- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. David Yeager. Dr. David Yeager is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and one of the world's leading researchers into mindsets, in particular, growth mindset, which is a mindset that enables people of all ages to improve their abilities at essentially anything.

He is also a world expert into the stress-is-performance-enhancing mindset, which is a mindset that allows people to cognitively reframe stress, and that when combined with growth mindset can lead to dramatic improvements in performance in cognitive and physical endeavors. Dr. Yeager is also the author of an important and extremely useful new book entitled "10 to 25, the Science of Motivating Young People." The book is scheduled for release this summer, that is the summer of 2024, and we've provided a link to the book in the show note captions.

During today's discussion, Dr. Yeager explains to us exactly what growth mindset is through the lens of the research into growth mindset, and he explains also how to apply growth mindset in our lives. He also shares the research from his and other laboratories on the stress-can-be-performance-enhancing mindset and how that can be combined with growth mindset to achieve the maximum results.

So while I assume that most people have heard of growth mindset, today's discussion will allow you to really apply it in your life, not just from the perspective of you, the person trying to learn, but also for teachers and coaches. In fact, Dr. Yeager shares not just the optimal learning environments for us as individuals, but also between individuals and in the classroom, in families, in sports teams, and in groups of all sizes and kinds.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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Again, that's R-O-K-A.com, and enter the code Huberman to get 20% off. And now for my discussion with Dr. David Yeager. Dr. David Yeager, welcome. - Thanks for having me. - Can you tell us your definition of growth mindset? I think most people have heard of it. They have some sense of what it is, but you've worked very intensely on growth mindset for a number of years.

So I'd love to know how you define it. - Yeah, so it's simply the belief that your abilities or your potential in some domain can change. A huge confusion is people think it means if you try hard, then you can do anything, but that's not really the idea. It's simply that under the right conditions with the right support, change is possible.

And that ends up being a pretty powerful idea because the opposite is so stressful, right? The idea that you are static, nothing about you can change is really kind of a stressful idea. - Of all the studies on growth mindset, including yours, the ones that you've participated in, what one or two kind of high-level results stand out to you as the most striking, surprising, exciting, or meaningful?

And here, I will encourage you to discard with attribution. We know that, or everyone should know, that Carol Dweck is the originator of the growth mindset idea as a field, and she deserves tremendous credit for that. So when you stand back from the field, given that it's mushroomed into this very large field now, and you look at that research, which results kind of stand out as like, wow, that's really cool, really meaningful.

People should know about that. - What stands out to me a lot, first of all, is just the field experiments, that the idea that you can distill a complex idea about the brain, about malleability, you can give it to a young person at a time when they're vulnerable, and that that can give them hope, and then they can do better at school or whatever.

So our 2019 paper in "Nature" that Carol, Greg Walton, Angela Duckworth, a lot of us collaborated on, took a very short growth mindset intervention, two sessions, about 25 minutes each, for ninth graders, and we found kids were, eight, nine months later, more likely to get good grades. By 10th grade, more likely to be in the hard math classes, and the unpublished results find effects four years later on graduating high school with college-ready courses from a short intervention that happened just one or two times, no reinforcement.

So there's a lot of reasons why that's true. That sounds magical and outrageous, and there are a lot of mechanisms, but that just demonstrates the overall value of the phenomenon, and in that study, we did everything we possibly could to address legitimate skepticism, right? Are we collecting and processing the data in ways that could bias it?

No, third party. Is it, are we handpicking schools where you could get the best effects? No, random sample of schools. Did we post-talk, decide on the analyses that would make the results look the greatest? No, preregistered. So that's a good, like, okay, this phenomenon is not something that falls apart in the hands of anyone else besides a select few researchers.

That's really, and we can go into that, but that doesn't explain the mechanisms, and I think that there are a lot of interesting growth mindset mechanism studies. My personal favorite is a very underappreciated, kind of like indie rock study by David Nussbaum and Carol Dweck that David did when he was a graduate student at Stanford, and it's on defensiveness versus remediation.

And the basic idea is, in a fixed mindset, the idea that your intelligence cannot change, you are the way you are, it can't change. Your goal in that fixed mindset is to defend your ego, to, like, hide your deficiencies or any flaws, because if they're fixed and then they're revealed, then it labels you for life in some way as less than, shameworthy, et cetera, right?

In a growth mindset, though, a mistake is, like, part of the process. It's just an opportunity to grow. So David took that idea and then set up a study, and I think I have the details right, where undergraduates did a task. They all did poorly. They were getting 20, 30% correct on this task, and the question is, what do you do before you do your second try?

How do you cope with that initial failure? And he found that both fixed-in-mindset participants wanted to recover their self-esteem. So you do poorly, you feel like crap, what am I gonna do to feel better about myself? In a fixed mindset, they looked downward. So the people getting a 25, look at the people who got a 12.

Like, I'm twice as good as these losers, right? In a growth mindset, they look at the people getting an 85 or 90. What are they doing? What are their strategies? How can I improve? Both of them then recovered self-esteem and looked the same at post-test. And I think about that a lot.

Like, how often in our society does something happen to us and we feel like garbage, and you have a choice? Like, am I gonna look down on other people and say, at least I'm not as bad as these losers? Or am I gonna say, like, how am I gonna get better?

And I love that because think of a ninth grader who bombs their algebra test. Am I like a no-good, dumb-at-math loser who's not going anywhere in life? Well, at least I'm not that burnout, right? Or is it like, how is anyone getting an A in this class? I'm not getting an A.

What's happening? What can I learn from them? So the openness and willingness to self-improve, I think, is the underwriting mechanism. And hardly anyone cites that study, but I think about it all the time. And it's the kind of thing that I like, if I'm being honest, that's the mindset I want my kids to have as they go through life.

- Very interesting. I'm gonna ask you more about this looking down or looking up in terms of performance. But before I do that, I have questions about these brief 25-minute, I think you said, interventions. - Yeah, sometimes 25. Sometimes we do two sessions, each about 20, 25, yeah. - Can you give us a sense of what those interventions look like?

I mean, it's incredible. These two sessions have positive effects lasting up to four years and perhaps even beyond. Maybe just a top contour of some of what these kids hear during those sessions. - Yeah, I mean, so the first thing to realize is that they're short and they have to do two things in order to have long-lasting effects.

One is I have to convince you to think differently at the end of the session. So I just have to persuade you over the course of 25 minutes to have a different mindset. That's sometimes hard. But then even if I do that, you then might have months or years between when I did that and when the outcome is measured.

So how could you remember it and apply it? And how many 25-minute experiences in your life do you have no recollection of, right? I have lots. So I think people are skeptical of the mindset style of interventions for two different, I think, legitimate reasons. Like, I remember a very famous statistician came to my office at UT Austin and was like, "I just don't understand these interventions.

"I mean, the other day I spent 25 minutes "telling my son all the things he has to change "and like, oh, he's doing everything wrong. "And he didn't remember it five minutes later. "How could someone remember your thing four years later?" And I was like, "Did you hear yourself talking?

"Like, I'm sure the way you talked to your son "was like totally condescending and bad." So the first step is, in that 25 minutes, how are you communicating in a way where someone's ears are open, where they're not feeling talked down to, ashamed, humiliated, et cetera? But then the second step is saying that to you at a time when it's possible for there to be what we call a recursive process or a snowball effect that's gonna happen over time.

So that's the stage setting. Okay, so now let's take the first part. 25 minutes, what am I gonna say to you, right? There are three big things that are in every intervention. And the term that Greg Walton, the Stanford professor, colleague, collaborator, uses is wise interventions. That's the umbrella term of which growth mindset is one.

And a good one, but it's just one of many. For wise interventions, we often do the following three things. First is we present some new scientific information, some idea that almost in like a Gladwell way is not obvious and intuitive to the reader, but feels like new information and useful information.

So the first is a scientific. The second is we present participants with stories from people like them who've used those ideas in their lives and found them useful. So in the concrete case of ninth graders getting growth mindset, it's like 10th, 11th, 12th graders who previously felt dumb, learned a growth mindset, then felt better.

It's more complicated than that. That's the basic idea. And last, we don't just tell them the stories, we ask third for participants to author a story. So they write a narrative about a time when they struggled, a time when they doubted themselves, and then remembered this idea that people can change, like my brain can grow, et cetera.

So the three points are like scientific information, stories, or the technical term is descriptive norms. So you're giving people information about what's normal for people like you. And then the third is the writing, which we call saying is believing, which is a term that's a popularized version of the term that came from classic social psychologists, Josh Aaronson, Elliot Aaronson, who found in the work on cognitive dissonance 30, 40 years ago, that one of the best ways to change someone's mind about something is to ask them to try to persuade somebody else, so that we do those sort of things.

So what is the science in the growth mindset? That's where we draw on the metaphor that the brain is like a muscle, that just like muscles get stronger when they're challenged and can recover, so too does the brain get smarter when it's pushed and challenged in a certain way.

This idea that writing a story about oneself or about others in which one succeeds can be useful toward building growth mindset in basic terms, I think that's what you're referring to, I think is interesting. It sort of suggests that we have brain circuits that underlie growth mindset type behaviors and thinking, and that just storing into those can potentially lead to better decision-making and behavior.

I mean, obviously it can't create new skills simply because I can't write a story about me being able to dunk a basketball and then expect that I can dunk a basketball because at present I can't, but the idea of writing a story about the effort going into dunking a basketball and learning how, and then translating that to a more realistic sense of ability that allows me to then go practice more, is that sort of what you're referring to?

- Yeah, so in a 2016 paper in PNAS, Greg Walton and I explained these types of interventions as a, we call them a lay theory intervention. And the idea there is that lay people, like not scientific theories, but just our intuitive theories for explaining the world help us anticipate what something means.

So the idea from basic developmental psychology is that human beings are walking around with kind of prior belief about objects, about motion, about number, and then later about complex social structures like whether people are looking down on me, how, where I stand relative to others, and also little lay theories about adversity.

What does it mean when I have to put in effort? What does it mean when I fail? So the idea is that if you understand the theory someone has, then you'll understand the meaning they'll make about a future experience. And therefore, well, and the reason meaning matters is because the way you interpret something then affects how you respond to it, right?

So if I see someone and they're doing something innocuous, but I interpret it as a threat, do I call the police? You know, do I run away? That's my interpretation, that's causing it, right? And so there's a long way of saying, it turns out one of the best ways to preset someone's meaning and give them a different theory is to give them a different story.

Stories are kind of like theories in motion. This is why, you know, like what's the point of war and peace, right? War and peace is really a theory of great leaders in the war, and if there's any English PhDs, I'm sure they'll tell me that's an oversimplified version of what Tolstoy was doing, but you learn the theory in a narrative way, right?

So this is the classic idea throughout human history. Great writers and authors give us theories through narrative, right? And so we're just taking that simple human fact and doing it in a 10-minute activity. And the lay theory in a person's mind that when things are difficult, it can change, can be taught with a very simple narrative, which is this person or even I experienced difficulty in something that mattered to me.

That difficulty didn't determine my entire future because actually there were steps that I could take in order to like make a difference. Here are the steps that I took, and then it improved. So it's a very, it's like the simplest Freytag's pyramid. And even though that simple story is available to all of us, you could look in culture and see it, you also see the opposite lay theory all the time.

And so without, absent our intervention, it's not like people couldn't end up with a growth mindset, but they wouldn't kind of know what to sort for or what to look for. So we give them some touch points for a very simple of like frustration, things can change, then they got better.

And we think that once people do that in our writing exercises, they're more likely to see that pattern out in the world. And if you see that enough, and then you take the actual steps to get better, then it starts becoming true for you. And that's what I call the recursive process that you, we give people a starting hypothesis about the world.

They go out, try things, struggle, fail, it improves. Then they see that that's true, and then they can keep acting on that over time. - I feel like so much of getting better at things involves reappraising the stress or anxiety response. You know, the friction that one feels when they can't perform something well, or when things feel overwhelming or confusing.

And I think the analogies to physical exercise apply, but I feel like they're limited in the sense that I like the idea that the brain is like a muscle, that it can grow and get stronger. I think the key difference to my mind is that, you know, like working out with weights, you get some sense of the result you're going to get because there's like a lot of blood flow into the muscle.

So it's like a hint of what's possible. - Right. - With cardiovascular exercise, like if we run hard up a hill, there's that moment where your lungs are burning, et cetera. And anyone who understands exercise knows that that's the signal for adaptation, such that the next time you can do the same thing without the burning of the lungs.

