Fifth Graders Told 'You Must Be Smart' Chose Easier Problems

Being told you are smart can make a person pick safer tasks, enjoy hard ones less and misreport results, at least in children and at least once. That is what Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck reported in 1998 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (75(1), 33-52), across six experiments with fifth graders. It is a candidate explanation for a common adult complaint, “why am I not achieving anything”: a person whose choices have quietly organised themselves around not being seen to fail. The study is more fragile than its reputation, so what follows separates what was measured from what was concluded.

What did Mueller and Dweck do to the fifth graders?

Each child sat alone with an experimenter and worked on a set of ten Raven’s Progressive Matrices, an abstract pattern puzzle, for four minutes. Every child was told they had done very well. Then the praise diverged. One group was told “You must be smart at these problems.” Another was told “You must have worked hard at these problems.” A control group got nothing further.

Next came a choice. Children picked what they would like to work on later: problems “that aren’t too hard, so I don’t get many wrong,” problems “that are pretty easy,” problems they were “pretty good at, so I can show that I’m smart,” or “problems that I’ll learn a lot from, even if I won’t look so smart.” The first three are what the authors call performance goals. The last is a learning goal. A performance goal means wanting a task mainly to display ability; a learning goal means wanting it to build ability.

Every child then got a harder set and was told they had done poorly, followed by a third set as hard as the first. The authors measured enjoyment, wish to continue, explanations for the failure, and the change in score from first to third set.

What did the numbers show?

Measure	Praised for intelligence	Praised for effort	Study
Chose a performance goal	67%	8%	1
Chose a performance goal	55%	23%	3
After failure, chose peers’ scores over strategy tips	86%	23%	3
Overstated own score to an unfamiliar child	38%	13%	3
Wanted to take the problems home (1 to 6 scale)	3.25	4.53	1
Enjoyed the problems (1 to 6 scale)	4.11	4.89	1
Change in score, first set to third set	-0.92 problems	+1.21 problems	1
Agreed that intelligence is fixed (1 to 6 scale)	4.24	2.19	4

Source: Mueller and Dweck (1998), Tables 1 and 2 and the text of Studies 1, 3 and 4. Control groups sat between the two in most rows; the control rate for overstating scores was 14%.

The lying result is the most vivid. Children wrote a description of the third problem set for a child in another state and were told the adults would never see it. Of the children praised for intelligence, 38% reported a higher score than they had earned, by an average of 0.45 points, and every misreport went upward. The authors read this as children treating a score as a verdict on themselves, even with a stranger as the audience.

The score change is the other result that matters for adults. Before the failure, the groups did not differ. Afterwards, children praised for intelligence did worse on a set as hard as the first, though they had had practice, while children praised for effort did better.

Where is the 1998 result thin?

Several things in the paper itself cut against the neat version.

First, the harm appeared only after a setback. In Studies 2 and 4, children were asked about enjoyment and persistence right after the success and the three groups looked alike. Ability praise did not make anyone miserable on the spot; it changed what a later failure meant.

Second, not everything repeated inside the paper. Goal choice did not differ by praise group in Study 4 (a chi-square of 5.51, not significant), and the wish to persist did not differ in Study 6, where the failure came on a different kind of puzzle.

Third, the setting was a puzzle test in one sitting, and every child was told they had scored well regardless of how they had scored, which is an unusual feedback policy outside a lab.

Fourth, independent replication has gone badly. Li and Bates (2019, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(9), 1640-1655) ran a close copy of Study 1 with 190 Chinese children aged 9 to 13, using the same matrices, praise lines and analysis. Children in the effort-praise condition did score higher after failure, but barely (p = .049) and by a much smaller margin, and none of the eight motivation and attribution measures differed (mean p = .48). Their later two studies, which added an active control group, found no effect of the praise manipulation on post-failure scores at all. The active control was added to separate a mindset effect from the other things a “work hard” comment does, such as ordinary encouragement, and it found no extra effect of the mindset wording.

The wider mindset literature points the same way. As reported by Sisk et al. (2018, Psychological Science, 29(4), 549-571), a meta-analysis of 129 correlational studies found an average association between growth mindset and achievement of r = 0.10, and interventions were weak overall. I have not read that paper in full, so treat those figures as second-hand.

What is left of the claim?

A narrow version. Feedback that turns a result into a statement about who you are tends to make people protect the statement, which showed up in these sessions as safer choices and some score inflation. Whether a mindset belief carries the effect, or praise simply points attention at something controllable, is what the replication left open.

The same logic turns up in work on labels. Bryan, Walton, Rogers and Dweck’s wording experiment on “be a voter” changed a noun to a verb and moved turnout, though that post also covers three later field tests that did not reproduce it. Noun-style identity claims (“I’m the smart one,” “I’m a morning person”) may be a shakier foundation than descriptions of what you did.

What does it change for an adult who feels stuck?

If it applies at all, it applies to selection. A person long called capable has reason to choose tasks where the outcome is known, and that can stall a career for years with no single failure to point at. Three adjustments follow from the study’s structure, each a hypothesis rather than a result.

Choose some tasks by what you would learn, not by how the result would look. The children’s goal choice was a literal menu, and the “learn a lot, even if I won’t look so smart” option is available to adults too. Rewriting a stop-goal as something you could film is one way to make such a goal concrete.

Count attempts, not scores. A score is exactly what the 38% shaded, and counting something that cannot be flattered also sidesteps the faking problem that Goodhart’s law describes for personal metrics.

Talk to yourself in verbs. “I tried it three ways” carries a lever. “I’m bad at this” does not, and it is the explanation the intelligence-praised children leaned on after failure, giving low ability 16.5 of 36 points of blame in Study 1 against 9.8 for the effort group.

In my reading, this is also why an alarm that records an action works better than one that grades you. DontSnooze asks for a short video when the alarm goes off, and if you skip it, a random photo from your camera roll goes to friends you chose, so what gets counted is whether you got up and not how impressive the morning was.

None of this requires believing that growth mindset is settled science. The practical question survives even if the praise effect shrinks further: what have you stopped trying because a failure there would tell you something you would rather not know?

Once effort is the thing you track, the question becomes whether to count what is done or what is left. And the idea that results arrive late is worth checking against a popular metaphor: the bamboo story from Atomic Habits.