Summary concepts and methods

¶ … differential effects of 'praise of intelligence' and 'praise of effort' on children and how it affects them. The authors proposed that praising intelligence as against efforts had detrimental effects on children and led to lesser resilience in the face of setbacks. The authors validated their hypothesis by including six studies that analyzed the effect of "praise for intelligence" and "praise for effort" on a variety of aspects both in terms of failure as well as success. Effort, as opposed to ability, is a much more flexible concept, so a poor performance is more likely to be interpreted as due to lack of effort than due to lack of intelligence. The authors arrive at the conclusion that praise for efforts results in better motivation and better handling of failures. The studies also clearly conclude that the responses to failure are related to how children interpret their performance. Children who are praised for their intelligence or for their effort interpret the experience of failure differently. Post failure striving is high when efforts are praised indicating positive adaptive behaviors. The differing attributions to success also contribute to a distinct difference in terms of the goals that children strive for (performance or learning)

Study three, for example, concluded that praising children for their intelligence after success in a task could do more harm than good by conditioning them into a performance oriented mindset than a learning focused one. This can also make them more vulnerable in the face of defeats making them less resilient and under-perform or even totally avoid challenges that can be risky. That is to say that children who are praised for their intelligence in an effort to maintain their image tend to shy away from tasks that appear hard. Study four focused on children's information seeking behavior and how praising different aspects of performance affects it. The fact that 76% of children who were praised for their intelligence chose to focus on information pertaining to performance of others rather than focusing on actual problem solving strategies indicates the development of a performance focused mindset where performance rather than gaining knowledge was the most desired outcome. Study five eliminated the possibility that the experimenter's influence by way of his expectations (from past performances) on the students had any role in children's responses to their failures. The sixth study concluded that praise for ability in one successful task continued to influence children's responses to failures in subsequent unrelated tasks.