- Right. - When it comes to mental work and learning, I think we immediately assume that if we're not performing well, if we're getting confused or overwhelmed, that somehow we're doing it wrong. - Yeah. - As opposed to stimulating the growth. - Right. - Are there any studies that point to bridging the relationship between the physiology, you know, the stress response and the mindset that allows one to say, okay, this is really hard and I keep failing and failing and failing, at this math, at this language learning, at writing this essay, whatever it is.

And that's exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. It's like the burning of the lungs or it's like the failure to complete another repetition in the gym. - Yeah, I mean, I think that you're right. You know, the standard growth mindset message does have reappraisal components, specifically around something Carol Dweck has called effort beliefs, which is very simply the belief that if it's hard, it means you're doing the wrong thing.

And that follows naturally from the fixed mindset idea that ability can't change. And I think it's very important to point out the centrality of that effort belief because people have tried to apply growth mindset, but simplified it in a way of just saying basically try harder, right? Or I believe in you.

If you try hard enough, you can do anything, right? But if your natural inclination is to view the need for effort as a sign that you are doing the wrong thing, which is that's the default interpretation, then people are gonna quit, right? If you believe effort out to you as lacking potential, and then I say, you need to try hard, I'm saying you don't have potential.

That basic insight is very poorly misunderstood in the field, and it's led to tons of misapplications of Carol's work. And then people are like, well, this thing doesn't work. Well, okay, but you haven't addressed the effort belief. So I think that the first type of response to what you've said is you can't just abstractly tell someone your brain is a muscle and assume that magically, then in the midst of stress and frustration and confusion and all those negative experiences that you're gonna immediately say, yes, I love doing this and this is great.

But then there's also the physiological component, as you're saying. So when we're stressed, frustrated, confused, your heart starts racing. Maybe your palms get sweaty, right? You start, your breathing starts getting heavier. My daughter is 13 before like a cello audition. It's like, I have butterflies in my stomach. I don't, what does this mean?

And I think that growth mindset research didn't always deal with the visceral experience of stress and frustration. And I think in a world in which someone hears the growth mindset message and says, "Yes, now I'm gonna go challenge myself. "I'm gonna be, I'm gonna embrace stress and frustration, "do the mental equivalent of running ladders "or running up a hill." Then they feel that stress, but if they don't know how to interpret that, it's like growth mindset isn't gonna get them to the skill development, right?

Or at least to the mental wellbeing of feeling like they have confidence and can do well. So in some research that we've done in the last few years, what we've tried to do is to marry together the growth mindset idea with great work originally coming out of Ali Crum and Jeremy Jamison's labs who were building on lots of great appraisal psychologists, Wendy Mendez and others, to say, "Okay, in the inevitable experience "where if you fully believe our growth mindset "and then now you load your plate with challenges, "but now you've got a physiological stress response, "how are you gonna appraise that better?" And that's kind of been the new frontier of growth mindset work in the last four or five years.

- Yeah, could you tell us more about this stress is enhancing mindset? I think it's a really interesting one, especially when it's woven in with the growth mindset. - Yeah, so let me tell you kind of that on its own and then the story of how we had this insight is actually kind of interesting too.

But just the basic idea as people who've heard about Ali Crum would know and Jeremy Jamison is that an experience of your heart racing, your palms sweating, anxiety in your stomach, that is itself a new stressor that then needs to be interpreted and appraised by the person experiencing it.

That idea on its own is kind of revolutionary for people. People tend to think that your physiological arousal is this objective experience that is universally bad. Ali Crum calls that a stress is debilitating belief. And I think that's a good label for it. It's this idea that heart racing, palms sweaty, butterflies in your stomach is a sign of your impending failure and doom and it will always interfere with your performance.

And the implication therefore is if you were about to do well on whatever you're gonna do, then you wouldn't feel that way. Ali Crum calls this being stressed about being stressed. And that, I think it's a really common experience right now where people are like, wow, if I was a confident, good person who was about to do well, I wouldn't be sitting here feeling so stressed about how stressed I am.

And it becomes this metacognitive layered loop of just being stuck in your own mind and interpreting your arousal in the most negative possible light. So that stress is debilitating belief doesn't, people aren't like wrong for having come to that belief because it's everywhere in our culture. One thing I do in my class a lot is I just have people Google image search stress management means.

And first of all, a surprising number about cats. I don't know why people think cat pictures are like the way to convey complex scientific ideas. Like it would be like a cat with like a cookie jar and it'll be like growth mindset. I don't understand what that, what the point of that is.

But you know, page two or three after all the cats, then you get to a lot of things that are, you'll see a person with a battery that's empty and it's like, they didn't de-stress or 10 tips for de-stressing. And it'll be like, go on a walk, drink chamomile tea.

Like, and the underlying implication is that if you're stressed, then you need to distract yourself. You need to get rid of that stress. But alternative explanation in the growth mindset world is well, maybe you have something that's very important to you and you've pushed yourself to embrace some challenge in a really admirable way.

And that has filled your plate in some way. Like if I was about to give a presentation to a senior vice president at work and I'm stressed about it, I should not like go take a bubble bath and like go for a walk. Like I should get ready to kick ass at the presentation.

And so I think what Ali Crum and others have identified is that you can think differently about that stress. You can say, this is actually a sign that I'm preparing to optimize my performance. And maybe the heart racing isn't my body being afraid of damage. Maybe it's my body getting more oxygenated blood to my brain and my muscles to like help me do really well.

And that's called a stress can be enhancing belief. And what's so interesting I think about this work and I wanna give credit to lots of other people is that if you're in the stress is debilitating mindset, you don't realize that there's an alternative. You just think that that's the way it is.

So it never occurs to you to say, oh, this stress is helping me, right? But once you tell people this, what happens is in our studies, we actually see a change in stress physiology. Changing your mindset about stress in turn changes how your body reacts, which then becomes a different stressor that you can interpret.

And so the big insight was pairing these ideas about reframing stress as an inevitable force that's gonna destroy your goal pursuit into a resource to be cultivated and pairing that together with the first step, which was the growth mindset that causes you to like be open to the challenge in the first place.

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They'll give you five free travel packs with your order plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman. I feel like so much of what human beings struggle with such as learning and performance, our relationship to stress, et cetera, could be resolved if we could overcome the deficit in language.

Here's what I'm thinking. We're talking about reframing stress to make it performance-enhancing as opposed to performance-diminishing. I wonder if we replace the word stress with just like levels of arousal. But then people hear arousal and they think certain kinds of arousal. So what we want to do is, the way I think about it is like a continuum of readiness.

But then that doesn't work because readiness can be readiness for sleep, which is a low level of arousal. You don't want to be highly alert, then you're not ready for sleep, right? So there's a real deficit of language where I think if there was some other word, I can't come up with it on the fly, where one's internal level of readiness as opposed to stress, and maybe it looks a lot like autonomic arousal where heart rate is increased and blood pressure is increased, and people would say, "Oh yeah, that's my body being ready for something as opposed to stressed about doing it." And it's kind of a trivial recasting of stress on the one hand, but in terms of kids learning about life and stress and arousal and these internal signals and adults learning about those and incorporating those into their life goals, I think it would be pretty meaningful.

And again, I don't have a solution to this, but I feel like everyone here, stress is bad. You hear stress is enhancing, okay, great. But I think it's really about developing a language that lets us interpret what's going on in our bodies and compare that to what we are facing in the moment and just decide is this well-matched or poorly matched to what we need to do?

Is it great for going to sleep? Is it great for learning? Is it great for catching that train that's soon to leave the station? And I just wonder why the deficit in language? - Yeah, I think that's a profound question because small changes in language perpetuate problematically theories because they have the baggage on them.

And I think that, let's think this through. So what the psychophysiologists like to point out is that there's a distinction between the stressor, which is the, let's call it the internally or externally imposed demand. It could be something that's thwarting your goals or-- - The exam, the difficult conversation, for some people going to the doctor or the dentist.

- The hard conversation with somebody you care about. It could be, or a physical stressor, right? Like a football game or running a marathon, right? So anything that imposes demands on your body and mind and therefore will require resources, whether like metabolic resources to do well, that's a stressor, okay?

Then there's your appraisal of it. That's what you name it, how you interpret it, how you frame it in your mind. And then there's your response. People in general conflate the stressor with a stress response. When they say stress, they're like, "I'm really stressed right now." Well, really what you mean is that there were stressors, you appraised them as more than you can handle, and then you had a threat type stress response, which means that your body is preparing for damage and defeat.

And that is like an inheritance of how the sympathetic nervous system evolved, which was to keep us alive from threats, mainly physical threats. And so if you have a stressor, some demand, praise is something you cannot handle. And then your threat type response, your body's basically assuming you're gonna lose whatever physical fight you're in, like the bear is gonna tear you apart.

And then your main goal at that point is to stay alive and like bleed out more slowly, right? So you end up with more blood kept centrally in the body cavity, less in the extremities, right? The body releases cortisol because it's an anti-inflammatory. It's gonna like help with tissue repair 45 minutes down the road.

So there's a whole like cascade of physiological responses that come in part from the mental appraisal that this stressor is more than you can handle. Now, we're very rarely confronted with those kinds of physical stressors these days. It's often social stressors, but a lot of these social stressors are the threat of social death, right?

Like a ninth grader coming into high school, getting bullied by all their friends or excluded because their friends in eighth grade now treat you like you don't exist, right? The threat of social death is pretty bad, right? Or you're a new legal associate and you've filed your first brief and all the partners are like, this is garbage.

We're not gonna send it to the client, right? Like all of a sudden you're on trial socially in front of these people who could cut you loose at any time. That's a very vibrant social stressor that evokes the same kind of physiological response as we suppose a physical one would, right?

And so we're very careful to distinguish in our studies a stressor from the stress response because often the stressor isn't really a bad thing. Like getting critical feedback on your first legal brief as a junior associate, well, that could be awesome. It could be like, oh, great. I have these awesome partners at my great law firm are now giving me personalized feedback.

That's useful. Or I'm a ninth grader and I have to make new friends, but I don't know, maybe you need new friends. Like that could be a good thing, right? And same with a test, same with a presentation to senior vice president, whatever it is. Stressors often in our daily lives are not good or bad.

Now, of course, there's traumatic stressors that are really bad for people. But then the appraisal is really where there's a lot of leverage. And if you think that the stressor is inevitably bad and that your response to it is always harmful, then it's really hard for you to think that you have the resources to meet the demand that you're facing.

And you end up in this threat cycle. So in a lot of our research, what we try to do is give people a different story to tell themselves about a stressor and about their response. So that way they end up in a better place. And I don't know what that better language is, but I will say, I once gave a talk at a middle school and a high school.

And I used slides that Jeremy Jameson, who's my collaborator, had sent me that had the word "arousal" on it on every single slide. And that was a big mistake in a room of middle school kids. I'd strongly recommend different terminology. And I was a middle school teacher. I should have known that you can't say that word in a high school.

Right, yeah, I think that there needs to be a better language. I think if people of all ages understood the autonomic nervous system, this aspect of our nervous system that is on a continuum that leads us to either be, I guess, at the extremes, you would say coma would be the deepest state of parasympathetic- - Right, total non-arousal.

- Yeah, non-arousal. Then ascending from very deeply asleep, lightly asleep, groggy, awake, awake and alert, awake and alert to the point of being highly alert. And then you get into kind of low-level panic and then all out panic attack, right? I mean, that's kind of the continuum, the autonomic continuum.

I feel like if people understood that and they could simply ask, okay, where's my body and mind along that continuum, and then compare it to whatever it is they face, then we'd have a better sense of whether or not we were in the correct, maybe even optimal state for dealing with challenge or not.

And along those lines, what is the optimal internal state for dealing with challenge that is just outside our ability? You know, maybe in an exam where I can naturally get 85% of the answers correct, but maybe 15%. I think this is what the machine learning and AI tells us is probably the appropriate level of difficulty for something in order to best learn.

I know that's probably too broad. - Yeah, it depends on if you're motivated and if, you know, a lot of things, but yeah. I mean, I think if you think of the autonomic arousal on just one axis, where you start running into problems, we find, is that I think you're right that there's like, you know, coma to like some arousal or meaningful arousal, but it's the middle to the end part where there's two different tracks.

