Kristof's Sunday Op-Ed: Rising Above I.Q.
Kristof notes that Asian-Americans make up nearly 20% of the student population of Harvard, that 1/3 of all Nobel Prizes in the sciences won by Americans were won by Jews, and that West Indian Blacks (a good friend prefers "Caribbean," but I'll use Kristof's nomenclature to be consistent) are 1/3 more likely to graduate from college and their median income is nearly 1/3 higher than the median of non-West Indian black people.
And, there's this:
One survey found that a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole.
Kristof uses these statistics to build the thesis that intelligence cannot be based on innate (genetic) predisposition, therefore, because these three groups are heterogeneous.
He ends the piece with a quote by the scholar from whom he acquired the statistics, Richard Nisbett:
Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.
But, how?
Two Authors In My Head
I'll be participating in my last high school graduation in two weeks. It's not that I've graduated several times, but that I am a teacher. A few days after that graduation, after 8 years of classroom teaching, I'll be walking out the door of the school into a different world. Unless something dramatic takes place, I don't foresee myself returning to high school teaching.
I'll be speaking at that graduation.
As part of my preparation I've been rereading Carol Dweck's book, "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success," intending to pull a quote or an idea, or perhaps both, to include in my speech.
Then I read the Kristof piece and saw so much of the Dweck book in it, that I had to wonder if Kristof was thinking about it himself. I may comment on his blog just to ask...so, ,to clear my mind of a few thoughts, I'm writing this diary just to see if what I'm thinking looks like it makes as much sense out in the world as it does in between my ears.
Any insights or feedback you may have towards that goal in the comments will be very much appreciated!
Let's begin.
Kristof's Op-Ed: Rising Above I.Q.
Much of the piece is a review of the new book by Richard Nisbett, I.Q. and How To Get It. In it, he argues against Hernstein and Murray's Bell Curve conclusions and marshals evidence in support of the notion that intelligence is not a genetically determined trait. As Kristof summarizes:
He says, the evidence is overwhelming that what is distinctive about these three groups is not innate advantage but rather a tendency to get the most out of the firepower they have.
A rather natural next question, I would think, is: "What is the nature of this 'tendency to get the most out of' their potential?"
Kristof answers:
A common thread among these three groups may be an emphasis on diligence or education, perhaps linked in part to an immigrant drive.
"An immigrant drive?" "Diligence?" What does that mean?
Dweck's Mindsets
In my AP Psychology classes I teach Dweck's theory of "entity" thinkers and "incremental" thinkers, or as she renames them for a popular audience in the book linked above, "fixed mindset" and "growth mindset."
It occurs to me that this is the key to what Kristof is writing about.
Fixed mindset people believe talent is innate, you either have it or you don't, and nothing can change that. Standardized tests define which one you are, as tests are the scientifically accepted measurements of the construct "intelligence." Do well on the test, and you're smart for life. Fail the test, and you are a failure for life in the intelligence department.
Growth mindset people refuse to be defined by the test(s). They use the test(s) to find ways to improve their performance on the next test, or to better understand what went wrong on the last one.
Growth mindset people are all about becoming smart, while fixed mindset people are about being smart. The difference is between action and state of being: "I failed this test" vs "I am a failure."
Dweck offers dozens of research studies investigating the differences between these two outlooks/frames/lenses/mindsets. A few interesting ones:
- Students were given a test. After receiving their score, they were given a stack of scored tests and told they could flip through them if they'd like. The fixed mindset students all looked at lower-scoring tests than their own; the growth mindset people looked almost exclusively at tests that scored higher than their own. Dweck claims this is because fixed mindset people need to feel superior. That even if shown a weakness or insufficiency, fixed mindset people will go more out of their way to find others with even greater weaknesses or insufficiencies in order to feel confident than they will go out of their way to improve or work to improve their weakness. The growth mindset people, she argued, wanted to know what was scored as correct and so looked at the better scored tests. For Dweck, this indicates curiosity, openness, and a focus on effort over ability are core differences between the two types.
- Minority status students of the fixed mindset are significantly more likely to be affected by stereotype threat than are those with a growth mindset. If your intelligence level is genetic, and you share genetic traits (such as skin color) with other who are expected to have less intelligence than the group with lighter skin, then the stress and inner turmoil of that conclusion will contribute to that very result. Or, at least, what passes for it in standardized test results. Growth mindset minority members just don't feel the same kind of stress and inner turmoil when being evaluated because they don't consider their intelligence to be a fixed quantity.
- College students were given a test. Some were praised for doing well and therefore "being smart!" Others were praised for having done well on it because they "worked hard!" When new problems of a similar nature were given to both groups, the "smart" students chose to work on easier problems, and had more trouble with them scoring fewer correct solutions than before the praise. "Worked hard" students chose to work on harder problems and claimed they were more fun than the easier ones they had been given earlier. Then students were asked to write a statement to students in another class about their own results on the test. The praised-for-being-smart students lied and self-reported higher scores than they had achieved (40% of them lied). Dweck claims the result of praising intelligence, therefore, was to cause such students to feel dumber and act dumber, but to represent themselves as being smarter than they were assessed to be.
Tentative, But Possible Conclusions
These are my own thoughts after reflecting on the Kristof article and the Dweck book. They may be completely left-field and nonsensical, or they just might make some sense. I'm writing them out to try and get a better sense of that myself.
- It may be that something about the Jewish, Asian-American, and West Indies cultures is communicating a strong "growth mindset" to their community members. Because they are motivated by becoming, rather than being, their results on tests and class grades as reported by Nisbett and Kristof are the result of increased curiosity, self-efficacy, and intrinsic motivation.
- White and non-West Indies black students are trapped in a "fixed mindset" where each group believes that intelligence is a fixed-trait and unlikely, if not impossible, to change through personal effort and time. The risk required by effort is too great to take seriously or genuinely because the possibility of "not looking good" is a direct confirmation of one's fears of potential inferiority. Why take on the harder problem if getting it wrong only proves that I should not have taken it on in the first place? Better to stay with what I know I can do and do well, and never have to deal with the possible discovery that I'm not as smart as I, and everyone else, thinks I am.
- #2 may also be known as "the soft bigotry of low expectations" except it is internal, holding us down from the inside; it is not only external and societal.
- But, Dweck points out, and my teaching career confirms: To dispel the fixed mindset, one only needs to be introduced to and then reminded of the growth mindset. Simply explaining the difference to a student is enough to flip the switch inside their minds from one to the other. She offers much experimental and anecdotal evidence to support this position, and I am convinced of it from reading her and from having lived my own teaching life.
- Or, as Kristof concludes:
Perhaps the larger lesson is a very empowering one: success depends less on intellectual endowment than on perseverance and drive. As Professor Nisbett puts it, "Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control."
My wish for you- that you find a way of becoming better tomorrow than you were today. That you never are satisfied with being anything.