The Inverse Power of Praise

Conventional Wisdom
If you praise a child for being smart, he will believe in himself and be willing to take on greater academic challenges.

NurtureShock Wisdom
Praising kids for being smart makes them nervous about preserving their image and unwilling to take on more difficult work that might expose them to failure. Praising kids for being hard-working, on the other hand, makes them view success as being a variable within their own control and spurs them to greater effort. 

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When Dr. Carol Dweck gave a group of students the same test but randomly praised some for their intelligence and some for their effort, the former group were far more likely to choose easy puzzles in the next round. In another experiment, students who had been praised for their intelligence actually performed worse on later tests. Click here for more on Dr. Dweck’s work.

Here’s an interesting excerpt from NurtureShock that discusses a key difference between American and Chinese mothers (pp. 22-23).

“Brushing aside failure, and just focusing on the positive, isn’t the norm all over the world. A young scholar at the University of Illinois, Dr. Florrie Ng, reproduced Dweck’s paradigm with fifth-graders both in Illinois and in Hong Kong. Ng added an interesting dimension to the experiment. Rather than having the kids take the short IQ tests at their school, the children’s mothers brought them to the scholars’ offices on campus (both in Urbana-Champaign and at the University of Hong Kong). While the moms sat in the waiting room, half the kids were randomly given the really hard test, where they could get only about half right - inducing a sense of failure. At that point, the kids were given a five-minute break before hte second test, and the moms were allowed into the testing room to talk with their child. On the way in, the moms were told their child’s actual raw score and were told a lie - that this score represented a below-average result. Hidden cameras recorded the five-minute interaction between mother and child.

“The American mothers carefully avoided making negative comments. They remained fairly upbeat and positive with their child. The majority of the minutes were spent talking about something other than the testing at hand, such as what they might have for dinner. But the Chinese children were likely to hear, ‘You didn’t concentrate when doing it,‘ and ‘Let’s look over your test.‘ The majority of the break was spent discussing the test and its importance.

“After the break, the Chinese kids’ scores on the second test jumped 33 percent, more than twice the gain of the Americans.

“The trade-off here would seem to be that the Chinese mothers acted harsh or cruel - but that stereotype may not reflect modern parenting in Hong Kong. Nor was it quite what Ng saw on the videotapes. While their words were firm, the Chinese mothers actually smiled and hugged their children every bit as much as the American mothers (and were no more likely to frown or raise their voices.“

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