And one track is very high arousal, but you're terrified of the damage and defeat and the humiliation and the failure. And so that's demanding all your attention. That's what we call a threat type stress. There's another version that is, again, very high arousal, but that's like you're stoked and you feel confident you're gonna do well.

And that's also very high arousal. And if you just look at arousal measures like pre-ejection period, right? - Could you explain pre-ejection period? - It's just a, it's a simple measure of just the sympathetic nervous system that we use in all of our studies. - So sympathetic, just to remind folks, is one aspect of the autonomic nervous system, has nothing to do with sympathy, just the more alert means more contribution of the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system.

Sorry, it's a mouthful. And then less alert would be more contribution of the parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system. - And PEP is just a measure that we use in our laboratory studies. And another could have been like skin conductance, which is about the sweat coming out of your skin.

And then we use an electrode to figure out how much is there that those kinds of measures can't distinguish what we call a challenge type state. That's almost like people have heard of flow where you're optimally balanced between important challenge you care about and resources and ability to, you know, overcome or at least deal with that challenge on the positive side.

And the other high arousal state, which is threat. And that's, again, everything's highly engaged, your whole stress system, but you don't think you can deal with it. So that becomes really important because here's a very practical example. If you look at devices people are wearing to detect their stress, that might say high or low arousal, but it can't distinguish between super good positive challenge type stress and really negative threat type stress.

One of the examples that psychophysiologists like to say a lot, I got this from Jeremy Jameson, is imagine you're at the top of a double black diamond about to ski down. If you are a good skier, your heart rate isn't probably low. You're probably amped up. You're stoked. You're like, this is awesome.

I can't wait to do this. If you're fully confident, you're gonna make all the turns and have a blast. If you're a terrible skier, you're just imagining the yard sale that's about to happen. You're about to crash. You're gonna fall down the mountain. You might die. Also high arousal.

If you're wearing like the regular watch that will just detect sympathetic nervous system activation, it wouldn't be able to tell the difference between really stoked to do something positive and terrified of like crashing and dying. And so I like that example because often in social situations or performance situations, you wanna be high arousal to perform your best, but you want your perception of that demand, the demand that's requiring your body to respond to be matched with an equal belief or what we call appraisal of your resources to meet that demand.

So I think my answer to the question is, well, I think it's not so much about what's the optimal amount of demand, right? So that the 85% likelihood of success rate problems, that's titrating demand. I think it's how do you pair a necessary level of demand for whatever goal you have with the perceptions of the resources.

And sometimes those resources are your internal, like just confidence, or sometimes it's your ability to reappraise and other times it's material resources. Like do you have a, it could be in real life, do you have a friend that you could turn to? Or it might be, have you been trained in a way where you're able to overcome this?

Do you have enough time? So resources can be a big bucket. And that's kind of the magic is because resources are appraised by the mind in our interventions, we can give you a different way of viewing your resources so that way people feel like they can meet the demand.

And that pushes them from a threat type response into a more challenge type response. - It makes sense if I think that the stress, for lack of a better term, and the effort is going to get me where I need to go, eventually I'm going to be far more willing to invest the effort.

Especially if I'm motivated, I want the thing that lies at the finish line. - You basically take the demand, which was your intense stress and worry, and turn it into a resource in your own mind. And it turns out that that actually helps people cope at a physiological level.

- Got it, got it. - So, we've been talking a lot about kind of the nuts and bolts of growth mindset and stress is performance enhancing mindset. Maybe we could shift a little bit to the discussion about what you call the mentor mindset. And as we do that, maybe we'll weave back in some of these concepts.

Your book, "10 to 25" focuses heavily on social appraisal, self appraisal. Basically the idea that we want to be liked and we don't want to be disliked, and it hurts when people say mean things about us, or when we hear negative feedback, especially if it's provided publicly. But ultimately what we do with that information is what determines whether or not we grow and move forward.

Everyone loves a great report card. Nobody likes a poor report card. So, tell us about mentor mindset, and both for folks in the 10 to 25 age range, but also for everybody, because it's clear that this impacts us throughout our lifespan. - Yeah, so the work I write about comes out of a dissertation led by Jeff Cohen at Stanford in the '90s with Claude Steele.

And they coined a term that they called the mentor's dilemma. And the mentor's dilemma is the idea that if you're a leader, a manager, a coach, teacher, whatever it is, parent, it's very hard to simultaneously criticize somebody's work and motivate them to overcome and embrace that criticism. And the reason it's a dilemma is because the leader on the one hand wants to maintain high standards by being critical, maybe in order to help the person grow, but that could crush the person's motivation.

The alternative is withhold your criticism. Don't say the truth. Hide all the critical feedback and be nice and super supportive. But, and that meets your goal of being friendly and caring, but it doesn't help the person grow. So it feels like we have to walk through the world we're stuck between two bad choices.

Either you're a demanding autocratic dictator who doesn't care about human feelings, or you are a low standards wimp pushover that's giving in to the wimpy demands of the weak next generation. And neither of those have uniformly positive connotations. And the classic example in Jeff's work was a student at Stanford who writes the first draft of an essay and then gets really harsh critical feedback from a professor.

Are they willing to revise their work? Or do they say, this teacher hates me, they're biased, I dislike them, and leave the comments unaddressed. So the solution to that in that research on the mentor's dilemma has been to say two things. One is appeal to the very high standard you have for someone's work, but also always accompany that appeal to the high standard with an assurance that if they implement the feedback and use the support, that they're capable of meeting the high standard.

I like to think of it as, like if you go to the rollercoaster and they say you have to be this tall to ride, right? So just saying you have to be this tall and you're not, see you later, isn't reassuring to somebody, right? But if you can say, here's the standard and I believe you can meet it, but it's gonna be hard, that means a lot.

It means I'm taking you seriously. It means I believe in your growth. And it's a kind of leadership practice that makes growth mindset be something that comes to life and feel true. It's not just an idea in your head that you're growing. It's like, I live in a social world where people are gonna push me to grow and not leave me alone.

- Are you familiar with the book of the late, I think the pronunciation is Randy Pausch for the last lecture? - No. - He was a computer scientist. He developed a lot of early online portals for kids, in particular, young women to learn programming. I think it was called Alice.

And he is known for what's called the last lecture. He was diagnosed with cancer. He eventually passed away, but he talked about in his book, lessons that were important for life. And one of the things that he said was, the thing to worry about is not when your mentors and coaches are pushing you, it's when they stop pushing you, that you should really worry because that means they've basically given up on you.

So that always rung in my mind. - Yeah, what I call the person who just is no longer maintaining high standards for you, I call that a protector mindset. That it's almost like it's gonna be too much trouble to see you dealing with stress from being pushed that I am gonna protect you from that stress.

Maybe I care about you, but I'm not gonna hold you to a high standard. And I see that a lot in coaches. I see it in teachers, I see it in parents. For me, the opposite problematic version is what I call an enforcer mindset. This is like, here's the standard, and I'm gonna hold you to it, and it's up to you to meet it or not.

That's kind of like the college professor that says, look to your left, look to your right, half of you are gonna be gone by the end of this. For me, the solution is to think about taking the best parts of both of those two. What's the high standards, high support?

So enforcer, great, you've got the standards, let's add your support. Protector, you care a lot, great, let's add the standards. And what Jeff Cohen and Claude Steele found in their initial study is that students were far more likely to view negative criticism as a sign that the teacher cared for them if it was accompanied by a transparent and clear communication of these two elements of high standards and high support.

If it was just the critical feedback, the professor could have meant the same positive thing, I'm caring about you, but if they didn't make it clear to the person, then participants were less likely to think that the professor was on their side. And in our work, in some small studies, we showed that even seventh graders, when they get critical feedback on their essays, are about twice as likely to implement the teacher's critical feedback with even a very short invocation of the high standards and the high support.

So to get to your question about mentor mindset, at some point, I got worried that our experiment on high standards, high support messages, which we called wise feedback in those studies, would be viewed as, I don't know, like a magic phrase. Like my joke, my laugh line, this is a lame laugh line, but I'm a professor, so that's the best I can do.

My laugh line was always, I just live in fear that Pearson and other textbook companies are gonna sell wise feedback posted notes and say they can magically erase the achievement gap. And I always said that as a joke, and then two things happened. One is a popular author, a guy named Dan Coyle, literally called it magic feedback in his book, didn't cite us, but like-- - You didn't cite us?

- No. - Dan. - But also like magic feedback-- - I'll say it so you don't have to, not cool. Attribution is important. - It's just not, it's not magic at all. The magic of high standards and high support is not the 18 words, it's I'm taking you seriously when a moment when you're vulnerable and I have power over you.

That is just so deeply human and so powerful. But there's nothing about the magic words. It's the experience of dignity and respect when you are questioning whether you're either worthy of it or are going to be given it by authorities. - It's interesting, we had Dr. Becky Kennedy on here to talk about parenting and she said many important things, but among them was the fact that children, perhaps all people, want to feel real and they want to feel safe.

An important concept that I think many people heard and are really internalizing. I know I am for sure. And this idea of feeling real has to do with not just feeling seen, but that people believe us, even if they disagree with us, like they believe us. - She has another thing that's super profound is the kind of two things argument, that I can both have high expectations for my kids and love my kids.

And I think that's a very good version of wise feedback mentor mindset. That as parents, it either feels like I can expect a lot of my kids, but then I'm a monster and they're gonna yell at me or I'm gonna be a pushover and then they're gonna be unruly.

And I think part of her wisdom is to help explain to parents how you can do both of those things. - And indeed one can, right? I think, but it requires having a kind of dynamic stance or dynamic mindset as the teacher, the leader, the coach, the parent. I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Waking Up.

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Again, that's wakingup.com/huberman. I want to get back to some of the mechanics of how to go about that. But why do you think this stuff is so hard? Like if we think about, I don't know, kind of a curbside evolutionary theory, meaning I don't have any formal training in evolutionary psychology.

You could step back and say, like, I don't know, maybe we just used to be so busy from morning to sleep that we didn't really have time to do anything except the stuff we needed to complete in order to feed our families and take care of our communities, et cetera.

And now a number of things are outsourced. And so here we have this notion of strivings. But then again, we went from hunter-gatherer cultures to writing "War and Peace" and everything else, technologies of all kinds. So, you know, there must be something in the human brain that causes us to strive.

And what we're really talking about here is striving and our relationship with striving. So if we were to step back and just say, okay, what do you think determines whether or not someone feels they can do better? Is it early success? You know, they tried at something. I mean, everyone, most everyone, I assume, who tries to learn to walk walks, learns to speak speaks.

You know, they're rare exceptions. But, you know, what do you think this whole thing about strivings is about? And when we talk about growth mindset, stress enhancing mindset, the mentor mindset, I mean, are we trying to get back to activating systems that are hardwired within us and that have been kind of masked by daily life?

Or are we trying to kind of better ourselves and our species through, you know, like really trying to do something that's never been done in human history before? - Right. - It's a big question. - It's a big question. But I mean, I think that all I can do is conjecture, you know, as a scientist.

But I'm often reminded of something I heard from Ron Dahl, who's a neuroscientist at Berkeley. - Not Ronald Dahl, the children's book author. - Not Rald Dahl, Ron Dahl. Although Ron is just so, he's an awesome guy. It's like polymath, he can do everything. And just so curious and generous.

What he always says to me, he's like, "Look," he's like, "David, what do you think the human brain wants to do?" Like, "I don't know, feel good." He's like, "No, it wants to feel better." And I think what he was trying to get me to see is that it's the kind of pursuit of some kind of delta.

- A change. - Yeah, a change from the state. And I think the argument is that even if you are, if what you thought was your biggest need, if that was satisfied, then there's always another thing, I think is part of the argument. But it's also this idea that if you think of the human brain as trying to learn at all times, like, what is it trying to learn?

And at least in the animal studies, as you know, often it's like, how do I either feel better or avoid feeling worse in a lot of ways? And I think that, as I think about adolescence, that's a period where your theory of how to feel better is dramatically changing because you're no longer fully cared for by adults, right?

All of a sudden, your criteria for feeling good about yourself is your social standing, not just in your parents' eyes, but in the eyes of the community and the milieu you're a part of. And that comes a lot from your contribution value. If you think in our evolutionary history, like, being ostracized and alone is certain death in ancient human cultures, right?

