The impetus for this post may seem unrelated to the bulk of the thing, but I try to tie up all the loose ends at the end. I started writing this because I am frustrated with how political/philosophical discussions are very rare, invariably contentious, seldom fruitful, and almost never worth having... and how almost any conversation I have (outside of a classroom) is thereby reduced to routine pleasantries, empty courtesies... just wasted time and wasted breath. But before I could adequately address this, I realized that needed to talk in some detail about attributions/mindsets, intelligence qua situated cognition, and politics qua rooting for your favorite team. This is a loaded post, and in more ways than one (see the title).
Do you believe that a person's basic abilities---e.g., their intelligence, their talents---are fixed traits? That people possess a certain amount of intelligence, say, which is more-or-less stable across the lifetime? Or do you tend to believe that these qualities can be developed through effort, good teaching, and persistence? That everyone can have these abilities and achieve if they work at it?* It may surprise you that the former outlook, termed a "fixed" or "entity" mindset, is endemic in America today, while the latter, a "growth" or "incremental" mindset, is more common in collectivist cultures. This distinction is championed by psychologist Carol Dweck, whose research on this subject been widely influential in recent years.
Because we often don't have any conscious awareness of our mindset, it is tough to make a candid determination and usually requires some roundabout self-experimentation. Here's a quick gauge: when you experience failure, how do you take it? Just imagine past failures and try to remember how you responded at the time. Did you react strongly (inwardly or outwardly), become despondent, or give up quickly upon experiencing difficulties? Did it bother you so much that you refused to even acknowledge the failure, effectively convincing yourself that it never happened? Do you dread failure, even now? Do you spend a lot of time trying to appear smart, capable, talented, etc.? When you were a child, were your cultural spokespersons (your teachers, your parents) telling you things like "you're so smart, you're so talented, so this and so that" instead of "you worked so hard, you learned so much, all that practice really paid off!"
If your answer was "yes" to any of the above, chances are good that you, like me, have a "fixed" mindset. It is our unconscious tendency to interpret our successes and failures as evidence either supporting or disconfirming our possession of certain "abilities". To someone with a fixed mindset, if you fail at something, you are probably bad at it. And while this may sound somewhat reasonable on the face of it, such a policy can be extremely pernicious. Imagine young schoolchildren all across the country who, upon receiving poor scores in math, have learned it's OK to simply repeat the culturally normative, socially acceptable phrase "I am bad at math." The fixed mindset breeds and perpetuates a crippling cycle of defeatism; when you get a bad math grade and say "I got this grade because I am bad at math," you are telling yourself that trying to improve would be pointless. After all, you are "bad at math." That's just who you are, and there's nothing you can do about it. But then, when your next grade is just as bad because you didn't put forth any effort, all you see is more evidence that you really are bad at math. "See, another bad grade. I told you that I'm not a math person!" Though it may sound eerily familiar, this sort of thinking can have tragic consequences: when people start attributing negative outcomes and experiences to internal, stable, personal factors, they come to believe that they are powerless to change their situation. They have slowly convinced themselves of their permanent helplessness, and they make no attempt to better their circumstances.
I've taken math as my pet example for fixed-mindset here because these delusions are nigh ubiquitous. In the United States, most people believe that only a few "gifted" individuals "have what it takes" to learn math, and that hard work can't compensate for this. To someone with a growth mindset, however, failure just means that you need to improve. Studies have shown that, when asked to explain why some children do better in math than others, Asian children, teachers, and parents point to hard work, while their American counterparts point to ability. But this post isn't about math; it should be obvious by now that mindset influences almost every aspect of a person's life--especially how they face challenges and cope with setbacks.
Another familiar hazard of the fixed mindset is something called the fundamental attribution error, the almost universal tendency overemphasize the role of someone's personal traits---their disposition, character, or personality---when explaining their behavior. For example, if someone walks by with an unfriendly phiz, we are more likely to think "that guy's an asshole" than we are "that guy's having a rough day." As a species, we find it easier to think in terms of fixed traits than in terms of situational factors... static adjectives and nouns (e.g., "smart person") make for easier mental labeling than do dynamic verbs ("worked hard"). Entity attributions like "I am an intelligent person" are difficult to maintain in the face of difficulties, whereas growth attributions like "I succeeded or failed because of my effort" place greater responsibility on the person-in-situation and lead to greater motivation.
To get a little meta for a moment, saying things like "I have a fixed mindset" is totally diagnostic of a fixed mindset... if you believe that it cannot be changed.
