When Praising Children is Counterproductive

Alethiography links to an excellent article about the differing outcomes of praising kids for their effort versus their intelligence. (I initially was just going to comment on her blog, but realized quickly that I could blather on for a year on this topic and that's what my own blog is for.) The article is well worth reading in its entirety, but the bottom line is that research has found that kids who are praised for their effort do better on later tasks and enjoy the challenge of harder tasks while kids who are praised for their smarts do worse on later tasks and gravitate toward easier tasks. They posit that this is related to the fact that kids labeled as “smart” want to maintain that image and thus avoid situations where failure could reveal them to be lacking in innate ability. However, even after parents and teachers are apprised of this body of research, they discount its validity or resist the implications for their own behavior; they continue to think it’s important to build the child’s self-esteem by (over-)praising their natural intelligence.

One thing I wonder about (and this has probably been investigated, but I am not familiar with this line of research outside of what the article described) is whether the effect of the praise is the same controlling for the kids’ actual intelligence or effort (it's easy to imagine interactions between these variables). And taking this outside of the lab, if you (as parent or teacher) consistently praise a child who produces a good work outcome specifically for his effort, when he does not put much effort in at all because he truly is quite intelligent and the work is not challenging enough for effort to be an issue, does that really work? At some point, can’t they see this is bullshit? (And I say “child” but is there any reason to believe this couldn’t also apply to an adult employee and his manager? I would like to think that we are not all stuck at our current level of self-efficacy just because we passed the age of 21.)

On an unrelated note, was I the only one who thought this comment from the writer of the article was kind of sad: “I recognized that praising him with the universal “You’re great—I’m proud of you” was a way I expressed unconditional love”? Maybe this hit me harder than it should have, but doesn’t it seem kind of a messed up way to say you love someone unconditionally, to imply that your attention and affection and care are tied up with them being “great” (whatever they think you mean by that) and making you proud? I’m not saying I can’t understand how this happens or that you should never tell your kid you are proud of them or whatever, but what a revelation to realize that you are expressing supposedly “unconditional” love with some very strict conditions. This unintentional and potentially mixed message is probably very common too.

I have to admit that I do have some of the characteristics of the “smart” kid they describe: I can easily be put off by something as being too hard too quickly and I don't like to look stupid or bad at something. I also don't think I'm very good at math, though by that, it is unclear whether I mean "very good compared to other people" or "very good relative to my other skills" or "very good where very good = insanely naturally brilliant as surely we can all admit some few people actually are"; also this reminds me of other research that showed, as I recall it, that kids who had lower confidence in math were actually the better mathematicians, so the upshot of this is unclear. (Good but unconfident, so when forced to do hard math, I will surprise myself by doing better than I would have expected, but when given the option to do hard math, I will be too scared to try?)

But I never got into the habit of undervaluing effort or wanting to appear that everything I did was due to natural ability. In fact, maybe I was just kind of unobservant, but I don't really remember encountering this attitude and related posturing until college, where it was common. (I remember that in elementary school, when the newspaper reporter came to take my picture and interview me for being the school Mathlete champion, they asked me whether I studied a lot in preparation for the weekly competitions, and vaguely uncomfortable about the fact that I knew a lot of other people did but that I didn’t study at all, I lied and said, “Yes.” Yeah, my mom did challenge me on it when she saw the article in the paper.) And in college I basically viewed this attitude and the behaviors that went with it (chronic underachievement, ridiculous competitive bragging on whose effort/success ratio was the smallest, etc.) with contempt. It seemed most typical, at least in its most aggressively in-your-face variety, among guys, too, many of whom (let’s be honest) were obviously smart enough and no doubt the big fish in their small high school ponds but weren’t godlike geniuses. (The girls afflicted with this problem may have been quietly doing badly in the privacy of their own rooms and with less macho self-delusion.) And when I think of the really super-smart girls I knew, the kind who took upper-level courses in engineering or math as sophomores, even though they were music or history majors, just because the classes sounded fun, and proceeded to kick everyone’s ass – these girls worked hard, but they weren’t mindless drones.

(OK, I’m going to have to make a special digression here to say: Those guys who want to attribute the school success of hard-working girls to a willingness to put up with endless, stupid worksheets and repetitive busywork – Screw you and the failing business you are running out of your or your mother's basement because you can’t work for other people and their “ridiculous” expectations of what you will spend your time doing and the computer where right now instead of getting down to the unexciting prospect of doing the paperwork that business requires you are having your fun posting your idiotic sexist statements on other people’s blogs. You did not get a C in 6th grade while Jenny got an A because you were a genius who was above that “crap” and she was an unthinking drudge. You were a fuck-up and you don’t even have the balls or the sense after all this time to face it.)

One piece of praise from school that has always stuck with me was when my 10th grade English teacher wrote “Sally is a tireless reviser of her work.” She then expanded a bit on this in the context of a few famous literary figures (Poe, Baudelaire, I don’t recall who else) who are well known for working away to improve their writing through revision after revision. (Remember that back in those days, you would sometimes turn in half a dozen drafts of an essay or paper before the final one?) Although this comment didn’t rock my world in some fundamental way, I think it made a lasting impression on me because I was glad that my efforts were noticed and seen to have a positive impact on my final product, it was basically new to me to think about the process that “real” writers used to create their work, I was particularly fond of EAP at that age so it was kind of a thrill to be compared to him, and it spoke to the part of me that wasn’t doing this work to get a grade (I could have gotten an A on my first draft) but the satisfaction of challenging myself to do good and then better work. And in retrospect, I greatly respect that fact that she didn’t give in to whatever temptation may have existed to simply say “Sally has a talent for writing.” It was a much larger compliment for her to call out my discernment and my high standards. (And in case you are wondering, I am not a tireless reviser of my writing [can’t call it work] on this blog. Sorry.)

I was initially disappointed, but later sort of cheered up, when several years ago I went with a bunch of co-workers to one of those Dave & Busters game/video places and in the basketball game (shoot as many baskets as you can within a given time frame), I did distinctly average. It had been a solid decade since I’d even held a basketball, but back in the day, I was a good shooter with an in-game free throw percentage to rival or outshine even the best NBA free throw shooters’ records. People now like to tell me that I have a talent for these kinds of tasks (ones which involve aiming for something then hitting it), which I think is probably true in a limited way, but I don’t remember hearing that back then, when I would sometimes start shooting baskets after school, would take a break for dinner, then shoot until it was so dark that I was relying on muscle memory to tell me where the basket was. There were times I was so in the flow of it that even when I would tell Mom, after she came out for the umpteenth time, that I would quit after I missed one, I eventually just had to stop because I had this deep feeling that I wasn’t going to miss, that I could not even miss if I wanted to. At Dave & Busters, it was weird to confront myself as just a regular person, not a prodigy, not a Shooting Machine, but it’s nice now to think about the truth: I was a normal kid, with a small knack for some kinds of hand-eye coordination and extremely slow foot speed, who regularly scored points in games, whose friends on the team would laugh and say “our strategy should be Sally shoots and draws the foul,” who was teased by unfamiliar girls at tryouts when I set up for my first (uncool two-handed) free throw but not for the rest, who had occasional moments of transcendence, because I had worked really hard. And because I had a good coach who has always demonstrated the value of effort and didn’t just preach it, who remains my go-to man for straightforward advice on applying basic principles of physics to sports, and who didn’t carry praise or blame too far. The Carver Middle School 6th grade volleyball team and I could not have done it without you. Thanks, Dad.