I mean, you can't, the tribe's wandering around in the savanna, you're alone. At a minimum, you have no one to watch out for you when you fall asleep. And so, and humans can't sleep in trees 'cause our muscles don't contract when we're asleep, unlike animals. And so you're just exposed on the ground.

If you're alone, eventually you're gonna die, right? So the fear of moving from parents taking care of your safety all night to now you have to trust peers to take care of you and watch over you, that comes to the forefront of young people's minds, the kind of the minute puberty strikes.

And so what it means to feel better often is that I'm socially valued by the group. There's something, they're gonna keep me around for some reason. Now, they don't often keep score in an explicit way. I mean, now things are in social media, maybe they're kind of keeping score, but like the rules of how you're doing socially are so implicit, you have to read between the lines, they're inferred.

Social hierarchy is very complex for adolescents. And so they overdo it thinking through, like, how am I standing? Like, where am I relative to others? Now, that process is started by puberty. And we know from lots of species work that it then leads to changes in the brain. So the dopaminergic system, of course, it's like driven in part by changes in going out on maturation.

Ron likes to talk about these great studies of songbirds, of how do they learn the mating calls. And if songbirds don't have testosterone when they are learning the mating calls, they don't do the like over the top obsessive practice, so they don't master them. And then they don't mate and they die alone.

- Interesting, yeah, I'm familiar with that literature. There's a great, unfortunately now passed away biologist who was first in the UK and then was up at UC Davis, Peter Marler, who studied the bird song learning. And it's- - It's amazing work. - Yeah, it's amazing work. And it mimics a lot of the development of human speech, although not exactly, like there's this babbling phase where babies and birds experiment with different tones and they're learning to use the pharynx and larynx or in birds, it's a slightly different system.

And some birds are seasonal singers, but I wasn't familiar with this result that the testosterone drives a kind of obsessive practice. - Yeah, it's an obsessive practice in order to demonstrate status, but really your value. I mean, there it's mate value, right? But I think the same thing is true for lots of things that teenagers try, it could be playing guitar, you know, could be gymnastics.

I mean, think about how many of their Olympic athletes are like 14, right? And they're waking up at four in the morning, they're practicing obsessively. How many like pro-social hackers who take down evil foreign governments, right, are teenagers, right? They're things that take so much practice and so much learning happen at the exact same age as adults are saying these kids are lazy and don't wanna work, right?

So I tend to focus on, let's get to your question about why do people strive to get better? I think in adolescence, you look around in your social milieu and see what counts for status, not in a superficial way, it sometimes happens, but often in a deeply meaningful way.

What am I gonna bring to the table? - One would hope. - And then, well-- - I remember junior high school being far more superficial, but I'm 48, so I remember it in kind of the John Hughes film era where people were very divided in terms of jocks and skateboarders and rockers and nerds.

Now, it seems a little bit more mishmashed. But I think also people will, in adolescence, I feel like kids find their niche and then try and excel within that niche. - Yeah. - You know, as opposed to high school or junior high school being one huge hierarchy. - Yeah.

- You know, there's kind of these sub-hierarchies. - Yeah, Dan McFarland is a sociologist at Stanford, did this really interesting study with the ad health data. And it turns out you could characterize the social hierarchies in different high schools by kind of single pyramid high schools versus multi-pyramid high schools.

And there's way better adjustment in the multi-pyramid high schools, because there's many routes to status. The evolutionary psychologist, Bruce Ellis, talks about having many roles. And I like that because in the old model, you know, if there's one pyramid and you're kind of near the top, but not at the top, you've got a lot of incentive to destroy reputations, be, you know, mean girls type of behavior.

Bob Ferris, sociologist at Davis, finds that the most bullying in high school is the people that are like the 60th, the 85th percentile on popularity. It's like you're near the top, but not all the way at the top. - Yeah, this maps very well to Robert Sapolsky's work on primate troops.

- Yeah. - Yeah, the alphas are stressed, but the sub alphas are, they have options. - Yeah. - And this is true for female and male animals. Just as it's true, we were talking about testosterone a few minutes ago in obsessive practice. I'll remind people that in women, they actually have more, adult women have more testosterone than they do estrogen.

If you look at a pure nanogram per deciliter comparison, it's just that overall, it tends to be on average less than in men. - So the statement about testosterone and obsessive learning or efforts to learn, I have to imagine is not restricted to males or females. - Yeah, and I think, I understand as a man praising testosterone that I could come across, but I, so I always need to remember that the research is very interesting on T.

Eveline Krohn's lab did these great studies where they had kids starting age 10 to like 25, and they had them come in the lab twice, and they took testosterone levels, but also had them do a bunch of tasks in the scanner. And you can look at nucleus accumbens, prefrontal cortex, et cetera.

- Areas associated with reward and pursuit motivation. - Yeah, and they also had them do risk-taking tasks. And what they find is that in both boys and girls, testosterone goes up over time. Starts a little earlier in girls because gonadarchies one or two years before boys, but the change score from one point to the next was equally predictive of neural reactivity during risk-taking tasks for both boys and girls.

So although boys end up with higher T throughout adolescence, the increase is equally predictive, which is another way of saying it's just as important for these social learning things in girls. And T, by the way, is just a really good-- - Testosterone. - Testosterone's a really good proxy. Other hormones are involved too.

They're just more complicated. Like DHEA, you could study as well, but that's part of the same metabolic pathway of cortisol and testosterone, so it's just messier and harder to interpret. So we're not making claims specifically about testosterone. It's just like a really good proxy for where you are in gonadal maturation.

In both boys and girls, gonadal maturation really matters for this kind of status, social-seeking part of your brain. - Yeah, so if I understand correctly, the slope of the line of one's testosterone increase for both boys and girls is predictive of striving. If it's a steep upward line, then that's associated with more striving in a given practice.

- To the extent that neural activation during a social reward task or a risk-taking task is a proxy for striving, and that's what a lot of people have argued, yeah. - Do you think that striving reflects the action of kind of a basic neural circuit that then can be applied to other things or lots of different things?

The reason I ask is that the notion of growth mindset is so attractive. It's such a sticky idea, or I think because one imagines, okay, if I can get really good at one thing, chess, then I can apply the same kind of relationship to the internal state of stress or arousal, what have you, when trying to navigate a new environment of another kind, a physical practice or a relationship challenge or something of that sort.

You know, what we're really talking about here is an algorithm that can be directed at different pursuits, as opposed to growth mindset is applied in one context and not another. So what of that? People who are incredibly good at accessing growth mindset in one domain of life, does that mean that they'll be good at accessing growth mindset in another domain of life?

What's the carryover or the spillover? - It's a great question. It comes up a lot. The Michigan State psychologist, Jason Moser, studied this, and they measured growth mindset about your intelligence, the classic one, your personality, your morality, your social relationships, your emotions, et cetera. And the question is, is there kind of like one growth mindset that applies in all the different ways, or are there totally narrow mindsets that have nothing to do with each other, or is it something in between?

And the finding was that there is an overall association. If you think one trait can change and be developed, you tend to think another trait can be changed and developed. And just empirically, it's hard to separate that from people's general tendency to disagree or agree with items. That could be what the common factor is, but it kind of makes sense.

However, there's also very domain-specific mindsets. So there are people who think, yeah, I can get smarter, but I can't change my shyness. And other people would think, my relationships are never gonna get better, but I can learn to play the cello, and vice versa. And when you wanna predict behavior, turns out that the closer you are to that domain, the better the prediction is gonna be.

So if I wanna know if you're gonna quit playing the cello or not, I'm gonna ask you your cello mindset. That's gonna do way better than, in general, can human qualities change? But if I'm gonna intervene, at what level should the intervention happen? If I only change your cello mindset, well, you're right.

Like, what if cello isn't your thing in life? Now are you gonna be fixed mindset for your relationships in school, and did I not really help you? So kind of the empirical answer currently is if it's a domain that someone could be really defensive about, it's better to be a little vaguer about it.

Classic example is Aron Halperin's work on the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is obviously a big issue right now. Their science paper in 2011 changed mindsets about group conflict in general. Can an ethnic group or a national group ever change? They didn't go to people in Israel and say, "Palestinians can change," 'cause they're like, "No, they can't.

"That's not possible." But if they said, "You know, sometimes leaders change, "and then when leaders change, "the group's priorities change, "and they become more amenable to negotiation, "and when that happens, things can change." If that was done at a more general level, then both Israelis and Palestinians were more open to a peace process.

So I think if it's something you're very defensive about, I tend to think back up and do the more abstract mindset. Another example is, I remember I was in graduate school at Stanford, and one of my RAs was so excited about our work, and he went to a party and talked about it.

It's like that very Stanford thing to do is talk about research at a party, and he's like, "Oh, yeah, math ability can change. "You don't have to be dumb at math forever." And the person he talked to was so offended. She was like, "Are you telling me "I could've done better in high school math, "and I just didn't try hard enough?

"And my life could be different? "So I could be an engineer right now? "Like, I like my life. "Why are you telling?" It went down this road of, like, how dare you tell me it could've been different? And who knows, maybe he had bad delivery and had 14 margaritas, and who knows what happened.

But I think the idea is like, if someone's got a reason to think about that fixed mindset as comforting in some way, that they don't have to feel bad about something that could've been different, it's probably not smart to go after that in a very specific way. But if someone's not defensive, generally the closer to the domain, the better, because they're gonna see the application.

Otherwise, they have to use it by analogy, and we know analogic reasoning is tough, 'cause it's hit or miss. - We love stories of people that have come from a place of being really back on their heels, or even just dissolved into a puddle of their own tears, to doing well again, maybe even soaring again.

It's sort of the common thing is that this is the classic American story, although it's true of people all over the world, I imagine. - Right, it's not always true in America either, but yeah, we love the story. - Yeah, some people crash and burn, but it seems like everybody loves a comeback story.

I don't know, something about that. The hero's journey, the hero of a thousand faces, is that the book, Joseph Campbell? - Yeah. - Yeah. And it's written into so many movies and books and real-life stories. I can't help but superimpose today's discussion onto something like that, that life is a series of efforts to apply growth mindset from learning how to walk, presumably as part of that.

I don't know any child that just stands up and walks early on, to the things that we really think we can perform well at, to finding ourselves really back on our heels. And so are there any data or theories even that point to the use of growth mindset and stress-enhancing mindset in coming from a real place of deficit?

Not just from trying to do better and learn new things, but from a real place of deficit, a real place of challenge. I think it's important for our audience to hear because I think a number of people do feel back on their heels in one or more domains of life.

- Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think that the data suggests that growth mindset becomes most relevant to your next behavior, the more challenge you face. And so for a long time, what that meant is if you maybe were a low-achieving student, and we're gonna evaluate growth mindset by looking at your grades, you should see bigger gains for low-achieving students compared to high-achieving students.

Part of that could be an artifact. If you already have straight As, we can't give you more As, it's impossible, right? But in general, psychological treatments like a growth mindset tend to work better for people who counterfactually wouldn't have them and could plausibly benefit from them. Where the story becomes more interesting is that often your kind of own individual difficulties are associated with your environment.

And the environment is really what allows you to apply your growth mindset over time. So it might make you right now need a growth mindset more, but it might make it harder for you to act on it. And so for people who like complex three-way interactions, the idea is that a treatment for growth mindset should work best for individuals who face the most challenges but are in the most supportive environments.

And one is like baseline, why do you need it? And the other is over time, what's gonna help you keep using it? So to be very concrete about this, in one paper we published in 2019, the National Study of Learning Mindsets, it was published in Nature. We evaluated growth mindset in this large national sample and the question wasn't, does it work on average?

The question was, where does it work and for whom? 'Cause there were lots of replications already and sometimes people tried it and like, well, it didn't work here. Okay, well, that's a puzzle, how do we figure that out? And the finding was low-achieving students in high schools that had more supportive classroom culture where you got the long run effects.

And in the four-year results, it's low-achieving students in high schools that offered more advanced courses. So if you're a low-achieving student, you get with mindset, it's like, great, give me pre-calculus. Oh, we don't offer that here, right? Or it's a toxic environment in some way. Their teachers are untrained, they're first-year teachers.

There's lots of poverty in the school. If you don't have the structure to support the striving, you don't get the long run effects, especially if the effects you're looking at are increases in equality of opportunity. So for me, the message is like, you think about growth mindset and psychological interventions as one tool in a toolkit to help people achieve their goals, but we can't forget about the entire field of sociology that tells us a lot about the allocation of resources through which people can even be afforded the chance to pursue their goals.