While acknowledging your mindset doesn't confer any immediate immunities---I'm as guilty as anybody of misplaced attributions---but it can change your perspective on things like intelligence, ability, and talent. These are sensitive subjects, particularly when conceived of as deterministic traits in a larger dialogue framed in terms of individual/group differences. The chief limitation comes from the tendency to think of people and situations as independent entities rather than seeing people-in-situations as integrated systems; this attitude leads us to look for talent/intelligence/ability in the heads of those we consider talented, intelligent, and able, which is flagrant dualism-- completely circular logic hobbled by the fetters of fixed mindset. Some hallmarks of this conception, which is as widespread as it is outmoded, are sayings like "there's a birth lottery for intelligence" or "a study proved that the heritability of IQ is 95% such-and-so."*
So the traditional notion, the commonly held belief that some people are "smart" while others are "dumb", is strongly echoed by the "find the gifted child" model of talent development. I want to share with you a supremely apropos account of a student who was selected to attend an intensive academic summer program for "talented" students. This program was designed around progressive educational strategies which emphasized collaboration, discovery learning, and creativity. Despite the fact that she was a model student and by all accounts highly intelligent, her performance in the program was extremely poor and her social interactions deteriorated. Discussions with her concerned instructors revealed that she was completely out of her instructional element! She was very uncomfortable in this classroom full of bright suburban students, and she had a strong preference for the lecture format used in her high school. In the traditional conception, her performance (in a technologically rich, well-designed curriculum) was below average, and therefore she had low ability. After adjustments were made to address this, her performance improved significantly. Thus, a better explanation of "ability" here is that her potential to act was a poor fit for this specific environment, and as a result the person-situation interaction did not support the emergence of "talent".
The point is that people perform differently in different settings! To take another striking example, the Adult Math Project (Lave, 1986) found that during price arithmetic calculations, shoppers almost never made an error, while the same individuals averaged only 57% correct on comparable math problems in a testing situation. The reason for these differences, in Fancy Jargon, is that different features of the environment afford activities for an agent who has appropriate effectivities. Just think about how differently you perform when you are in comfortable, familiar situations versus when you are in uncomfortable, unfamiliar ones; intelligence is not a thing that you possess, but a thing that arises from the dynamic transaction among the individual, their previous experiences, their physical environment, and the sociocultural context.
"A learner's ultimate understanding of any object, issue, concept, process, or practice, as well as her ability to act competently with respect to using these, can be attributed to, and is distributed across, the physical, temporal, and spatial occurrences through which her competencies have emerged" (Barab and Plucker, 19xx).
I'm pretty far afield already, but think for a minute about the instructional implications of all this. All too frequently, the learning taking place in a classroom context contributes to knowledge that is inert during interactions outside of the school walls. Fortunately, there have been movements that stress ongoing participation and aim to develop contexts within classrooms that aid students in learning the material in a manner consistent with those situations in which they would use the material outside of school.
OK, wait, so what was the point of all of this about mindsets and attributions if I wanted to talk about how people discuss political and philosophical topics? I believe that the fixed-mindset perspective has grim implications for the way people discuss, debate, or otherwise compare their ideas. Concretely, if I assert something in front of fixed-mindset folks, then the idea or belief I have articulated is assumed by default to be some fixed and immutable aspect of me, with people either becoming supportive or defensive depending on whether they agree or disagree. In these interactions, we assume that the other party is unwilling, perhaps even unable to change the belief they just expressed, when in fact they may feel no strong attachment to any of their beliefs... I know that countervailing evidence could cause me to change a false beliefs in an instant, even if it's a false belief I happened to have been proud/fond of. When someone brings up their ideas, beliefs, or pet theories, they are not necessarily aggressing or competing or initiating a stand-off... when I bring up my feelings about a political issue, I am not marching my views forth like soldiers into battle; I am submitting them to you as incomplete-yet-personally-compelling hypotheses that I want new/different perspectives on. Views that I want your perspective on. Yet people become automatically, acutely, viscerally defensive, because they identify so strongly with their mostly arbitrary belief system... "I was raised a Libracratic Conservican, therefore the things I believe are A, B, and C!" ...and they assume that I must likewise be passionately attached to my own. Saying something that might be inconsistent with A, B, or C is tantamount to declaring war on their side, because the American way is to reduce even serious issues like ethics and governance to games of sport. Instead of having a rational discussion, we can mindlessly scream Go My Team! Boo Your Team! and feel like we've actually accomplished something.
So just because you hear me say "I think X, Y, Z", please try not to create a mental model of Nathaniel that has X, Y, and Z fixed beliefs. I believe in nothing 100%, I try to have no irrational attachment to my beliefs just because they are my beliefs, and I relish adopting new beliefs when compelling arguments are available.
*Nota bene: I am NOT asking for your opinion on "Nature vs. Nurture", which is an over-hyped and unproductive false dichotomy. If you actually know what you're talking about---e.g., no anecdotal assertions about your family, etc.---and are prepared to discuss norms of reaction and phenotypic plasticity, then OK we can do that sometime.
