1999, Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis
ISBN 1-84169-024-4
Reviewed by Baoguo Li
Review_Author: Baoguo Li
Book_Author: Carol Dweck
Book_Title: Self Theories: Their role in Motivation, personality and
Development
Reference: 1999, Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis
Date: 5/28/00
Time: 10:43:51 AM
Remote Name: 141.151.18.207
Self Theories: Their role in Motivation,
personality and Development
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Written By Carol
Dweck 1999, Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis ISBN 1-84169-024-4 Reviewed by Baoguo Li |
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This book summarizes the 30 years research done by Dweck with her graduate students. The subjects of her research vary from preschool children to college students. So you can see her findings are widely applicable. Her book is built on the idea that people develop beliefs that organize their world and give meaning to their experience. She names these beliefs “meaning system” and holds that different people create different meaning system. Her goal of writing the book is to tackle the question why sometimes people do well and sometimes they do not so well even behavior in ways that are self defeating and even destructive.
She begins her work by defining the qualities of mastery oriented people (love learning, seek challenge, value effort and persist in the face of obstacle) and refuting some common beliefs that students with high ability are more likely to display the mastery-oriented qualities and success in school directly foster confidence as well as praising a student's intelligence encourages mastery oriented response. She outlines two ways people understand intelligence, namely the theory of fixed intelligence (also called entity theory)--intelligence is considered to be an entity that dwells within people and they can not change; the other is the theory of malleable intelligence (also named incremental theory), people holding this theory think that intelligence is not a fixed trait but something they can cultivate through learning.
Facing failure, different people have different responses, many most accomplished students fall apart in face of setbacks while less skilled students are energized by failure. Human beings, like other animals, show helpless responses--react to certain situation helplessly. Students with entity theory usually feel the situation is beyond their control; they quickly begin to denigrate their abilities and blame their intelligence for the failure. But students who hold incremental theory will issue instruction to them on how they could improve their performance. People holding different theory of intelligence will also set different goals in their life. She argues there are two different goals (performance goal and learning goal). Students who pursue performance goals are more concerned with how to look smart and avoid looking dumb, so they choose to play safe and avoid mistakes. In contrast, students with learning goals tend to learn new skills, master new tasks or understand new things. The significance of goals lies in that they create helpless versus mastery-oriented response.
Based on the study of responses to failure and their different goals, she comes to the conclusion that theories of intelligence predict and create differences in achievement. Their study on students who are in transition to junior high school proves that students entering junior high school with an entity theory are more likely to show a helpless response and a decline in achievement relative to their peers. Students with incremental theory would be more mastery oriented and will improve their academic standing in the classroom.
Why do some students achieve high and some low? According to Dweck, theories of intelligence create high and low effort. Failure means different to people of different intelligence theories. To those entity theorists, failure means low intelligence, to incremental theorists failure is a cue to try something new. It is also true of effort. To entity theorist, effort signifies low intelligence, to incremental theorists, effort is what turns on people's intelligence and allows them to use it to full advantage. (39)
It’s very interesting that in one study, they divided students into three groups by their scores on a questionnaire--depressed, non-depressed entity theorists and non-depressed increment theorists. Then they investigated how they respond to failure. Those students who were given three vignettes that described important failures and were asked to write down their response to the failures, then their response were scored and compared among groups. They found that students of the depressed and entity group usually denigrated their intelligence and felt like losers, reacted to this failure with negative emotions, and may feel like to quit or escape from the arena in which failure took place. While increment theorists showed positive response to failure. She notes that confidence and success are not enough to make students react positively to setbacks. Her research shows that the confidence students bring to a situation often does not help them when they meet with difficulty. Entity students with high confidence still show a drop in academic performance. Confidence in intelligence is a good predictor of their academic achievement when they are not facing difficulties. In contrast, increment students even with low confidence simply do not seem hampered by obstacles. In college, those are students who are least likely to blame their intellectual ability for their failure.
Does success build up mastery-oriented responses? Their study shows that students with the most striking history of success are often the most vulnerable. In her research, one of the two groups of students received the training that consisted largely of success while the other group received training in how to interpret their failures. At the end of the training, both groups were given two difficult problems to solve. Those getting success training interpret failure as meaning that they lack ability, whereas those receiving attribution training do far better.