And so what I like about that finding, which by the way came from a collaboration with sociologists who thought, you psychologists are absurd. They're like, you think your little mindset is gonna change inequality? Like, you're gonna make an argument to 15-year-olds and that's your plan for improving the American economy.

That's absurd. I was like, well, I don't know, you could do something. And psychologists are skeptical of sociologists. They're like, look, how often do we have huge changes in law and policy, but people don't take advantage of the resources that are available to them? Let's change the behavior so they take advantage.

We kind of came together and said, what does it look like to consider both the structure and the internal psychology? And I think this was a very important point because people tend to choose one or the other. Either we're gonna lobby for new laws to reallocate resources, or we're gonna optimize the psychology of the individual.

And I think our perspective is to find ways to bring those two together and kind of do both. And ultimately, it's not a deficit-based perspective of you have a deficit and we're fixing that. Growth mindset's more like, well, it's an asset-based perspective. What I mean by that is we're not giving someone motivation in growth mindset.

We're presuming people already kind of wanna do well. They wanna impress others, they wanna be meaningful, they wanna contribute, but there's a barrier. The barrier is when you strive and then inevitably struggle, if you're pushing yourself beyond your abilities, people make you feel dumb for that struggle. So we're trying to remove that cultural and social barrier that's preventing people from their natural goal pursuit.

And that comes deeply from Carol Dweck's original work at the intersection of developmental and social psychology. The basic claim in developmental psychology is the human being is an active learner who's trying to figure out the world. This is classic Alison Gopnik, Susan Gellman. Infants are meaning makers trying to interpret the world and wanting to do well.

And eventually, they're socialized into beliefs that prevent them from acting on that basic neural desire to learn and grow, develop, et cetera. And growth mindset is really, it's not trying to be a magic pill to give an unmotivated, disaffected kid a shot in the arm of adrenaline so they go out and learn.

No, it presumes agency and love of learning and kind of like Dr. Beck, he said, presumes the goodness in kids and tries to remove whatever kind of garbage beliefs they've learned from social context. And then our long-term studies then show how once you do that, if you're also in a context where you can act on that love of learning, then you can see long-run effects that are far more than what a lot of people have said you could get even in a disadvantaged context.

- It's so interesting because what we're talking about here is psychological theory playing out in the real world, but also kind of like deep notions of the human spirit. Like we are a species that seems to organize our experience in terms of stories of ourselves and others, but that when it comes to things like strivings and learning, are really always in a constant state of either being more, to borrow the words of a friend of mine, either back on our heels, flat-footed, or forward center of mass, right?

And what we're talking about today as being forward center of mass, at least in certain areas of life. I mean, the fact that the reward systems of the brain, whether you mentioned them earlier, these mesolimbic reward pathways that basically deploy dopamine and other things, of course, are so associated with striving and achieving, striving and achieving, and presumably underlie much if not all of our human evolution, assuming we're still evolving.

Lately, sometimes I wonder, but some people would argue we're devolving, but I would argue we're still evolving, especially with this new burst in AI. It's all about math nowadays, folks. A few years ago, it was all about neuroscience, and neuroscience is still really important, and the two share, but it's all about math lately.

So I like to just think of the human animal as so different than the other animals of the planet. Like we're the curators of the planet. The house cats might be striving, but they're clearly not doing as well as we are in terms of managing the way the world goes.

So do you think that this is like a basic algorithm within human beings to look at ourselves, look at the environment, see challenges, overcome challenges, develop technologies? It's just kind of like a, it's like the same way my bulldog used to like to gnaw on things. You know, you like to chew and pull.

We just want to learn and grow. Do you think it's inherent to who we are as a species, maybe even what sets our species apart from all the others? - I mean, that's a profound question, and I think that's a good one to debate. What I've been really taken by recently is Carol Dweck's "Secret Life as a Neuroscientist." She has this great psych review paper that contradicts a lot of received wisdom about the prefrontal planning regions of the brain and the kind of amygdala and the hippocampus, the, you know, the affective regions and the memory creation regions.

And the classic argument, and going back to Plato and the Phaedrus, right, is that the rational acting part of the brain plans out what it wants, makes all these calculations, and then has to tame the emotional part in order to make those goals into a reality. And so the emotion, you know, the amygdala, the mesolimbic, that's this unruly horse that the charioteer has to harness, you know?

And I think that Carol argued, and I think other people have argued too. I've seen Adriana Galvan and Ron Dahl and others argue this, that the affective regions are often the teacher and the prefrontal is the student. And that makes sense if you think about how humans are goal-directed.

Think about how a kid learns to walk. They don't do that for theoretical reasons. They don't just like look at people walking and be like, "I wanna learn how to do that." - Right. - I have four kids. It's usually because there's a toy at the other side of the room that they really, really want and that I don't want them to have.

And the only way for them to go get it, 'cause I won't get it for them, is for them to learn how to walk. So the motor learning is the effect of the desire in the goal pursuit. And what Carol argued is that Phaedra's Hat is totally wrong. It's not that the prefrontal charioteer is taming the emotional.

It's really that the affective part is training the prefrontal to be better at pursuing the goals that matter in the social milieu that you have. And a lot of people like Adriana Galvan and Jen Pfeiffer and Nim Tottenham in the adolescent space have shown this, and I don't understand all the details fully, but the argument that I've heard is that once the scanning studies were able to switch from fMRI focused on simple activation to studies looking at connectivity, and where you could get temporal ordering, then you could start seeing actually that, especially in adolescence, it's the affective regions are training or teaching or telling the prefrontal regions what to do.

So I guess that's a long way of answering the question of I think that, I think goal pursuit is fundamental to human nature. And I think that the brain and our adaptation is designed to help us learn how to be a lot better at pursuing whatever goals will help us survive in our environment.

And the brain has to be adaptive to that environmental input because the environment's always changing. If it had only one way of pursuing its goals, then we would never survive. So it has to be the case that the planning, rational, observing part of the brain is actually responsive to what works in your context for goal pursuit.

So again, I'm summarizing other people's work here, but that's how I see it, yeah. - I completely agree that emotions drive the more, let's call tactical circuitry of the prefrontal cortex. Of course, we should be fair to the neuroscience. The prefrontal cortex is part of the limbic system. People often think because it's in the cortex, it's higher order, and that's simply not true.

But well, if we both agree, and it sounds like we do, that emotions drive tactical decisions that drive action and learning, maybe we could talk about the two major types of emotions that one could imagine. One is I really want the toy. I really want the piece of food.

I really need something for survival or for wellbeing, and so I'm going to be motivated, and then the prefrontal cortex will work out the strategies and balance out the relationship to stress, et cetera, and remind ourselves that stress can be performance enhancing, and eventually we get the thing or the skill or the whatever.

The other would be fear, fear of social shame, fear of staying in a place that's not good for us financially, emotionally, socially, et cetera. Is there any work that identifies whether or not that the core emotion driving motivation is relevant, and is there a role for growth mindset there?

- That's interesting. - I guess put simply, take it out of the ivory tower a little bit, which is what we're doing here anyway. You can do things out of love. You can do things out of fear. You do for both reasons too. - Yeah. - You can do things to please yourself.

You can do things to please others. You can do things to avoid others being disappointed in you, you being disappointed in yourself. Presumably it's both. - Yeah. - But is there any, I'm dying for you to tell me that when we do things out of love, we learn faster, but maybe that's not the case.

- Well, I don't know. I mean, so two thoughts. One is just honoring Danny Kahneman, who just passed away. His work with Amos Tversky took on a version of this question in prospect theory, and it's the idea of does the fear of a loss motivate us more than the prospect of a gain, right?

And their argument is that both can be motivating as well as the possibility of a loss, but that loss is loomed larger, that people are more willing to take a risky gamble to prevent a loss than they are to get a numerically equal, like a mathematically equal gain. And so a lot of people have used that information in various ways, and I think that that has led people to conclude that the prospect of a gain doesn't mean anything.

But that really wasn't ever the point in prospect theory. It's just that it's a little more powerful to avoid, to be afraid of a loss. I don't see a problem with thinking like, yeah, losses are a little worse. If I already had $1,000 and you took it away, feels a little worse than the chance to win 1,000 that I didn't win.

Mathematically, it's the same delta. But I think that the way that behavioral economic work gets applied is to appeal to people's kind of basis and most fearful responses to things. And if you think about what drives a lot of excellence, in moral exemplars too, it's this chance to feel like you've made a big contribution to others.

And I don't think people are afraid that they didn't help as many people as they could have. And maybe that drives some people. But I think just the affective forecasting of one day I'll feel good because of the meaningful work I did for others, that was high integrity when no one else would have seen it.

I think that's really motivating for a lot of people. And I think we underappreciate that. And therefore, we appeal to very narrow self-interest. And my favorite theorist on this is Dale Millers at the Stanford Business School. And he calls it the norm of self-interest. That if you look around, it looks like everyone's behaving for only very narrow short-term self-interested reasons.

And because you think that's the norm, then you yourself kind of respond to those incentives. And then you then in turn create that norm even more than other people see. But it's not a state of affairs that anybody really likes. Everybody kinds of prefers a pro-social world where people are helping others.

But if you think that's just a really weird thing to do and not normal, then people conform to the wrong norm. So in my work, what I try to emphasize is not that we're not afraid of losses and the narrow short-term gain that we're avoiding, or the short-term loss we're avoiding.

But I really do think that people are capable of far more beautiful contributions to the world when we assume that that's what they want and we create opportunities for them to do that. - Yeah, I've seen that so much. You look at some of the best managers, right? It's not just if you screw up, you're gonna lose your bonus.

Like that's not what the best managers in the world are doing, right? They're like, let's do something no one's ever done before. Let me support you to do it. And then let me make sure that you look awesome in front of all the senior vice presidents because you did that.

Like that's what the best managers do. And coaches too. - For my book, I interviewed the NBA's best shooting coach. This basketball player named Shane Battier who played college and pro basketball told me about him. And I interviewed Chip, England is his name. And he was at the San Antonio Spurs, which they had a 17 year run of being a perennial contender for the NBA championships.

And constantly drafted players who were talented but had a bad jump shot. So Kawhi Leonard is an example where it fell late in the first round because people thought couldn't shoot. Tony Parker is another example. When Tony Parker used to shoot, Greg Popovich would say, that's a turnover every time.

Chip England is a great shooting coach, worked with them. There's lots of Bill Barnwell had a great story about him, called him the shot doctor. And I interviewed Chip and I was like, Chip, how do you sell the vision to these players who are 18 to 21, are newfound millionaires.

Everyone's saying you're the best, you're a first rounder. And they don't wanna change their shot because if they do, they could mess it up, make it worse. Like a golfer is superstitious about their shot. And he's like, the number one thing I have to do is build trust. 'Cause I can't critique a player's shot and make them change it if they think they're gonna sacrifice more.

So he's like, Dave, the first thing you have to do is sell your vision. I was like, well, what's your vision? He's like, he doesn't say, if you don't change your shot, you are gonna lose millions of dollars and be out of the league. So he doesn't motivate with a fear of loss.

He says, the average time in the league is two and a half years, right? If you develop a great reliable jump shot where even as your athletic talents decline, you're still reliable. You're talking about a 10 year career. And then you're not just helping you, you're not just helping your family, you're helping your family's family.

So even in the like money obsessed throat world or professional sports, the single best coach working with the top players appeals to the prospect of what you could do for others, not the fear of loss. And to me, that's really telling. Like if it works to just motivate with the fear of loss, that's what he would do.

'Cause they would do whatever's effective. It's like at some level an efficient market, but that's not what Chip England does. And I think the same is true for a lot of other great mentors and leaders. - So if I understand correctly, when we find ourselves back on our heels or flat footed, we want to focus on the prospect of what we can do for others.

Like ultimately that's going to be the best. - Or the world, yeah. - Or the world, yeah. I guess, yeah, pick your, pick your scope of impact. - Yeah, could be for art, for intellectual history. It's a classic Viktor Frankl argument of man's search for meaning, right? As Viktor Frankl's leaving the concentration camps, what helps him survive?

And it's the debt that he owes to the future work that he wants to write to share with the world. And it's not the fear of death. It's the meaning of the work he could do for the world if he survives. - Yeah, I think I'd like to hover on this for a minute or two 'cause I think it's really important.

