5 Strategies for Changing Mindsets

Tenth graders were 3x more likely to score in the top fifth on a national achievement test if they had a growth mindset (if they believed that intelligence is something you can grow). Teachers suspended 50% fewer students if they adopted an empathic mindset about discipline (if they believed teachers should try to understand the perspective of a misbehaving student). Those are just two examples of the dramatic ways in which our mindsets can affect our behavior and our lives in meaningful ways.

Our mindsets also affect whether we seek out and persist through challenges, whether we think others should be given opportunities to learn, whether we get depressed, even whether we act prejudiced. In short, mindsets are important.

How do you help people develop mindsets that bring out their best?

People’s intuitions about how to change mindsets are often wrong. I’ve been studying mindsets at Stanford for the last 10 years, and I’ve seen numerous well-intentioned efforts to change mindsets fall flat or backfire because they ignored the psychology of persuasion.

Persuaders (those trying to change someone else’s mindset) sometimes err by approaching mindsets as if they were “facts” to be memorized rather than habits of mind to be internalized. Or they ignore the personal and emotionally charged nature of many mindsets, which means changing them calls for special sensitivity to the perspective of the persuadee (the person whose mindset you’re trying to change).

Imparting a new mindset successfully requires a careful application of persuasion principles. I listed just a few of these principles below, and I oversimplified for the sake of brevity. My goal is just to whet your appetite. For a more nuanced and comprehensive account of these processes, read books or take classes on “attitudes and persuasion” or “social influence;” read Greg Walton’s (2014) paper on wise interventions; or pursue a Ph.D. in social psychology (it’s pretty fun).

1. Social modeling — provide a positive example of the transformation you seek

If you want someone to transform — to adopt a new mindset or behavior — provide positive social models for the transformation you hope to see (Bandura, 1962). For example, if you want a teacher to invest more in building strong relationships with students, given them the opportunity to hear from teachers who invested more in building strong relationships and had positive experiences as a result. That will help them envision what change could look like for them and why it might be attractive.

2. Social norms — use the bandwagon

To get someone to do something new, convey the idea that most “people like them” are already doing it — or that there is a growing trend towards people doing it (Lewin, 1943). For example, Schultz and colleagues (2007) got people to use less electricity by showing them that others in their own community, on average, use less electricity than they do. Whereas “social modeling” provides a narrative account of the transformational process, “social norms” focus on the number of people who are enacting a desired behavior, or subscribing to the desired mindset.

3. Signal credibility — use a trusted messenger

People are more likely to be persuaded by messengers whose opinion seems credible on the topic at hand (e.g., Heesacker, Petty, & Cacioppo, 1983). Keep in mind that credibility is not necessarily about credentials or prestige. For example, a student might find a peer to be a more credible source of information than a teacher when it comes to deciding what’s “cool.”

4. Respect autonomy — being patronized elicits resistance, not persuasion

People don’t like it when somebody else tells them how to think, especially if it’s “for their own good.” If the persuadee suspects you’re trying to manipulate them, they are more likely to become defensive and to resist your persuasion attempts. This is a phenomenon called reactance (Brehm, 1966). To avoid reactance, don’t talk down to people or tell them they’re “thinking about it the wrong way.” Instead, create situations in which a person will discover the new mindset for themselves.

5. Avoid blame and focus on growth

People want to see themselves (and others they care about) in a positive light, and they resist persuasion if it paints them in a negative light. (This is an example of “cognitive dissonance” in action, see Festinger, 1957; Festinger, 1962). To get around this problem while still inducing change, find a way to pardon the persuadee’s past behavior while increasing pressure to change future behavior. That is, try to help them “save face” for past transgressions, but not for future transgressions. For example, imagine you were trying to convince parents to stop using corporal punishment:

“Historically, many parents used corporal punishment to discipline kids, but corporal punishment is rapidly disappearing as more and more parents learn about new research on the long-term effects of corporal punishment. This new research shows that corporal punishment can cause toxic stress which impedes kids’ cognitive development and predisposes them to aggression and domestic violence later in life — an unintended consequence that few parents were aware of until very recently.”

Conclusion

Changing mindsets isn’t easy, but social psychology points us towards many effective strategies. Of course, there are lots of factors to think about. Above all, try to empathize with the person whose mindset you’re trying to change. Why do they hold a counterproductive mindset right now? If you held that counterproductive mindset, ask yourself what might convince you to change your mind (hint: probably neither nagging nor sanctimony).

Happy mindset changing!

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Smriti Mehta for her help editing this post. I’d also like to thank Justin White and the Adult Learning for Equity (ALE) inquiry group in the Building Equitable Learning Environments (BELE) Network for feedback and suggestions about this post. Finally, a huge thanks to Carol Dweck and Greg Walton, who taught me so much about the psychology of motivation over the last 11 years.

References

Bandura, A. (1962). Social learning through imitation. In M. R. Jones (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1962 (pp. 211–274). Oxford, England: Univer. Nebraska Press.

Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child development, 78(1), 246–263.

Brehm, J. W. (1966). A theory of psychological reactance. Oxford, England: Academic Press.

Claro, S., Paunesku, D., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). Growth mindset tempers the effects of poverty on academic achievement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201608207.

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Evanston: Row, Peterson & Company.

Festinger, L. (1962). Cognitive dissonance. Scientific American, 207(4), 93–106.

Heesacker, M., Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1983). Field dependence and attitude change: Source credibility can alter persuasion by affecting message‐relevant thinking. Journal of personality, 51(4), 653–666.

Lewin, K. (1943). Forces behind food habits and methods of change. Bulletin of the National Research Council, 108, 35–65.

Okonofua, J. A., Paunesku, D., & Walton, G. M. (2016). Brief intervention to encourage empathic discipline cuts suspension rates in half among adolescents. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(19), 5221–5226.

Paunesku, D., Walton, G. M., Romero, C., Smith, E. N., Yeager, D. S., & Dweck, C. S. (2015). Mind-set interventions are a scalable treatment for academic underachievement. Psychological science, 26(6), 784–793.

Schultz, P. W., Nolan, J. M., Cialdini, R. B., Goldstein, N. J., & Griskevicius, V. (2007). The constructive, destructive, and reconstructive power of social norms. Psychological science, 18(5), 429–434.

Walton, G. M. (2014). The new science of wise psychological interventions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(1), 73–82.

Yeager, D. S., Romero, C., Paunesku, D., Hulleman, C. S., Schneider, B., Hinojosa, C., … & Trott, J. (2016). Using design thinking to improve psychological interventions: The case of the growth mindset during the transition to high school. Journal of educational psychology, 108(3), 374.