The Inverse Power of Praise
on June 1st, 2009Some of the most talented people I know are also the laziest. Convinced of their natural superiority, they not only lack stick-to-it-ive-ness, they can be intellectually lazy. If one is gifted, one is also superior, and if one is superior, what else do you need?
When brains and effort go hand in hand, you get a successful person. Without work, you have the classic underachiever.
Intelligence is like any other kind of talent: an innate ability. Innate intellectual ability, like any advantage, comes with drawbacks.
Children who are told they are smart believe it (whether it is true or not), and conclude that being smart means being freed from pesky things like effort. Smart kids conclude that things should come naturally to them. If they have to work at something, they must not be good at it. A difficult task can be taken as proof that they are not smart. Not wanting to be seen as less than brainy, the smart kids give up, while the hard working kids excel.
The kids who are labeled smart are also more likely to cheat and lie because it is more important for them to be seen as smart than to actually be able to accomplish the tasks they have been assigned. The label becomes a status symbol to be protected at any cost.
This holds true for adults as well. It’s not The Man keeping some immensely talented creators down – or the unfairness of the world – it’s when some encounter difficulty they decide that their talent should sail them through the troubles of life. Only lesser mortals should have to work.
Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.
Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.
It’s interesting that psychologist Nathaniel Branden is cited in the article, as Branden had once been a follower of Ayn Rand. He wrote many books on positive thinking – which is nothing if it isn’t backed up with the reality of right action.
While I don’t agree that hard work makes you a genius at anything, I agree that hard work enhances natural abilities.
An individual can create works of quality by enhancing natural abilities with effort, and with so many naturally gifted people not capitalizing on their gifts, they just make it easier on those who are willing to work to excel.
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Ack! Wiped out my original response.
Anyway… I’m not totally sold on the “inverse effect of praise” idea.
On the one hand, although I was originally inclined to pursue some sort of career in visual arts, I only rarely got praise directed my way about my work. I could have used just a little bit more, as it would have encouraged me to stick with that line.
BUT….
I do know the other side too. In elementary school, the “math whiz” classmate of mine, with whom I had a little bit of a rivalry as the “smart kid” (though not really consciously on my part), he was made much of for his math ability. I always felt I had to work at it more. But when we got to junior high, his grade point average dropped down a bit, while I maintained my “usual” level. I think he got into coasting too much.
And beyond the lack of timely praise for my artwork, there was also the “working at it” matter. Artwork came very, very easily for me (as did music). Writing, I had to *work* at. And I ended up pursuing the one I had to work at. Part of that is just me doing things the hard way (character trait). But part of it is that I can clearly tell the effect of the work I have done, learning craft, without having to rely on feedback (ie, praise). Even so… getting praise feels nice – when you know the work has had the effect on others that you wanted it to have.
I dunno scribbler, the article doesn’t say anything about praise for the work you are doing. It specifically refers to undue praise for natural ability.
If the teacher isn’t praising you for the output – your art – that is not the same thing as being told you are a gifted artist whether or not the output is any good.
Unearned praise (praise for merely being naturally wonderful) is about ego, not about accomplishment. Being intellectually gifted is no more worthwhile than being beautiful, unless the gift is put to good use.
Here’s what I wrote on my Facebook page:
If you tell people that they are naturally superior, then they fail because they become lazy. If you tell people they are naturally inferior, then they become listless. If you tell people that they can excel through EFFORT, then they TRY.
Ah! Yes.
Put that way, I’ve always been aware of the distinction. Growing up, I got a LOT of “you’re a good artist!”, which I tended to discount, feeling “Well, I know I like *this* piece of mine.” What I wanted was feedback (and possibly) praise for the specific work I was showing off. I’m not sure I really cared whether anyone thought I was naturally gifted.
Interesting that I seem to have instinctively understood that distinction from an early age. For my math friend, math came easily for him, and he got praised for “being smart”. (I believe he ended up being an accountant, actually.) But in our household “being smart” in and of itself wasn’t much commented on. Maybe because – pretty much – we all were smart.
Unearned praise, though… *that* I think is a dreadful disease these days. All that “build up their self-esteem” garbage has given us mobs of people who feel they are entitled to do or take whatever they want, just because they want it.