I realized we're getting more philosophical than operational, but-- - We have data on this, it's a-- - Yeah, I'd love to hear it. That's one of the things I'm really enjoying about this conversation at the moment. I think it's going to be abstract or that you've got it all there in that brain.

Yeah, let's talk about this, that when we feel back on our heels or we're flat footed, meaning we're not doing well, maybe hard things have happened, focusing on the prospect of what we can do for others, not just trying to avoid loss or further shame or just diminishment is going to be the best thing.

So what are the data on this? - Yeah, so we'll first just look at correlational studies in these global surveys of happiness. In almost anyone you can think of, the best predictor of life satisfaction and wellbeing is going to be the meaning of your life, in particular, the feeling like you're connected to others, you've contributed to others.

- That your life mattered. - That your life, there was something of value in your life to others or to the world, right? And so just anecdotally, the advice I always give to people like going through depression or the risk of that is to focus on what you can do for others or what you have done, right?

So that's just correlationally. Now, experimentally, what we did in some work, this was started with my first advisor at Stanford, Bill Damon, who studies purpose in life, is we asked the question of when you're going through something tedious, boring, frustrating, what motivates you to keep going? And there are many possible answers to that, but we compared two different ones.

One is the potential benefit you get out of that striving. So for a student in school, it's like the money you would get one day from working hard and doing well. An alternative though, is what you could do with the knowledge that you gained by going through the hard learning.

How could you contribute to others, make a difference, et cetera, with the knowledge and skills? We call that our purpose condition. A couple of things make that different from the standard narrative, but I think ultimately intuitive. One is the standard narrative is if you try hard in school or at work or whatever it is and suffer now, then one day there will be a kind of financial compensation.

So you're suffering now in a way that will bring material reward in the future. The brain's not really designed to make that kind of calculation, right? It's like, well, how certain is the reward in the future? How far into the future? And how bad is the punishment right now?

So there's all kinds of affective trade-offs that are hard for anyone or especially hard for 13-year-olds, right? So what a lot of school comes down to is an adult saying, "You need to suffer through 40 minutes per day "of factoring trinomials because I said so, "and I said it's good for your long-term future "so that one day in your 30s, "you can barely afford a mortgage," right?

This is not a compelling argument for most of America's youth, my opinion. The purpose condition though, is not about the exchange value of a credential some long time in the future. It's more like right now, you're getting a hard and kind of admirable skill that not everyone's gonna get.

And you're gonna then be prepared when the moment arises to do something of significance for others. Now that also is uncertain and in the future, but for things that are contributions, you kind of get to feel like a good person right now. The analogy I often use is if I'm gonna like make lunch for the homeless, I don't have to wait until they actually eat the food to feel like a good person.

I feel like a good person when I'm putting it in the bag, or even when I'm driving to the homeless shelter, right? And I think our idea was you can move up the reward by making it a social reward right now, rather than a material reward years into the future.

- Because then the pursuit itself becomes the reward. - Right, right now my, and actually the more frustrating it is right now, the more I'm being a good person because it means it was a hard skill to acquire that'll prepare me to make a difference later. And so we framed super tedious math.

This is with Angela Duckworth and Sidney D'Mello and Dave Ponescu and others as Marlon Henderson, as a chance to gain a skill that helps you contribute versus a chance to learn how to get an A and make money in the future versus a control. And what we found was that the contribute to others version led to deeper learning, greater persistence, higher grades over time.

And in one of our experiments, we gave them a choice of either doing super boring math or goofing off on the internet. And we were secretly tracking what the websites they were going to. And we found that teenagers did more very boring math and watched fewer videos and played less Tetris when they were given this purpose message before the task.

It's in our 2014 paper. And what I always think about, that's the kind of paper I wanted to go to graduate school to work on. But I think about it because if you think about Dale Miller's norm of self-interest, nobody thinks to do the purpose argument. They're like, of course, teenagers are short-sighted and think about material rewards and all they wanna do is either look cool or make money or whatever.

But no, like in our studies, if you appeal to the chance to make a contribution right now, then they did the behaviors that adults want them to do. They didn't goof off online and instead chose boring math. And adults think the only way you could ever get that is by imposing our will and was this kind of authoritarian set of rules.

But if you instead just appeal to the love of learning for the sake of others, then they're willing to kind of go through the suffering. And in the paper, we cite Viktor Frankl, where the person who knows the why for their existence is able to bear any how. And I think about that a lot, that we underestimate how willing young people are, really anyone is, to bear through things that are hard and difficult if they have a strong why.

- I think this is one of the most important concepts, frankly, ever discussed on this podcast, if I'm really honest. I think that we've parsed dopamine circuits and we've talked about motivation and reward. We've talked a little bit about growth mindset in a solo episode, but never before have I really understood the why component, the meaning component.

And I love how it marries so much of what we hear in kind of like pop culture psychology with real data. Like we're finally, thanks to you being here, meaning we're finally in the guts of it. Because we hear this like, oh, it feels so good to make a contribution, but you know, people are also self-interested.

- Yeah. - People want money. Then people say, well, past a certain amount of money, you don't get any happier. And I would argue that it's true, money can't buy happiness, but it can definitely buffer stress. - Yeah. - Not all forms of stress. And money itself can get people into more stress.

But anyone that says, you know, past blank number of dollars, there's no incremental increase in happiness. I just don't see how that could be given inflation. - No, that treats humans like linear functions. - Right. - I think that's a simplification. - Right. If higher purpose is best defined as making a meaningful contribution to the world, to a community, or maybe at the scale of the world, maybe at the scale of a family or what have you, a classroom.

And the thing that you said before that seems so important is that the moment that you attach your goal to something that's for others, it makes the effort involved its own form of reward. - Yeah. - That to me is so important. - Yeah. - So, so important. I kind of want to highlight bold, underline, and put a big exclamation mark after it, because that's so different than like, oh, you know, I want to be the top player on the team.

- Yeah. - Which means that every bit of effort you put in, you're like thinking, I'm going to be the best, I'm going to be the best, I'm going to be the best. But, and one perhaps can then feel that progress when one is making it, and feel like they're ascending that staircase.

But something additional must come about when we're invoking this feeling of contribution. And I think this is essential to our evolution as a species, 'cause we didn't develop in isolation. - Yeah, I mean, we had to show our value to the group or else they would get rid of us, right?

I mean, that's what it meant to go from being a child to being an adult. And the, think about what it, let's take basketball or whatever, right? If I'm trying super, super hard and it feels impossible to me and I'm not getting better, and it's purely for me, then I feel like a failure.

It feels like my goals are not being met and they never will be met, right? The effort feels terrible because it means something really bad about me, right? Now imagine you're putting in effort for others. The harder it is, the more awesome it is because it's more noble, right?

You've done something that's super impressive and sacrificed your own happiness for others, right? The social status of trying hard and failing for yourself is net negative because it's about shame, humiliation, I'm not good enough. The status of trying hard and failing and keeping going for others is like super net positive, right?

And I think that's what people fail to appreciate is especially someone young or even just early in a career, right? Starting out, if you can reframe difficulty and failure as part of the process of doing something with high integrity for others, like it changes the meaning of effort totally.

And once you have a different meaning, then something that previously felt bad can instead be motivating. Whether it's the stress, like in our stress enhancing work, or the boredom you're undergoing, it's doing something super tedious or anything like that. I remember when I was at Stanford as a graduate student, I worked in the lab of John Krasnick, who is famously detail-oriented.

Whenever we wanna go in really deep into something and go beyond what any other scientists would do, our joke name for that is giving it the full Krasnick because he's in communications and political science. And there was one project I was supervising where this will sound ridiculous, but it was what is the best adjective to use in a survey item?

So say you wanna go like, how hungry are you? Not at all, very, extremely, like what adjectives should you pick to label those in a survey item? And so the task was to find every time that human beings have rated adjectives on a zero to 100 scale in the history of science, and then average across all those to choose optimally spaced adjectives, like not at all, a lot, little.

So we had a lab full of undergraduates at Stanford who are used to creating startups and running nonprofits, and this is very tedious work for them. So how do you get them to super pay attention to all the details and not get it wrong? Where are we really gonna trust their work?

It's not by saying you're gonna get into law school if you do this, because it's not really true. And they'd be like, there's a lot of other ways for me to get into law school that don't involve going to journals from the 1920s to rate adjectives, right? Instead, what I started doing was give them what I call the save the world speech, which is like, look, we're gonna write this paper, and it's gonna be the kind of paper that no one would have done 'cause it's so tedious.

But if it's trustworthy, thousands of people would know how to have more accurate measurement, and they're gonna be so grateful for that. But not only that, there'll be skeptics, and the skeptics are gonna look in our supplement, they're gonna find mistakes, and then they're gonna email the editor, and they're gonna say, why did you let this sloppy work into the journal?

And that happens all the time. I mean, I don't know how much you follow what's happening to behavioral scientists these days, but if you have an influential finding, that's the norm, is people should scrutinize it, they should kick the tires, and they're gonna find it, and they're gonna out you.

- And they're doing more of that now, like with PubPeer, which I think is great. PubPeer is awesome. PubPeer, folks, is where papers are evaluated online. People find sometimes outright errors, and sure, there are those like sleuthing for- - Yeah, you find fraud. - For fraud, but most of what's put there is stuff like differences in interpretation, or somebody will suggest that the authors could have done a better analysis, or that maybe their conclusions were a little too far-reaching based on a particular set of methods.

- And I think it's good for science. I mean, there's a lot of bad-intentioned sleuthing that is trying to find circumstantial evidence to make someone look bad. - Is that true? - Yeah. - Really? - Yeah. - That's a shame, because the whole purpose of it is to better the work, not to...

I'm assuming the whole purpose of PubPeer is to better the work, and of course, point out where there are real errors in the historical literature. - Right, well, I think that the... Yes, there's a new way to become famous in science, which is to find errors, which, again, is really valuable if you successfully do it, but there's enough room for interpretation that someone can, with circumstantial evidence only, make it look like something's really bad, and then cause an alarm, and it causes all kinds of problems.

However, for me, at least in our lab, that if you always assume that someone will look at your work with the worst possible intentions, and will ask for every file, how did it get from Qualtrics into your paper, just assume that all the time, then that means you need to pay as much attention to the file that was downloaded, and how it was processed, and every part of the pipeline has to be documented.

You just have to do that. And so, working with Crosnic's lab, that's the process that we adopted, and there's all kinds... People email, they're like, wait, show me this finding. I'm like, okay, here's the link to the server, here's the syntax, you can go find it, et cetera, et cetera.

So, good scientists should do that, and so the possibility of scrutiny and catching fraud should motivate everyone to treat it as though it's an inevitability, and therefore, be careful in your process. Convincing 19-year-old Stanford undergraduates that that is likely to happen, and that therefore, you need to pay super close attention to the details, that was my task as a lab manager.

And so, there, it was a mix of the fear of shame and humiliation, but also, ideally, the contribution that our work will make. And we had the hardest working RAs we've ever had that summer, and that's not an empirical claim. I say that, I didn't randomize the undergrads to that, but that experience kind of gave me the idea for the purpose studies, was assume people wanna do good work, but all else equal, they might find an easier way to do it, and then motivate with an appeal to how this work could make a difference, how other people could be influenced by it, and also, if you don't take it seriously, it'd be a really big deal, it'd be really bad.

And I think about that a lot, because we don't often appeal to the contribution value of the work, we appeal to getting a good grade and impressing people. And that's less important for me than did I get a skill and did I do high-quality, high-integrity work. - So, what you're basically saying is that if we attach our motivation to the give, to the contribution that we're going to make, it actually makes the process much easier, or at least more rewarding along the way, as well as, by definition, contributing more positively to society.

It's causing me to reflect on what we normally perceive as high-achieving individuals. So often, it seems like we hear the stories of the Steve Jobses, I really enjoyed that book by Walter Isaacson, and that story, I'm very impressed by his contributions, although he's a complicated person, as is often the case with people that make big contributions, it seems.

Or people in the political sphere, or people in the academic sphere, or the sports sphere, you know, most often, we think of them as striving for themselves, maybe for themselves and their family. And then there are these people that really stand out as these shining examples, like Martin Luther King, or, you know, and others where we just are kind of in awe of how mission-driven they were for the greater good.

