Page 33 - The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin_Neat plip book

and unalterable level of ability. They see thei r overall int elligence or ski ll level
at a certain discipline to be a fixed entity, a thing that cannot evolve.

Incremental theorists, who have picked up a different modal ity of learni ng—
let’s call them learning theorists—are more prone to describe their resul ts with
sentences like “I got it because I worked very har d at it” or “I sho ul d ha ve tried
harder.” A child with a learning theo ry of int elligence tends to sense tha t with

hard work, difficult material can be gr asped —s tep by step, incrementally, the
novice can become the master.
Dweck’s research has shown that when challenged by di ffi lt material,
learning theorists are far more likely to rise to the level of the ga me, whi le

entity theorists are more brittle and prone to qui t. Chi ldr en who associate
success with hard work tend to have a “mastery-oriented respo ns e” to
challenging situations, while childr en who see them selves as jus t pl ain “smart”
or “dumb,” or “good” or “bad” at somethi ng, have a “learned he lpl essne ss

orientation.”
In one wonderfully revealing study, a group of childr en was int erviewed and
then each child was noted as having either an entity or learni ng the ory of
intelligence. All the children were then given a series of easy math pr obl ems,

which they all solved correctly. Then , all the childr en were gi ven some very
hard problems to solve—problems that were too diffi lt for them . It was clear
that the learning theorists were excited by the challenge, whi le the ent ity
theorists were dismayed. Comments woul d range from “Oh bo y, no w I’m really

gonna have to try hard” to “I’m not smart enough for thi s.” Everyone go t the se
problems wrong—but evidently the exper ience of being chal lenge d ha d very
different effects. What is most interesting is the thi rd stage of thi s expe riment :
all the children were once again given easy probl ems to solve. Nearly all of the

learning theorists breezed right thr ough the easy material, but the ent ity
theorists had been so dispirited by the inab ility to solve the har d probl ems tha t
many of them foundered through the easy stuf f. Thei r self-con ce ha d be en
destroyed.

What is compelling about this is that the resul ts have no thi ng to do with
intelligence level. Very smart kids with ent ity theo ries tend to be far more
brittle when challenged than kids with learni ng theo ries who woul d be
considered not quite as sharp. In fact, some of the br ight est kids pr ove to be

the most vulnerable to becoming helpless, because they feel the ne ed to live up
to and maintain a perfectionist image that is easily and inevitably sha ttered. As