Cheating. We’re all against it, right? I assume that means we’d want to teach our kids the same values—and certainly not to accidentally do anything that might encourage them to cheat in the first place.
With that, let’s take a look at a new study in which researchers told young kids they were gifted or smart—and then gave them the chance to cheat, to see what they’d do.
Then we’ll look at how this fits into a longer line of research on how praise can change what kids want from a test.
You got the answers right because …
The researchers conducted three experiments involving 378 children ages 5 and 6. Each child received feedback after an initial math test—and then took a harder test that gave them an opportunity to cheat.
Here’s how the first experiment worked: Researchers gave 126 children a test with ambiguous answers—the same answer could be right or wrong.
But afterward they told the children that they’d gotten all of the answers wrong, and told them one of three things:
You got the answers wrong because the test was too hard for you.
You got the answers wrong because you didn’t try hard enough.
You got the answers wrong because you just had bad luck.
In a control experiment, 168 other kids took a pretest where the answers were clear-cut, and they got them all right.
This time, the researchers gave them four analogous explanations:
You got the answers right because you are smart.
You got the answers right because you worked very hard.
You got the answers right simply because you were lucky.
You got the answers right because the test was too easy.
Then: a final five-minute test, which was much harder for their academic level.
Before leaving the room, however, the researcher placed an answer sheet on another table and explicitly told each child not to look at it. This time, the researchers didn’t care how well the children did on the test. I
nstead, they watched via a hidden camera to see if the kids cheated by sneaking over to look at the answer sheet.
More likely to cheat
Now, the results:
The “you did well because you were smart” group cheated on the final test by looking at the answer sheet 64.3 percent of the time.
Kids who had been told they did well because they worked hard cheated 35.7 percent of the time, just a bit lower than the 38.1 percent who were told they succeeded because they got lucky.
Finally, kids who had been told they did well because the test was easy cheated about 21.4 percent of the time.
There was also a comparison group that took the initial and final tests and received no explanation at all for why they got the answers right; those kids cheated 35.7 percent of the time.
The “smart group” cheated significantly more often than every other success group, even the group that was given no explanation.
Published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, the study comes from Hangzhou Normal University and the University of Toronto.
Latest in a long line
Now for the context we promised. The whole “praise kids for their talents or praise kids for their effort” debate has been going on for a very long time.
Two of the researchers behind this study, Li Zhao and Kang Lee, co-authored a 2017 paper titled “Praising Young Children for Being Smart Promotes Cheating.”
And we also have the work of Carol Dweck, a professor at Stanford University who spent years studying the idea of growth mindsets versus fixed mindsets, and how we can (or should?) encourage kids to develop the former over the latter. Short version:
A person with a fixed mindset has learned to believe that intelligence and other talents are almost entirely innate. Either you’re born smart or you’re not.
People with growth mindsets learn to believe that achievement is much more variable, and that intelligence and problem-solving abilities can be developed over time.“Turned kids off”
In a series of experiments—and for that matter, presented in a very popular TED Talk back in the day—Dweck studied what happened to kids who developed each type of mindset, and particularly whether praising them for their abilities or their effort was more likely to result in either.
Two of my favorite studies:
Dweck and her team studied 373 seventh graders over two years, identified which ones had fixed mindsets and which ones had growth mindsets, and watched how their math grades diverged. Kids with growth mindsets did better, as you might imagine.
In other studies, they did the same kinds of tests that the team out of Hangzhou Normal University and the University of Toronto did, focusing on achievement and also finding something that might be related in retrospect.
For example, in one experiment, 38 percent of children praised for their intelligence actually overstated their scores to other children, compared with 13 percent of children who were praised for their effort.
In short, Dweck said, summarizing her work, “praising intelligence turned kids off to learning.”
“Show me how you did it”
I think maybe we can draw a line—a person who cheats on a test probably isn’t so concerned about whether they have learned the material; they’re concerned with what grade they get.
There are a lot of things to pull together here, but whether you want kids to learn more, achieve more, and believe that they can grow—to say nothing of whether you don’t want them to cheat—the arguments seem to be piling up here against telling them that they’re smart.
One closing note—I’ve written about this subject a number of times over the years, and each time I do, my inbox fills with adults saying they wish their parents had read these kinds of studies and avoided telling them that their success was due to their innate intelligence or other abilities.
Whether they were actually less successful than they might have been otherwise is impossible to say.
Maybe the most useful thing we can say after a child succeeds is, “Show me how you did it.”
Other things worth knowing …
USA Today: President Trump sparked immediate backlash from California leaders after suggesting Iran could “take out” a U.S. city with a nuclear weapon and mentioning San Diego and Los Angeles by name at a Nebraska campaign rally. “They can take out a city. Let ‘em take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay,” he said, arguing Americans should accept the economic impact of the Iran war.
CNN: The Trump administration is struggling to get clear answers about the death of a Russian laboratory worker at an institute dedicated to studying the plague, amid days of stonewalling from Russian officials. “It’s incumbent upon Russia to obviously share more information with the world,” Secretary of State Rubio said Tuesday. “Maybe it’s bigger than we thought. We don’t know, but I think it would be reckless at this moment, given the limited information we still have, to speculate.”
The Guardian: Trump’s Justice Department has moved to strip the citizenship of 40 naturalized citizens accused of crimes, in what authorities describe as “the largest” such initiative over a single period during his administration. The naturalized citizens are alleged to have committed offenses including “acting as an agent for a foreign government, voluntary manslaughter, and aggravated sodomy against a special-needs man.”
Mediaite: Retiring Sen. Thom Tillis accused President Trump and his eldest son of wanton corruption Tuesday. “Whether or not it’s illegal remains to be seen,” Tillis said, talking mostly about Trump’s meme coin, which has apparently netted him $104 million. “Appearances are not good. Anytime a president makes a billion dollars in the same year that people are growing up in a trailer park ...”
NYT: Christa Pike, who survived two doses of a lethal injection drug last week during a botched execution in Tennessee, is conscious and speaking, her lawyers said Tuesday. Pike, 50, is believed to be the first person to have survived doses of a lethal injection drug.
MSN: McDonald’s is facing a proposed nationwide class action alleging the fast-food company illegally coordinates menu prices across its franchises and company-owned restaurants through an AI-powered pricing system that uses machine-learning algorithms to continually analyze data from millions of daily transactions across its nearly 14,000 restaurants.
WSJ: Inside the Albanian village fighting a Jared Kushner-backed luxury resort. How Zvernec residents are pushing back against plans to build hotels, casinos, and a water park where villagers once farmed.
Thanks for reading. Photo by Salah Darwish on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments!
When my son was young, around age 5 or 6, he was busy building houses and cabins with LINCOLN LOGS.
He was downstairs quietly working and on numerous other occasions had meticulously followed the diagrams when building the residence.
However, this time there didn't appear to be any diagrams or instructions in sight and I said to him " Jack, did you follow the instructions? " and he looked at me and smiled and said, " No Dad.... I used my mind" and the satisfactory smile he had on his face is something I will never forget.
We should encourage our children to " use their minds" is exploring and building as opposed to following other's instruction.
Review the book “Switch on your brain” by Dr. Caroline Leaf. It provides the biological explanation of how to trigger your brain processes that align with these studies