- What sort of work is being done to encourage that kind of mindset, the contribution mindset? Growth mindset through contribution mindset. I just coined that, contribution mindset. - Add some more words in there. - Right, exactly, that's all it needs, more mindsets. But the contribution mindset, because I think, at least in this country, we are often raised to revere people that make big contributions, but then we get really absorbed into that person's story.

Right, it's like the story of the person and what made them tick. And then there's a lot of ego in it, you know, or they have a kind of obsessive nature to them. And we don't know what goes on in other people's minds. You know, we're so, I must say, there's a certain arrogance in all of our perceptions of others, like that we know why they're doing what they're doing.

Half the time, we don't even know why we're doing what we're doing. But I think you get the idea here. What I'm imagining is a more benevolent world where people also enjoy striving more, and the striving process itself, while hard, has meaning, and people are not egoless, but where there's a bit more balance.

Like, are we getting a little bit like, we, you know, kind of looking at this through rose-colored glasses? Or I think it's possible. I like to think it's possible. - Yeah, I mean, I think that the version that in which people are purely pro-social, self-transcendent, and have no self-interest, you know, is not super realistic, and it's not actually what our data are finding.

So what we find is that adding this pro-social contribution argument has a big effect, but if you do it absent any plausible benefit the person would get, it tends to not be motivating. So it's the combination of, let's just take the school case. I'm gonna learn something, gain a new skill.

I'm gonna get a job that I enjoy and that gives me freedom, and make a contribution to others. We found it was the addition of the pro-social part to the self-interested part. Now, if it was do X, Y, Z, and, you know, make lots of money far in the future, and then give that money away, that didn't work, 'cause that's still the same logic of sacrifice now for later financial reward, which then has an exchange value of some ambiguous, you know, amount in the future.

That one didn't motivate kids or students to want to deeply learn that. - Don't tell the philanthropists that. - Universities depend heavily on philanthropy, especially nowadays, and we're grateful to them that they support so much good work. So you're saying that it makes sense that there needs to be some component of self-interest, right, like Jobs loved design, right?

Presumably folks like Elon and others love the mechanics of what they do, building rockets, building electric cars, and things like that. But then this pro-social thing, the idea that the world could be better and different with these things in them. - Yeah, if you did the work right. I mean, a good example is my friend, Danielle Kretik, who ran Empathy Lab at Google for a while, and before that worked at Apple and other places.

You know, you could think that designing products at a large tech company is purely about is that product gonna sell a lot, make a lot of money, et cetera, and that's obviously part of the value for the shareholders and so on. But, you know, her philosophy was always, okay, well, what's gonna happen with the user?

What does the user need? Is their life gonna be better with this product? And that often led to design choices that made the product even better and more profitable. And I think there are a lot of examples of that where, you know, when the team is trying to create something that is high quality, but with integrity and ethics that are gonna benefit people, people are willing to put in extra hours.

They're willing to solve a puzzle, do better work. I think there are a lot of examples of that. That's on the product design side. I also wanna talk about the management side. So one of the people I followed for my book is a manager at a company, she was at Microsoft, now she's at a place called ServiceNow, and I just studied how she mentored young employees.

Her name is Steph Okamoto, and she has this great story about a really awesome 25-ish employee, 25-year-old-ish employee showed up and had come from teaching, Teach for America, and now is in HR at Microsoft. And Steph could immediately tell, her name is Saloni, she's gonna be bored by her regular job.

She's gonna be able to do more than what she had to do. But as a manager, you can't say as the first thing, you need to do twice your job for the same amount of pay. That's like not a good management philosophy. So instead, it was a conversation. All right, what's a contribution you wanna make to the company, where in making that, above and beyond, you're gonna learn a new skill that's gonna help you move up the ladder, right?

So that in your next performance review, you're gonna look like a superstar, like a total over-performer. And so at the time, they were running global manager development. And so what they decided was, don't just deliver the programs well, which Steph thought she could do well, but also create a dashboard to track everyone's progress.

So every new hire, they would know where they are in the management process. And it was global during the pandemic, so kind of a complicated time. Anyway, she did her regular job really well and created this whole dashboard, which brought value to the company, big contribution. But then when it came time for performance evaluations, she could say, you're already performing at a level, two levels up.

That gave her promotional velocity. She moved up, she left the company for a while, now is the chief of staff HR at Microsoft, right? Kind of in line to lead Microsoft. And then what about Steph? Well, Steph's team overperformed, which was incentivized. But then she gets to go home saying like, I use my time as a manager to change someone's life.

And that brings her so much joy. And it's just so much fun as a teacher to have some of our time with young people lead them on a path they wouldn't have been on otherwise. It is a total blast to mentor someone and change their lives. So I think that's a good example of, it's in everyone's long-term self-interest to contribute to both the company and the people around you.

But no one's being a martyr. They're not really, also everyone's compensated. So you need to think about, of course, is the company gonna pay you if you help others improve? And there's important questions that we asked there. But I just think that's a good example where we have a false psychotomy of it's either good for me or I'm a martyr helping others.

But like the best work is both. And then it feels awesome 'cause you both change people's lives and you're compensated for it. And that's great. Certainly has been my experience that doing things that I love, like learning and organizing and distributing information with the specific intention of people benefiting from it, should they choose to use it or apply it or think about it, is the best of both worlds.

- Yeah. - Certainly. Let's talk about this other phenotype, the people that, and they do serve a role in the world, folks whose sole purpose seems to be to critique, to identify errors. And I think in the case of catching real fundamental flaws and stuff play a key role.

We need those, right? - Yeah, and it's kind of unfair that as a scientific field, we force a small group of people to have to police everybody else's work. Ideally, they wouldn't have to do that job. And so there's a lot of value in the people who have developed very honest and high integrity tools to find mistakes.

- Yeah, I think some of the AI tools for finding errors, at least in data sets. - Right, like the images in a neuroscience study where you can tell that the images have been altered. - Or plots. - Yeah. - Like I remember a few years back, the Reinhard Schoen cases of the, he was like this wunderkind who published, I was like crazy numbers, like eight or 10 papers in science and nature per year.

And then I think it was actually similarities in the noise, the random, in quotes, noise plots. - Oh, the error bars. - That eventually led to the understanding that there was data duplication or something. Anyway, I don't remember how it went. Yeah, it's important to correct the literature that way, right?

But then there seems to be, at least online, and on social media, there seems to be a kind of a short-term incentive, I have to imagine there's some incentive, for people just being really critical. Like I was thinking about this the other day, what kind of mindset would one have to just randomly go put a nasty comment on social media?

Like if you just think about it, not about an issue you're particularly vexed by or somebody's stance on, like that makes sense, right? People get aggravated and they're like, there they were. But just think about the mindset there. Like, oh, you've got your life, you have time, and you're going to go like say mean things, right?

Like to me, it's just inconceivable to do that online, like to go and just post that stuff. But clearly there's something, there's some incentive built there. And I don't think this is a new thing. I'm guessing that before we had online culture within medieval societies, and these elements exist within us, and that there must be some reward, they must feel some reward.

But it's not generative, it's not building society. When appropriately placed, I guess we're saying, it provides a corrective mechanism. But what do you think that's about? And is there any literature on this kind of thing? - Yeah, well, not the exact example of being a total jerk online. I mean, I can't imagine doing that 'cause who has the time?

I mean, I have four kids and like coach baseball. I don't know how I'm gonna like police other people, unless it's relevant to my work. And I think someone's like not having integrity in what they're doing. And I'm like, you guys are being sloppy. And I might say that.

But what I find compelling is a beautiful new book by Mary Murphy called "Cultures of Growth," who was trained at Stanford under Claude Steele, was also trained by Carol Dweck, just came out a week ago, and it's getting tons of great press. And in her work, what she finds is that fixed mindset can be a cultural variable, like a more leadership variable, not just in the mind of the individual.

And when that's the culture, then she finds people are more willing to try to make everyone else look like an idiot so that you don't get attacked. That's the summary finding. And there's a kind of deflection strategy that if I trash other people for being idiots, then it'll make other people think twice before they mess with me.

And so, but it creates the very toxic culture that they're trying to escape, which is the threat of their own intelligence being attacked. So it's totally counterproductive. And she uses the example of Microsoft under the Ballmer era, where you'd go into meetings and you'd get yelled at if you made any mistake and you weren't allowed to talk, and they would literally flip over a table and yell at you, and people would leave the room crying.

And there's a lot of accounts of this as a very public information. And one of the things Satya Nadella did when he came in was to change what he said. He said, "We have a culture of know-it-alls, "and we need a culture of learn-it-alls." And has the virtue of ending in the same word, so it's pithy, but I kind of like that idea.

And so Mary describes how, in this culture of genius, she calls it, you don't just get the hypercriticism, you then, the consequence of that is unethical behavior where you hide mistakes or lie about things because you're worried about being outed as not a genius. So the culture of fearing mistakes gives rise to the kind of unethical hiding type of culture.

Now, the layperson could draw a line between that and like the Zune and Bing and other like failed products. You know, I'll leave that to organizational scholars to decide if that's the story. But at least the cautionary tale is like Boeing is another example where Calhoun, when he came in as a CEO, changed the incentive scheme at Boeing to be something called stack ranking, which is where you fire the bottom 10% every six months or a year within your group.

So if your group might be higher performing on average than some other group, but the bottom 10% of your group are getting fired. Okay, and this goes back to GE, it's a Jack Welch policy. Anyway, so that happened two years ago, and look what's happened in the last two years.

Now he's out, right? You have all these mistakes where people aren't going and finding the problems. Now, again, I'm not at Boeing. I can't, you know, as a scientist, I can't say that that is the cause. But the argument in Mary's book is that when you have organizations like that culture of genius, you hide mistakes, and then you have unethical behavior in order to conceal those, and then you don't fix them.

But in what she calls a culture of growth, you're like willing to examine mistakes because they're not indicative of a sign that, they're not indicative of your overall inability to do well. They're like part of the process of growing as a group. - Super interesting. You said Mary Murphy cultures of growth?

- Yeah. - Interesting. It seems everybody worked with Carol Dweck, you, Claude Steele, Mary Murphy. - I have a small friendship group. - That's an amazing group. - By that, I mean I have no friends except people I work with. - You've clearly landed in a great group, nonetheless.

This is very interesting. So people who are hypercritical or spend an enormous amount of time being critical just for being critical sake are masking, they're cloaking themselves. It's a form of self-protection, yeah. - That's their SR, that's the claim. And I think there's some pretty good suggestive evidence of that.

- Yeah, it'd be interesting if online, like everyone had to put some of their CV in their masthead, you know? It's sort of like what have you done as you're attacking? Because that would differentiate the people like Elizabeth Bick, for instance, who I think that's her name, who's considered one of the best data evaluation people, right, she runs her Twitter account, is they essentially, she shows errors in papers.

And I think the goal there is to offer people the opportunity to not necessarily retract, although in some cases retract, but to alter the papers, write errata and addendums and things that to say, you know, so that's like the appropriate use of critique, right? She's not doing it to cloak anything else, presumably.

As opposed to people that just run around trying to poke holes in everything that they see. It's cynicism, really. It's kind of an like online cynicism. - Well, I think it's easier to be skeptical than it is to like eventually believe in something after being convinced. And so I think there's a default toward, well, I don't believe that.

And we get that sometimes with growth mindset. They're like, well, what do you mean a 50 minute intervention has effect? Well, okay, but all the things you're complaining about are things that we addressed in the study. So at some point you have to just say that you believe in the process of science or you don't.

And I understand if there were additional studies that didn't follow the process of science or left big holes to be addressed. But at some point it's like, well, we did what you asked for. So I don't know what to tell you, I'm sorry. - Yeah, I know the growth mindset field has come under a bit of, not attack, but critique.

I know this 'cause in researching the solo episode and this one, one always has to be careful about relying on Wikipedia too much because it's the use of editors, legacy editors. And I'll go on record saying that there's a ton of bias in even within the legacy editors. I just, by the way, I'm not, just got my page vandalized even more, but I've sort of given up at this point because things are kludged together out of context.

And so I like, if I look at growth mindset on Wikipedia, there's a lot of supportive evidence and then you can get like two paragraphs of critique. And so for the uninformed, they don't know how to weigh that which is why we basically need a new system. - Well, they kind of want to say on one hand, on the other hand, but then- - Yeah, and there's no real weighting.

