Sublime

But it was those with the fixed mindset who accounted for almost all the inaccuracy. The people with the growth mindset were amazingly accurate.

Judgments of responsibility depend upon the overall complexion of one’s mind, not on the metaphysics of mental cause and effect.

I began this chapter with the example of cancer incidence across the United States. The example appears in a book intended for statistics teachers, but I learned about it from an amusing article by the two statisticians I quoted earlier, Howard Wainer and Harris Zwerling. Their essay focused on a large investment, some $1.7 billion, which the Gates

idea, Diener and his students also found a less-is-more effect, a strong indication that an average (prototype) has been substituted for a sum.

John Doris’s book Lack of Character noted that “situational factors are often better predictors of behaviour than personal factors.” Baggini suggests that plenty of Germans living under the Third Reich would otherwise have led “blameless lives” if they had not been put in an environment that brought out their worst selves. By the same token, “many

In his work on the psychology of emotion and moral judgment, David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University, has studied the effect of such “team affiliation” on moral reasoning. In one experiment, subjects who had just met were randomly divided into teams by giving them colored wristbands. Then they were separated. The first group was

what has been demonstrated through a host of celebrated laboratory and field studies is that manipulations of the immediate social situation can overwhelm in importance the type of individual differences in personal traits or dispositions that people normally think of as being determinative of social behavior.

Minds and societies defined by diversity and dialogue are, consequently, open to new possibilities in ways that monological, fixated, and totalitarian worlds and mindsets are not.

The other half were put in a growth mindset. He told them that computer skills could be developed through practice. Everyone,