Does Mindset Matter?

The growth mindset has gained popularity in education and work environments where it is touted as the solution to cure all organizational ills. However, recent research shows that such claims are overstated. GETTY.

The concept of fostering a growth mindset has attracted a great deal of attention since it was conceived by Carol Dweck more than 30 years ago. Since then, Dweck has gone on to evangelize the growth mindset through her book, TED talk and the company she founded, Mindset Works, which describe the adoption of a growth mindset as not only transformative, but critical for success in today’s performance-oriented world. Mindset can purportedly explain “our relationship with success and failure in both professional and personal contexts, and ultimately our capacity for happiness.” This is no minor assertion.

But in spite of the growth mindset’s popular acclaim, researchers are beginning to wonder whether the enthusiasm around it is warranted. Recent research demonstrates an impact of mindset on achievement outcomes, but with small effects that are often limited to a subset of the general population.

Carol Dweck describes mindset as the set of beliefs around one’s abilities, such as intelligence, and assigns people to one of two mindset camps: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. While a person with a fixed mindset is said to believe that attributes are fixed and resist change through effort, someone with a growth mindset believes that these attributes are malleable, so they can be changed through effort and determination.