We don't know the expertise of these people where they're gleaning from blogs or whatnot. And look, I think it's a great concept. I think that it's just, to me at least, it seems that there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that growth mindset and related mindsets that we've talked about today have immense value.

I think it's also good to have competing opinions in any field, but I think as we're kind of parsing motivation for people that really want to make it, I don't know, feel their best, do their best, make a contribution to the world. It seems like the default state that the fast food, the junk food, the Slurpee, the Twizzlers and the Snickers bar there, I just got myself in more trouble by naming name brands.

The junk food is in hiding by critiquing. There's, I think, maybe there's the man in the arena thing, that it's easy to be a spectator. It's hard to try and do something real. - Yeah, I think that going back to this question of like, are you willing to reveal your mistakes or not?

Mary writes a lot about great exemplars in her book, Jennifer Doudna, who's developed CRISPR, famously has a lab that's hypercritical in the lab, but then the work stands well in public. And it's someone who could have every incentive to just churn out as many papers as possible and for profit, et cetera.

But instead, and I've actually interviewed one of the postdocs from that lab, and it's just like an amazing scientific enterprise, that I write about this astrophysics lab at Vanderbilt with a guy named Kayvon Stassen, who is just a legend. He is, as you know, a lot of people would be thrilled to have one nature paper in their lives, like he had five last year, right?

But what he does is mentor probably the most diverse group of physicists in all of America. And he developed what are called bridge programs, where students, often graduate students of color, students who had low GRE scores, low socioeconomic status, they're pre-admitted to a master's program in physics at a local HBCU, Historically Black College University.

And then if they do well, then they're pre-admitted to the physics PhD program. And it's a now well-known idea, but the basic concept is in the old days, you look at just your GRE scores and say, are you smart enough to be a physicist or not? And what he argued was that the coin of the realm for professional physics is publishing professional physics.

And if you come into a lab and you can analyze data and write a paper and publish it in a journal, then you're a physicist. So he has people come for two years, regardless of your GREs, but as long as you have kind of grit and resilience and a drive, as you're saying, and let's them work in labs.

And it turns out about 85% of students end up getting admitted to the PhD program, and then they do well. So the first ever black first author on a nature paper in physics is his student, right? So like a ridiculously high proportion of racial diversity at NASA are graduates of his program, his laboratory, right?

- And his lab is at Vanderbilt? - His lab's at Vanderbilt. It's called the Vanderbilt-Fisk Graduate Program, interesting bridge program. At any rate, for my book, I interviewed him and I was like, well, that's your admission. So what happens, there's still five years when people have to learn to be a physicist.

And every day they have a different thing they do. So Monday's a journal club, Tuesday's a coffee, but the lifeblood of the lab is Wednesday's lab meetings, where you, as a trainee, put up your figures in your paper in Overleaf, which is like a WYSIWYG editor for scientific papers, and everyone critiques your stats, your tables, your figures, your narrative, and everyone's just looking at your work and critiquing it.

And these are all top physicists in the lab. And that sounds terrifying, and it kind of is initially, but then by the time they present at the conference, they've heard everything. And they're doing that far before they're spending three months doubting themselves, unable to complete the paper, et cetera, et cetera.

It's like, you just have to do that. You have to face that fear. So it's very demanding, but it's super supportive. And they don't pull punches in terms of the critique of the content, but it's never in question whether the comments are coming from a place of believing your potential to be a great physicist.

And what I like about that is that you're not like, it doesn't feel good at that time to be critiqued publicly, but it feels necessary. And you kind of know that you will measure up at the end of that process and that it's formative. I think that's fundamentally what a lot of people, I think, misunderstand about what it takes to help someone become better.

They think either I have to be a monster to critique you, or I just have to pull my punches. But you can be like Stassen's lab and be super demanding and super supportive, and then people grow. - Sounds like the key thing is to make sure that one is gleaning critique from the correct sources.

And this is one of the major issues with kind of just open online critique. While attractive because of the lack of barriers, it means that you have to be a selective filter, right? I mean, you can see this in online comments. People, some people are very impacted by them.

And then other people say, "Oh yeah, well, that's some person in a basement." Or that's a, you know, like, "What have they done?" And, you know, but some people just have a thinner skin than others. And, but when you're in a community where clearly everyone cares about the mission, the outcome, the physics, et cetera, then you can put trust in the critique.

By the way, I find it really interesting that this lab at Vanderbilt is focused mainly on motivation and drive as the key thing, as opposed to some standardized score metric or something or prior experience. When I was starting my lab as a junior professor back before being at Stanford at UCSD, UC San Diego, a senior colleague of mine said, "When picking students, "you have to really evaluate many things, right?

"Ethics, how they do the work, et cetera." But the main thing is just drive. Are they driven? - Yeah. - And yeah, that turned out to be the case. - Yeah, I think it's hard. I mean, it's just a case by case decision. You know, like you don't pick that many students over your career, so you don't get to really learn.

But I think, I had a colleague when I started who was like, just told me they just sort by GRE right away. - Just by standardized score. - By standardized test score. I was like, "Well, I would never do that." He's like, "How about this? "How about you take all the low GRE students "and I take all the high ones "and see whose students do better?" - Yeah, I feel like standardized tests in some cases are necessary but not sufficient.

- Yeah. - That there's this other thing that's like nuance and I mean, coming up with great experimental ideas or I mean, there's just so many examples of people that just weren't good at standardized tests that just kicked ass in their various fields. - Yeah. - But there is a correlation there, typically.

- I mean, I think my issue, in a perfect world, standardized test scores would be great for equity because there would be people who didn't get great information in high school about where to go to college or started out in the wrong major and eventually figured out, don't have great GPAs or didn't go to a great college but they have tremendous ability and they deserve a shot.

And so I think that argument for GREs makes a ton of sense. The problem is that you can just pay to have someone teach you how to take the GRE and your scores can go up a huge percentage. And so the GREs end up being a proxy either for the training you got now or it's a proxy for how good your 10th grade math teacher was 'cause it's mostly testing 10th grade geometry.

And so again, that's gonna be a function of what neighborhood you grew up in and how good your high school teachers were. So what I don't love is like, I would love test scores if they were about meritocracy and equality or opportunity but they often end up being just a proxy for kind of advantages you already had.

So ultimately though for Kavon, setting aside the GRE in physics was like a hypothesis. Ultimately the proof that needed to be in the pudding was, did the students admitted under an alternative means end up producing great physics? And in that case, the answer is absolutely yes. And so for me, it's like, yes, consider it or not.

For admissions, but what are you doing with the students when they arrive? How are you mentoring and how are you training? And how are you breaking the link between whatever advantages might've had in the past and the work that they can do in the future if they're driven? - We've been talking a lot about data and other people.

I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you a little bit about you. - Sure. - No pressure to share anything you don't wanna share, but of all the things you could study, of all the contributions you could make, you decided to focus on this notion of mindsets and essentially trying to figure out how people can be their best for the greatest good of the world.

This would be the way I would describe it. Is that just inherent in your wiring or was there something about your experience coming up that makes you value that in particular? Or did you happen to just resonate with Carol and folks and feel like, "Hey, this would be a great place "to place my efforts?" - Yeah, well, that's an impossible question to answer 'cause I have no counterfactuals.

So a real causal inference person wouldn't allow me. This is a digression, but so my only real precocious skill is that I can do the splits, which sounds like a weird thing to do, but it's my party trick at weddings. - You always could? Or you did gymnastics as a kid?

- I did, but not seriously, not for very long. And one time someone, another academic, he was like, "You can do the splits, that's super weird." I'm like, "Yes, it is weird." And he was like, "How can you do that?" I was like, "Well, as a kid, I was in gymnastics "and then I stretched all the time." And he was like, "That is the dumbest causal story "I've ever heard in my life.

"There's no way that that is the single, "even the most important cause." And I think about that as like, my whole life I've been posed with this puzzle of why can I do this weird thing? And I had told myself that. And I don't think that's even remotely true.

I think that's for whatever reason, it's just kind of developed. So I can't fully answer your question about why I got super interested in this work. But I will say that out of college, I thought I was gonna be a lawyer. And that's because my college major was something called the Program of Liberal Studies, which is a great books major where you read the great works of history and philosophy and stuff.

- Amazing. - Yeah, and then you read them in order. And so, and there's no lectures allowed. And you can't even read the introduction to the book. So you just have to like read Hume and pretend like you can understand it and Kant and stuff like that. And you argue with other 19 year olds about what it might mean.

And I loved it, it was great. I still don't know what Kant was talking about, but I'll figure that out at some point. But then PLS, the joke is probably law school, which is the answer to the question of what are you gonna do with this liberal arts major?

And so I thought that's what I'll do. But at the last second, I just had a change of heart. And so I went and taught in a really low income school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And I ended up being the six through eight English teacher, the K through eight basketball coach.

I coached, or K through eight PE coach, and then I coached basketball and ran the book club. And I like ran the cat five cables to fix the internet in the attic, you know. And it was great. I worked like 100 hours a week. I made $12,000 a year.

It's a lot of fun, had a great time. And at the end of it, I thought, now I'm gonna go to law school. And when I was doing my applications, a friend of mine died of cancer. They got sarcoma. It was real quick, it was like six months. And we all went back to college and were there for a service.

And I remember being in the airport and I picked up Jeffrey Sachs' "End of Poverty," which is a popular book at the time. And just thinking like, here's a guy who like, I don't know, was doing something pretty mundane, macroeconomics, but he was spending all his time talking world leaders in other countries out of crushing debt that was causing poverty.

And it's like taking whatever precocious skill he had and using it for others. And I thought, law's not my Jeff Sachs skill. What I do know how to do is motivate teenagers. Like that's how I spend all my time. And so I thought I just wanna do, I wanna do the science of motivating young people like as much as possible.

So then I went to Stanford. I'd never taken stats before, never taken psychology, but I just like tried to become like a wild man learning as much as I could. And thankfully in my third year, Carol started working with me and like, and we kind of haven't looked back since.

- What an awesome story. So totally mission-driven and- - And post-hoc causal inference. So who knows if that's actually the story, but those sequence of events did occur though. - Post-hoc causal inference. I guess you can map onto that famous Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford where he's basically saying you can't connect the dots going forward only backwards.

So it all makes sense looking back. - Exactly. - This led to that, led to this, led to that. But going forward, we're kind of stumbling in the dark. - Well, I must say I and everyone else's are so grateful that you made that choice or those choices. Clearly the work you're doing is having a huge impact.

I covered a few of your papers on the solo episode on growth mindset and you mentioned nature and the fact that most people don't publish there at all, let alone once or twice or several times in their career. You've had an amazing run lately and you just had this incredible arc of papers in this area of which can be distilled down to, I think, forgive me if this doesn't capture it all, but figuring out how people can be the best version of themselves for their own lives and for the world, right?

I mean, that's essentially what we're talking about here. And I love the way you incorporate the neuroscience and the motivation literature and you're so good at attribution as something that we should all model ourselves around. It's really an incredible literature and I'm excited to read the book, 10 to 25.

Genuinely excited. This notion of a mentor mindset and how we can bring out the best in ourselves and others. It's phenomenal that you're doing this work. Please keep going. And I'm speaking on behalf of myself and everyone else. I say, thanks for taking time out of your busy research schedule and teaching schedule to come here and teach millions of people about what you do and what they can do to be their best.

So thank you so much. - Well, thanks. Well, we're just getting started and it was great to be here. I did, I missed baseball practice tonight. So not for me, but for nine-year-olds. - An apology to your nine-year-olds, plural? - Yeah. - Okay. Oh, 'cause there are many of them on the team.

- Yeah, yeah. - Oh, okay. This is back in Austin. - Yeah. - Okay. When's the next game? - A couple, three or four weeks. So we have plenty of time. We're still learning how to throw and hit. We'll get there. - Well, depending on when this episode comes out, you can let me know if they won or lost and- - Doesn't matter.

- My apologies to the team. - It's about the process. - That's right. That game is important. But I can assure you that the information that you've given us today is sure to make a huge difference in people's lives. So thank you so much. - Thanks for having me.

- Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. David Yeager. To learn more about his research, to find links to his social media accounts, and to learn more about his upcoming book, "10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People," simply go to the links in our show note captions.

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You simply go to Huberman Lab, go to the Menu tab, scroll down to Newsletter, and provide your email. And we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion all about growth mindset and the stress can be performance-enhancing mindset with Dr.

David Yeager. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)