty of not-so-great teachers, I stopped being interested in math. I never really regained that interest, either.

[Paul]
That can have to do with your teachers’ mindset, your parents’ mindset. We call these implicit theories in our field, because these are theories we have about the world or ourselves that we don’t even know about. Our parents, our mentors, our teachers, in very subtle ways they teach us their mindset. They’re playing a role in your interest in math, in whether that’s going to be lasting or if it’s something that’s going to fade away.

[Celia]

More, after the break.

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[Celia]
You're listening to Wired for This

[Celia]
Say that someone comes to you and they say, “I don’t really love my job. I don’t really have any hobbies. I want to pick up a fun new activity, but I don’t know where to start.” What advice would you give to someone who is curious about developing a new interest, but doesn’t really know how?

[Paul]
You have to know what the problem is. What is the psychological barrier? If it’s that they don’t know what’s interesting, inculcating a growth mindset of interest can help them consider new interests. This is something we’ve studied quite a bit.
It might be that they don’t see the relevance of certain things. It’s an unfortunate fact of our school system that we teach a lot of kids stuff that could not be less relevant to them and their lives at that time. At a time in their lives when they just might want to think about dating or think about sleepovers or any number of things, we’re trying to get them to care about the branches of government. Stuff like that. That can be very challenging.
One successful way of making this happen is championed by my colleague Judith Harackiewicz, where we get them to think about what we call utility value of whatever it is that we need them to be interested in. In other words, how is it useful to you?

[Celia]
A little more on utility value: Judith Harackiewicz (hair-a-kevitch), psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has done a bunch of studies where she has students write about how the material they’re learning — whether it’s math or biology or something else — might be relevant in their real lives. She’s found that just thinking about how something can be useful makes it more interesting.

[Paul]
The problem could also be opportunities. For them, they want to be a musician, but they don’t know anybody who has a guitar, or anybody who has recording equipment. They’re just on their own. That might be something that is stopping them.
If they have a fixed mindset, they might think, well, maybe I’ll meet somebody someday and I can borrow their guitar.
Someone with a growth mindset, if we can teach them that way of thinking, they might be thinking, well, how can I make this happen? I wonder if I could ask around school. Maybe I could borrow a guitar from a friend. Maybe I could intern at a recording studio and get some experience. Now that is making it so that they’re going out and getting the opportunities that they want to really pursue their own interests and things they think would be exciting. Understanding what that barrier is and what we could do to remove that barrier.

[Celia]
Earlier you did admit that you started pursuing this line of work in part for the sake of “me-search.” Has your work ended up influencing your own approach to your personal and professional challenges?

[Paul]
Without question. The effect of failures and setbacks, as I said before, never goes away.
If I apply for a grant and I don’t get it, it’s a real bummer, it’s a heartbreaker. You know you put a lot of work. You’re really excited about this huge new project you want to do. You don’t get the funding and you have to start all over again. It could take another year before you get the next answer.
But when you understand that this is the nature of things, and that this perseverance, this grit and this way of thinking that–okay, maybe I didn’t write as great of a grant as I thought I did. Maybe I should go back and look. Maybe I should get some trusted colleagues to give me some feedback. Maybe I’m blind to something here that they won’t be blind to. Maybe I didn’t sell it—maybe I didn’t market it the way I should have. I could have framed it differently to have a bigger impact. Even in my career now, I’m always thinking about this, about how I could use that.
And I also think about how I can use this as a teacher. I’m constantly thinking about how I can make it so my students and my advisees understand that when it feels like they’ve hit a brick wall, it’s not. It’s a hurdle that they have to deal with. They have to figure out how to get over it.
For example, I won’t say, “You didn’t get it.” I’ll say, “You didn’t get it yet.” And you can do it,also, with the feedback we give people.
If they, say, do a great job on a paper or a research project, I don’t say, “Wow, you must be really smart.” Because what that does is it suggests that the reason they did well is because they have the magic, the gift, the smarts. And then when they inevitably work on the next task that at some point will be very difficult, and they’ll get very frustrated, they won’t do very well on it — they will interpret that in a way that says, well, I was smart enough for the other one but I’m not smart enough for this one. That’s demoralizing. It’s demotivating.
But if you praise students for their effort when they do really well, then the next time they encounter something really really difficult, they realize, “In the last one I did well because I worked hard. On this one I didn’t do as well, but I think I can work even harder and accomplish this.”