She gives example of an eminent novel prizewinner to show that the so-called IQ does no good to people. The noble prize winner she knew freely admitted that had he known his IQ too low he would never had dreamed of embarking on his scientific career. IQ may measure one's present skill but not potential. Skills can grow and abilities can blossom.
How do people of different theories interpreter intelligence. Those hold
entity theory think intelligence is simply about smartness. They think what you
IQ is or how smart you are. Incremental theorists will say it is what you know.
When asked to complete the following equation.
Intelligence = __% effort + __ % inborn smartness.
Entity theorists put 35 before effort and incremental theorists put 65.
She extends her theory to people's personality and shows readers through her research that a belief in fixed personality lead people to be concerned with how they are judged in social situations and so they focus on more validating themselves and a belief that personality is changeable makes people seek social situation s in which they grow. So that they focus more on developing themselves and their relationship.
She also explores how those guys with different self-theories judge others. They ask their subjects why some of their classmates perform better, entity holders jump to the conclusion that they are smart, while incremental theorists attribute their success to their effort. It is also true when it comes to the judgment of others personality, entity theorists is too ready to attach global labels to other people, while incremental theorists tend to find the reason for their behavior.
Entity and incremental theorists also differ on the issue that traits are
innate or social.
Incremental theorists think they are more a result of experience against entity
theorists
Idea that it is more innate. Hence, entity theorists prefer to punish the
wrongdoer incremental will choose to educate them. So far she shows readers that
entity theorists condemn themselves, lost self-esteem and fall into depressed
state and lost confidence in the future performance when they encounter failure
and they give up on others too. Increment theorists, on the other hand, see
their failure as problem to be solved and they say other people's failures that
way as well. They think people can make mistakes, follow the wrong paths, do
harm to others, and they are also capable, with proper motivation and guidance,
of going beyond this.
Their study of preschool children show that those little kids also have
theories about
themselves though they are pretty much protected from the negative effects of
failure. Young children as young as 3 1/2 display every aspect of the helpless
response when they confront failure. They have the symptoms of helpless
response -- nonresistance, lowered expectations, negative evaluation, negative
emotion and feeling of badness. Then where do these responses come from?
Were some children born mastery oriented and others borne to react helplessly?
Their research shows that it is the feedback children get from adults that make
them respond differently, their environment will shape their responses.
Different kind of criticism and praise they get directly create mastery-oriented
hardiness or helpless vulnerability. They find that criticism that measures
child's traits or judges the children as a whole would make children more
vulnerable and produce helpless response when they confront failure later.
Criticism focusing children on effort or strategy would promote a
mastery-oriented response to later difficulties. She also suggests that adults
should not praise children for their trait when they do well, because if they
take this message to heart, they may also judge themselves thoroughly when they
later fail and no matter how good person praise or trait praise may make
children feel at the time it is given, it carries with it a host of dangers.
Most parents believe that praise children's ability when they do well is
something that is
necessary for children's self esteem, but their findings indicate that praise
for intelligence
might quickly make children shy away from challenging learning tasks that could
jeopardize their positive judgment. so how can we convey our message to
the children that we are delighted at their work, effort praise alone seems not
enough, but effort and strategy praise when given in the right way can be highly
appreciative of a child’s accomplishments, so do not try to label students no
matter high achieving or low achieving they are. she points out so many
misguided practices originated in a limited view of what self-esteem is. and
adult think self esteem is given to children by telling them they have high
intelligence, so many adults like to exaggerate positives, to sugarcoat
negatives. but this practice can only bring entity theory to kids. so she calls
for teacher to teach in a framework in which effort is expected and enjoyed and
setbacks are informative and challenging. according to her, self-esteem is how
you feel when you when you are striving whole-heartedly for worthwhile
think.
Finally, she warn readers that her incremental theory is in favor of effort
but not excessive
effort, encourage persistence but not compel persistence. confidence that they
can crease their skills and nudge is definitely necessary in this theory.
Performance goals is a critical part of achievement but proving ability can not
be so important to students that it drives out learning goals.
Publishers say the intended readers for this book are researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students. I recommend the book to beginning graduate students and advanced undergraduates, in that it introduces them to motivational constructs and issues, besides that, the language used in her book is not difficult to understand. For researchers and advanced graduate students, this book could serve as a springboard into more technical and research-laden articles on motivational issues.
The book is available on line at (http://www.taylorandfrancis.com/PSYPRESS/BKFILES/0863775705.htm).
