The Intelligence Trap

by David Robson

  A parent’s influence also comes through their conversation. Recording twelve families’ dinner-table conversations, she noticed that some parents routinely offer a straight answer to a child’s questions. There was nothing actually wrong with what they said – they were not notably uninterested ? but others used the opportunity to open up the subject, which would inevitably lead to a chain of further questions. The result was a far more curious and engaged child.

  Engel’s research paints an even bleaker picture of our education systems. Toddlers may ask up to twenty-six questions per hour at home (with one child asking 145 during one observation!) but this drops to just two per hour at school. This disengagement can also be seen in other expressions of curiosity – such as how willing they are to explore new toys or interesting objects – and it becomes even more pronounced as the child ages. While observing some fifth-grade lessons, Engel would often go for a two-hour stretch without seeing a single expression of active interest.

  This may partly be due to teachers’ understandable concerns about maintaining order and meeting the demands of their syllabus. Even so, Engel believes that many teachers are often too rigid, failing to let students pursue their own questions in favour of adhering to a predefined lesson plan. When observing one class on the American Revolution, for instance, she saw one boy politely raise his hand after fifteen minutes of non-stop lecture. ‘I can’t answer questions right now,’ the teacher replied in a brisk tone. ‘Now it’s time for learning.’ You can see how that attitude could quickly rub off on a child, so that even someone of greater intelligence simply stops trying to find things out for themselves.

  Darwin, incidentally, had found that rigid classical education almost killed his interest, as he was forced to learn Virgil and Homer by heart. ‘Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind’, he wrote. Fortunately, he had at least been encouraged to pursue his interests by his parents. But without any nourishment at home or at school, your appetite to learn and explore may slowly disappear.

  Engel points out that anxiety is also a curiosity killer, and very subtle cues may have a big impact; she has even found that the expression of interest is directly correlated with the number of times a teacher smiles during the lesson.

  In another experiment, she studied groups of nine-year-olds in a science lesson. Their task was simple – they had to drop raisins into a mixture of vinegar, baking soda and water, to see if the bubbles would make them float. In half of the lessons, the teacher set out the instructions and then left the children to get on with their work, but in others, the teacher deviated from the lesson plan slightly. She picked up a Skittle sweet and said, ‘You know what, I wonder what would happen if I dropped this instead.’

  It was a tiny step, but having observed the teacher’s expression of curiosity, the children engaged more enthusiastically with the lesson – continuing their endeavours even when the teacher left the room. It was a stark contrast to the control condition, in which the children were more easily distracted, more fidgety, and less productive.

  Although Engel’s work is still ongoing, she is adamant that it’s time to bring these insights into the classroom. ‘There’s a lot we still don’t know and that’s a very exciting thing for us as scientists. But we know enough to say that schools should be [actively] encouraging curiosity . . . and that it can be very powerful. A kid who really wants to know things – you practically can’t stop them from learning.’

  We will soon discover the ways that Feynman managed to keep his curiosity to achieve his potential – and why this also contributes to better reasoning and thinking. Before we examine those ground-breaking discoveries, however, we also need to examine one other essential ingredient for personal and intellectual fulfilment: a characteristic known as the ‘growth mindset’.

  This concept is the brainchild of Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford University, whose pioneering research first attracted widespread attention in 2007 with a best-selling book, Mindset. But this was just the beginning. Over the last decade, a series of striking experiments has suggested that our mindsets can also explain why apparently smart people fail to learn from their errors, meaning that Dweck’s theory is essential for our understanding of the intelligence trap.

  Like Robert Sternberg, Dweck was inspired by her own experience at school. During sixth grade, Dweck’s teacher seated the class according to IQ – with the ‘best’ at the front, and the ‘worst’ at the back. Those with the lowest scores were not even allowed the menial tasks of carrying the flag or taking a note to the principal. Although she was placed in row one, seat one, Dweck felt the strain of the teacher’s expectations.21 ‘She let it be known that IQ for her was the ultimate measure of your intelligence and your character.’22 Dweck felt that she could trip up at any moment, which made her scared to try new challenges.

  She would remember those feelings when she started her work as a developmental psychologist. She began with a group of ten- and eleven-year-olds, setting them a number of stretching logical puzzles. The children’s success at the puzzles was not necessarily linked to their talent; some of the brightest quickly became frustrated and gave up, while others persevered.

  The difference instead seemed to lie in their beliefs about their own talents. Those with the growth mindset had faith that their performance would improve with practice, while those with the fixed mindset believed that their talent was innate and could not be changed. The result was that they often fell apart with the more challenging problems, believing that if they failed now, they would fail for ever. ‘For some people, failure is the end of the world, but for others, it’s an exciting new opportunity.’23

  In experiments across schools, universities and businesses, Dweck has now identified many attitudes that might cause smart people to develop the fixed mindset. Do you, for instance, believe that:

  A failure to perform well at the task at hand will reflect your overall self-worth?