[Celia]
As we wrap up, I’m curious. If I gave you a soapbox to stand on and you could say, “There’s this one intervention or application of my work that seems to be really helpful, and I wish everyone would apply this,” whether it’s in the classroom or with their kids or anything, can you think of one thing that seems like it’s the most obvious or the most helpful?

[Paul]
When people have this preconceived notion that they are a certain type of person and that’s the bubble that they’re going to live in, they’re going to miss out on so much of what life has to offer and how it could enrich them. I’m very excited about the research that we’ve done in that area, those interventions.

[Celia]
In a study published this year in the journal Contemporary Educational Psychology, Paul and his colleagues followed a group of incoming pre-college students: they overwhelmingly identified as big science nerds, and applied to this particular school because it had historically been known for its science curriculum. But recently, the school introduced a new multidisciplinary curriculum that would require all of these science-y students to step outside their comfort zone and take arts classes, too.
So, Paul’s team gave these students a growth-theory-of-interest intervention, essentially a series of quick reading and reflective writing prompts designed to get students thinking about how their interests aren’t fixed, and can be developed over time.
Compared to students who didn’t do this, these kids reported feeling more interested in arts and science, and felt a stronger sense of belonging at their new multidisciplinary school.

[Paul]
They’re more open to this new area that they had previously closed off. To me that’s really exciting. They don’t have to be fascinated by everything, but to develop these interests, to expand yourself, to expand your knowledge and your experiences, that’s really beneficial.

[Celia]
Before you go, do you have any ongoing work that you’re especially excited about, or anything else that you want to plug?

[Paul]
Well, the stuff that I’m really excited about now is the work that we’re doing on implicit theories of opportunity.
It’s important to acknowledge that we do live in a world where opportunity is not equal. We don’t live in a fair or just world. There really are differences in opportunity among people. But to the extent that people can carve out their own path and believe that they can carve out some path and get the opportunities that they need to accomplish their goals, so far in our research we’ve found that it’s very advantageous.
We’ve been developing interventions. We’ve been working with transitioning veterans. These are people who are just finishing up their military service. They’re about to go from this super structured, ideally socialized environment, where things are a lot clearer–there’s a clearer path to promotion than there is in the civilian world. They go from this to a very capitalistic, less structured civilian world. That’s a transition that is extremely difficult, for very good reasons, for many veterans.
What we’re doing now is, we’re teaching them, versus a control condition, that their opportunities can be cultivated. Even when they don’t feel that they have the opportunities they need to pursue the goals they have – employment, for example – they can actually change those circumstances. We’re excited, because for me this is an extremely meaningful group of people to work with. It’s a population that has not been researched enough in our field, in my opinion. I’m very excited about this project, and we’re hoping that it helps a lot of them as they make that very difficult transition to the next chapter of their lives.

[Celia]
Thank you for doing that work, and thanks again for being here. It’s been a pleasure.

[Paul]
Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

[Music: Wandering by Nat Keefe FADE IN]

[Celia]
Thank you to Paul O’Keefe for joining us on this episode of Wired for This. You can find links to our sources in the episode description.
You’ve been listening to a podcast by American Scientist, published by Sigma Xi, the Scientific Honor Society.
Wired For This is produced and edited by Nwabata Nnani and hosted by me, Celia Ford.
Thanks for listening.

[Music: Wandering by Nat Keefe FADE OUT]