Dweck’s ideas of the Fixed and Growth Mindset have to do with the students’ want for more knowledge and change in their understanding of overcoming a problem. Dweck believes that when people are faced with a problem there are two ways to approach it. The first way is running away from the problem and not trying to find a way to solve the problem. This way of thinking does not try to find a solution to the problem, they simply run away from it once it gets hard. This kind of thinking is what Dweck calls the Fixed Mindset. The second way is when faced with the same problem, you find a way to solve it. These people are the one who think problems through a found way to solve the problem. This is the kind of thinking that Dweck calls the Growth Mindset. In the Lukianoff and Haidt article they talked about how the coddling of children by the parents, and even by society, is creating this close minded student and person. Where anything can set them off and make them upset. Dweck’s idea of a Fixed Mindset is very similar to the points Lukianoff and Haidt make about the “trigger warnings” people nowadays use wehn a hard conversation comes up. Lukianoff and Haidt’s topic of their article was people running away from hard conversations because they are scared of what the conversation will entail, similarly to Dweck’s ideas she stated in her TED Talk.
In both Dweck’s TED Talk and in Lukianoff and Haidt’s article they talk about the issue of not being able to handle hard conversations and problems that are common in life. In Dweck’s Talk she talks about what goes through a person’s head when they are faced with a problem and they have a fixed-mindset. When she is showing the audience the difference in the two types of mindsets, she says “On the left, you see the fixed-mindset students. There’s hardly any activity. They run from the error. They don’t engage with it” (around 01:51). What she is saying here is that students with this type of mindset don’t engage with a problem. They do not see the issue as a puzzle and aren’t trying to solve it. They are stuck in their ways and are not able to get past what they think they know. Similarly in Lukianoff and Haidt’s article they talk about people being very sheltered and not having hard conversations about things that are important in our lives. Lukianoff and Hadit talk about the hard conversations that we need to have in our life, about topics that are sensitive but also very crucial to parts of our history. “Attempts to shield students from words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for the students. They are bad for the workplace, which will be mired in unending litigation if student expectations of safety are carried forward” (Paragraph 58) this is a quote from the text, and they are talking about how these people are not the kind of people that society wants. They want someone who will see a problem and effectively address the issue and find ways toward a solution. The people that can have these hard conversations and are able to keep themselves composed, even if they don’t like the way the conversation is going and not say that this is triggering them, are the one that are going to go far in life. Because these people can see past their own selfishness and be able to be a contributing member of society. In both the TED Talk and “The Coddling” article, we see examples of students who have a fixed mindset. These students do not take the time to think outside of the box, and stop and realize that they are not the only ones who live in this world.
Dweck talks about the difference between the two types of mindsets, “On the left, you see the fixed-mindset students. There’s hardly any activity. They run from the error. They don’t engage with it. But on the right, you have the students with the growth mindset, the idea that abilities can be developed. They engage deeply. Their brain is on fire with yet. They engage deeply. They process the error. They learn from it and they correct it”(around 01:51). She also compares the two of them after doing an experiment with the children, “‘Not Yet” also gave me insight into a critical event early in my career, a real turning point. I wanted to see how children coped with challenge and difficulty, so I gave 10-year-olds problems that were slightly too hard for them. Some of them reacted in a shockingly positive way. They said things like, “I love a challenge,” or, “You know, I was hoping this would be informative.” They understood that their abilities could be developed. They had what I call a growth mindset. But other students felt it was tragic, catastrophic. From their more fixed mindset perspective, their intelligence had been up for judgment, and they failed. Instead of luxuriating in the power of yet, they were gripped in the tyranny of now” (around 00:35). These two quotes from Dweck’s Talk really speak to me when it comes to the conversation that Lukianoff and Hadit have in their article, “The Coddling”. In the last section of Lukianoff and Hadit’s article they talk about what we can do next, and what the next steps would be to create a society where everyone is not as scared. What Dweck talks about in her Talk may be what we do next. She shows, through studies and research, that people can evolve in their ideas and thinking. And if we as a society can start evolving our thinking from a less fixed approach into a more open mindset, we will be a better society as a whole. The problems that Lukianoff and Hadit talk about are stemmed from the fixed mindset, these people have never had issues in their lives because they just ran from the problems in their lives, but once it gets tough for them they cry about it being too hard. And with Dweck’s research we can change these people and their fixed mindsets into members of society who are able to approach a problem and fix it instead of cowering and running away.
