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It came under question several years ago, too. As far as I can tell, Carol Dweck's response was basically to no-true-Scotsman any failures as being based on "false growth mindset" [1].

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/12/how-pr...

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Even if she went back on it (which I think she never will), people would still obsess over the idea. The ‘growth mindset’ has an agency on its own, a proper meme in the psyche of modern populus.

Something similar would be the Marshmallow Experiment, which is still to this day completely misinterpreted. People just need bases for what they want to believe; the loads of new psychological theories have the same function as modern fake news does.

I think if I had a theory that became popularized, I, too, would have legitimate concern that people were using that theory imprecisely—-ie incorrectly. Ive noticed that as ideas get popularized they get watered down or misapplied. Think Agile.

Sure, but the problem I have with Dweck's response is that it seems to be muddying the water rather than adding precision. In particular, she says:

> Everyone is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets. You could have a predominant growth mindset in an area but there can still be things that trigger you into a fixed mindset trait.

I have no problem with this concept per se; as far as it goes, it seems eminently more realistic than most descriptions I've seen of mindset theory (which seem to treat it like what therapists sometimes call a "core belief"). But if mindset is significantly contingent on immediate circumstances, what are we saying when we say that someone "has" a fixed or growth mindset? Are the instruments used in the studies capturing any of this variation? If not, what needs to be done to ensure that studies are properly taking this into account?

I'm generally skeptical of pop psychologically, but in this case her response seems valid to me.

There are a number of areas where it's widely believed that one must be a born X to be good at some skill. (Say, drawing, or mathematics).

The basic idea is that this is a limiting belief. People who think that drawing is amenable to hard work and practice grow more in that particular area.

But you can generally believe in the power of growth while also thinking that your least favorite subject (say math) is only for people with innate talent. In that case you grow in your "growth mindset" areas and plateau in your "fixed mindset" areas.

> Are the instruments used in the studies capturing any of this variation?

No, honestly probably not. The studies themselves may not replicate. But that doesn't mean that you can't measure such things better than we have.

Indeed, my experience so far is ideas getting watered down to incoherence is the rule, not the exception. For Agile, definitely [1], but for all sorts of other stuff. Object orientation. Lean Startup. Startups period (e.g., WeWork). Dunning Kruger. And a depressingly large number of other things.

The consolation prize is that anybody willing to dig in can often find a lot of value that other people overlooked. But what always gets me is that it becomes almost impossible to talk about that deeper value, because people already think they know it. Agile being a prime example here.

[1] My Agile postmortem is here: http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how...

It's a legitimate concern, but not a legitimate response to repeated failures-to-replicate. The "Criticism" subhead on her wiki page has a good overview.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism

agile went wrong as soon as it went "agile". The manifesto was a nice idea in principle, I think it would've been better for all the "agile" methods to not have come under a single umbrella term that made it so anything vaguely associated with any agile concept could be called agile in an "all inclusive" manner. But agile was never a specific process or way of doing things.

If most scientists fail to understand what growth-mindset is then it is a worthless theory. The people in this thread who praise it as something awesome then almost surely have the wrong idea about it in their head and is applying it wrongly. So you are right, this is a concern, which is why we should take failure to replicate extremely seriously!

Much of the growth mindset literature out there has its foundations built on goal orientation theoretical framework, which has been replicated extensively across domains, frameworks, and cultures. There's been a number of studies on growth mindset as well, but the results are clearly more mixed. That's interesting to me given how the concepts are related, but obviously not identical.

Goal orientation is pretty simple, for a larger goal set up concrete smaller goals like "practice the parts I can't do every day for 1 hour until I can do them" and then do those. I don't see how growth mindset is related at all.

Here is the main definition of fixed mindset (the opposite of growth mindset):

> In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits.

I don't believe this at all. I strongly believe that people cannot improve their intelligence, that some people are destined to be dumb their whole lives while others are brilliant. Of course I can still see the value of practice, and that working hard can immensely improve your performance, but I am still "fixed mindset" according to the definition.

Do you believe that people can improve their intelligence through hard work? If not, then you are fixed mindset like me.

I don't believe people can improve their core intelligence or "g", no. But I do think that people can become smarter and more knowledgeable generally. A person with a lower g can still learn, grow, and improve. They may take longer to do it, they may reach diminishing returns sooner, but they can do it.

As a Scotsman I've never heard of no-true-Scotsman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

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