  Learning a new, unfamiliar task puts you at risk of embarrassment?

  Effort is only for the incompetent?

  You are too smart to try hard?

  If you broadly agree with these statements, then you may have more of a fixed mindset, and you may be at risk of sabotaging your own chances of later success by deliberately avoiding new challenges that would allow you to stretch beyond your comfort zone.24

  At Hong Kong University, for instance, Dweck measured the mindset of students entering their first year on campus. All the lessons are taught in English, so proficiency in that language is vital for success, but many students had grown up speaking Cantonese at home and were not perfectly fluent. Dweck found that students with the fixed mindset were less enthusiastic about the possibility of taking an English course, as they were afraid it might expose their weakness, even though it could increase their long-term chances of success.25

  Besides determining how you respond to challenge and failure, your mindset also seems to influence your ability to learn from the errors you do make – a difference that shows up in the brain’s electrical activity, measured through electrodes placed on the scalp. When given negative feedback, people with the fixed mindset show a heightened response in the anterior frontal lobe – an area known to be important for social and emotional processing, with the neural activity appearing to reflect their bruised egos. Despite these strong emotions, however, they showed less activity in the temporal lobe, associated with deeper conceptual processing of the information. Presumably, they were so focused on their hurt feelings, they weren’t concentrating on the details of what was actually being said and the ways it might improve their performance next time. As a result, someone with the fixed mindset is at risk of making the same mistakes again and again, leading their talents to founder rather than flourish.26

  In school, the consequences may be particularly important for children from less advantaged backgrounds. In 2016, for instance, Dweck’s team published the result of a questionnaire that examined the mindsets of more t
han 160,000 tenth-graders in Chile – the first sample across a whole nation. As the previous research would have predicted, a growth mindset predicted academic success across the group, but the team also examined the way it benefited the less privileged children in the group. Although the poorest 10 per cent of children were more likely to have a fixed mindset, the researchers found those with the growth mindset tended to perform as well as the richest children in the sample, from families who earned thirteen times more money. Although we can only read so much from a correlational study, the growth mindset seemed to be driving them to overcome the many hurdles associated with their poverty.27

  Beyond education, Dweck has also worked with racing car drivers, professional football players and Olympic swimmers to try to change their mindsets and boost their performance.28

  Even people at the height of their career can find themselves constrained by a fixed mindset. Consider the tennis player Martina Navratilova, the world champion who lost to the sixteen-year-old Italian Gabriela Sabatini at the Italian Open in 1987. ‘I felt so threatened by those younger kids,’ she later said, ‘I daren’t give those matches 100%. I was scared to find out if they could beat me when I’m playing my best.’29

  Navratilova identified and adjusted this outlook, and went on to win Wimbledon and the US Open, but some people may spend their whole lives avoiding challenge. ‘I think that’s how people live narrow lives,’ Dweck told me. ‘You take this chance to play it safe, but if you add up all those moments you are far into the future and you haven’t expanded yourself.’

  Dweck’s research has gained widespread acclaim, but the attention is not always well directed, with many people misreading and misinterpreting her work. A Guardian article from 2016, for instance, described it as ‘the theory that anyone who tries can succeed’,30 which isn’t really a fair representation of Dweck’s own views: she is not claiming that a growth mindset can work miracles where there is no aptitude, simply that it is one of many important elements, particularly when we find ourselves facing new challenges that would cause us to question our talents. Common sense would suggest that there is still a threshold of intelligence that is necessary for success, but your mindset makes the difference in whether you can capitalise on that potential when you are outside of your comfort zone.

  Some people also cite the growth mindset as a reason to rhapsodise over a child’s every achievement and ignore their flaws. In reality, her message is quite the opposite: over-praising a child for effort or success may be almost as damaging as scolding them for failure. Telling a child that ‘you’re smart’ after a good result, for example, appears to reinforce a fixed mindset. The child may begin to feel embarrassed if they put a lot of effort into their studies – since that would detract from their smartness. Or they may avoid future challenges that might threaten to take them down off this pedestal. Ironically, Eddie Brummelman at the University of Amsterdam has found that excessive praise can be particularly damaging to children with low self-esteem, who may become scared of failing to live up to parental expectations in the future.31

  We shouldn’t avoid showing pride in a child’s achievements, of course; nor should we shy away from offering criticism when they have failed. In each case, the researchers advise that parents and teachers emphasise the journey that led to their goal, rather than the result itself.32 As Dweck explains, ‘It is about telling the truth about a student’s current achievement and then, together, doing something about it, helping him or her become smarter.’

  Sara Blakely, the founder of the intimate clothes company Spanx, offers us one example of this principle in action. Describing her childhood, she recalled that every evening after school her father would ask her, ‘What did you fail at today?’ Out of context, it might sound cruel, but Blakely understood what he meant: if she hadn’t failed at anything, it meant that she hadn’t stepped out of her comfort zone, and she was limiting her potential as a result.

