What is a mindset and can you cultivate a better one?

For some of us, the phrase “mindset” might bring to mind the unscientific platitudes that you find in certain kinds of self-help books. A growing body of research, though, is showing that our mindset can powerfully shape our lives, thanks to its impact on our perception, motivation and behaviour.

“We think of mindset as a belief about how the world works – which includes either you or your environment – that, in turn, shapes your interpretations of the world and your responses to events, as well as your goals,” says David Yeager at the University of Texas at Austin.

It was Carol Dweck at Stanford University in California who first popularised this concept. She was initially interested in people’s beliefs about intelligence and how these affected their academic achievement.

In psychological questionnaires, some people will strongly endorse statements like “Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t change very much.” These people are said to have a “fixed mindset”. Others are more likely to endorse statements like “No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.” They are said to have a “growth mindset”.

Dweck’s research found that people in the latter group tended to be more likely to persevere after failure and were more willing to take on challenges outside their comfort zone – two behaviours that encourage intellectual development.

Crucially, Dweck and her colleagues found that mindsets are malleable; teaching people about their brain’s natural plasticity, for example, seems to promote a growth mindset. Despite some failed replications, the effect appears to be robust, though this depends on the context.

“The intervention tends to work better in schools that have a supportive culture and when the teachers endorse more of a growth mindset,” says Yeager, who led some of these studies.

Inspired by Dweck’s research, psychologists have now uncovered many other mindsets that might affect our health and prosperity. Alia Crum, also at Stanford University, has pioneered research on “stress mindsets”, showing that people who believe that stress is enhancing and energising tend to cope better with life’s challenges than those who believe that stress is inherently debilitating.

Crum compares our mindsets to “lenses” that filter our view of the world – and recent research suggests those optics can have long-term consequences for our health. A study of first responders, for instance, found that those with the mindset that stress is enhancing had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, regardless of the total amount of stress they experienced in their lives.

Combining a growth mindset and a stress-is-enhancing mindset may amplify the benefits of both. In a series of studies published in 2022, Yeager found that teaching a “synergistic mindset” that incorporated the two improved students’ mental health and academic progress better than either alone. “These two mindsets go hand in hand,” says Yeager. “You’re daisy-chaining your beliefs.”

That said, mindset research has at times been misinterpreted. The scientists behind it would never propose that a positive mindset can work miracles – as Dweck highlights in her book on the subject. “Do people with [the growth] mindset believe that anyone with proper motivation and education can become Einstein or Beethoven?” she wrote in Mindset: The new psychology of success. “No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable).”

Cultivating a growth mindset can also be taken as justifying uncritical encouragement, in which every effort is uniformly praised. Yet having this mindset often means setting high standards. “It sometimes involves being tough, but also supporting someone so that way they can grow to meet those standards,” says Yeager. “It can be uncomfortable.”

So, contrary to the self-help gurus, a positive attitude can’t conjure instant riches. But it can help us to put in the necessary efforts to reach our goals – and to cope with the tears along the way.