  ‘The gift he was giving me is that failure is [when you are] not trying versus the outcome. It’s really allowed me to be much freer in trying things and spreading my wings in life,’ she told CNBC. That growth mindset, combined with enormous creativity, eventually allowed her to ditch her job selling fax machines to invest $5,000 in her own business. That business is now worth more than a billion dollars.33

  Dweck has recently been exploring relatively brief mindset interventions that could be rolled out on a large scale, finding that an online course teaching schoolchildren about neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to rewire itself – reduces the belief that intelligence and talent are fixed, innate qualities.34 In general, however, the average long-term benefits of these one-shot interventions are significant but modest,35 and more profound change would almost certainly require regular reminders and deliberate consideration from everyone involved.

  The goal, ultimately, is to appreciate the process rather than the end result – to take pleasure in the act of learning even when it’s difficult. And that itself will take work and perseverance, if you have spent your whole life believing that talent is purely innate and success should come quickly and easily.

  In light of all these findings, Feynman’s astonishing personal development – from tinkering schoolboy to world-class scientist – begins to make a lot of sense.

  From early childhood, he was clearly overflowing with an irrepressible desire to understand the world around him – a trait that he learnt from his father. ‘Wherever we went there were always new wonders to hear about; the mountains, the forests, the sea.’36

  With this abundant curiosity, he needed no other motivation to study. As a student, it would drive him to work all night on a problem – for the sheer pleasure of finding an answer – and as a working scientist, it allowed him to overcome professional frustrations.

  When first arriving as a professor at Cornell, for instance, he began to fear that he could never live up to his colleagues’ expectations; he began to suffer burnout, and the very thought of physics began to ‘disgust’ him. Then he remembered how he had once ‘played’ with physics as if it were a toy. He determined from that point on to experiment with only the questions that actually interested him – no matter what others might think.

  Just when many would have lost their curiosity, he had reignited it once more – and that continued desire to ‘play’ with complex ideas would ultimately lead to his greatest discovery. In the cafeteria of Cornell, he watched a man throwing plates in the air and catching them. Feynman was puzzled by their movement – the way they wobbled, and how that related to the speed at which they were spinning. As he put that motion into equations he began to see some surprising parallels with an electron’s orbit, eventually leading to his influential theory of quantum electrodynamics that won a Nobel Prize. ‘It was like uncorking a bottle,’ he later said. ‘The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.’37

  ‘Imagination reaches out repeatedly trying to achieve some higher level of understanding, until suddenly I find myself momentarily alone before one new corner of nature’s pattern of beauty and true majesty revealed,’ he added. ‘That was my reward.’38

  Along the way, he was aided by a growth mindset that allowed him to cope with failure and disappointment – beliefs he passionately expressed in his Nobel lecture. ‘We have a habit of writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on,’ he said. Instead, he wanted to use the lecture to explain the challenges he had faced, including ‘some of the unsuccessful things on which I spent almost as much effort, as on the things that did work’.

  He describes how he had been blind to apparently fatal flaws in his initial theory, which would have resulted in physical and mathematical impossibilities, and he was remarkably candid about his disappointment when his mentor pointed out these defects. ‘I su
ddenly realized what a stupid fellow I am.’ Nor did the resolution of these difficulties come from single flash of genius; the moments of inspiration were separated by long periods of ‘struggle’. (He repeated the word six times during the speech.)

  His colleague Mark Kac may have considered him ‘a magician of the highest calibre’, an ‘incomprehensible’ genius, but he took an earthlier view of himself. Unlike many other high achievers, he was willing to acknowledge the blood, sweat and tears, and sometimes tedious drudgery, that he had faced for the sheer ‘excitement of feeling that possibly nobody has yet thought of the crazy possibility you are looking at right now’.39

  By enhancing our learning and pushing us to overcome failures in these ways, curiosity and the growth mindset would already constitute two important mental characteristics, independent of general intelligence, that can change the path of our lives. If you want to make the most of your intellectual potential, they are essential qualities that you should try to cultivate.

  But their value does not end here. In an astonishing convergence with the theories of evidence-based wisdom, the very latest research shows that both curiosity and the growth mindset can also protect us from the dangerously dogmatic, one-sided reasoning that we explored in earlier chapters. The same qualities that will make you learn more productively also make you reason more wisely, and vice versa.

  To understand why, we first need to return to the work of Dan Kahan at Yale University. As you may recall, he found intelligence and education can exaggerate ‘motivated reasoning’ on subjects such as climate change – leading to increasingly polarised views.

  Those experiments had not considered the participants’ natural interest, however, and Kahan was curious to discover whether a hunger for new information might influence the ability to assimilate alternative viewpoints.