Still, it’s an interesting topic. Genuine praise (if we can call it that – praise for the works and endeavour) can be so nourishing, and lack of it can be so detrimental. And yet, misapplied praise (doling it out where it is not needed, or giving it just to “make them feel good”, or for ability that is not necesarily being exercised) can be so damaging. I guess that to properly praise anyone, you actually have to be paying attention.
I love Po Bronson’s writing. He’s got such a gift for revealing people’s stories and motivations, even when he’s writing essays about survey results.
Praise is a strange thing.
There’s the blowing-smoke-up-your-ass kind of general praise, which is what I think Bronson’s referring to. That’s the kind that feeds one’s ego, and also breeds laziness. And then there’s positive feedback on one’s work or effort, which is an entirely different kind of praise. But Bronson’s dead on about how when the wrong thing is praised, it’s actually detrimental.
There’s an interesting article on self-knowledge and the gifted, which deals with how the gifted perceive their innate talents — namely, as not being all that special.
“…the higher the IQ or greater the intellectual capacity, the more individual differences there will be between individuals. … If we were to think of each of these various unusual mental capacities (e.g. photographic memory, lightning mathematical calculation, the ability to visualize clearly, speed reading, quick spatial pattern recognition, ease in learning languages, metaphorical thought and speech) as “dots” and the lack of them as “spaces,” we would see very different patterns in different individuals, even if IQ scores seemed to indicate great similarity. No matter what the individual’s pattern of dots and spaces may be, there is a tendency for the person to take his or her own dots for granted. … There is no great sense of accomplishment for an attribute that seems to have been with one all one’s life, even if that attribute contributes to unusual and high levels of achievement in a culturally recognized field. … those things that we can’t do (or that we do poorly) that someone else can do, easily and well, we’re likely to consider really important, particularly if there is a cultural cache to being able to do them. We will feel our lack acutely, and since there are probably a variety of spaces in our particular constellation of abilities just as there are a variety of dots, if we focus heavily on the spaces, we may feel actually incompetent rather than unusually able.”
So being praised for an innate ability you take for granted might well be right up there with being praised for your height — it never really registers as praise.
I like that quote, VT. I’m going to have to track down more of this.
But I think it is true, certainly of my experience. When the talent or ability is indeed natural, you just don’t think of it as special, because you’ve never experienced not having it. My mother (a trained musician) always said I have perfect pitch, and seemed to think it remarkable (well, she remarked on it.
) But to me, it didn’t seem remarkable. It’s how I hear. I can’t help knowing when something is “off” or not in pitch. My reaction is “So what? I’m really miopic – near-sighted!”
That’s a great article, VT.
I find this subject fascinating, in part, because I grew up around a lot of very gifted people, most of whom crashed and burned. High IQ types who ended up delivering pizza or working as temps. Or dead of suicide.
Natural gifts aren’t enough. People have to have emotional muscle. And excessive praise or excessive criticism can destroy promising people.
I think you nailed it scribbler “…to properly praise anyone, you need to be paying attention.”
Nothing is more insulting than platitudes. They say, “I don’t care about what you really are, or what you are really doing.”
This is a great subject!
I’m a musician in the Marine Corps and have been a professional musician for over 20 years now. Without sounding cocky I know that I have a fair amount of natural talent and I’d like to think I have a good work ethic.
All that being said, growing up my mother showered me with praise. So much so that she would sing my praises even when I knew deep down that I sounded like crap. This happened so much growing up that now when I’m praised I’m instinctively skeptical and believe I’m getting lip service. It’s very hard for me to believe that most of the praise I get is honestly genuine.
I am so hypersensitive to this now that I often feel neurotic when giving my kids praise. Hopefully I won’t scar them for life
It’s refreshing to see others talking about this though.
As someone with a stutter (far worse when I was a kid) I was usually considered “slow” and by teachers no less. So when I scored very high on the standardized tests that were administered, the praise seemed tinged with a bit of surprise. I felt patronized.
Basically that left me with a bit of a chip on my shoulder and I usually push myself and worked to advance. Some courses were easy for me, but I still felt like I had to prove myself. I still rarely accept any sort of praise as sincere. While somewhat appreciated, I preferred seeing improvements which convey that my effort is paying off.
If you want anything in life, you have to work at it. I also saw people in my high school and in the early years of college coast through due to how “easy” things were for them. But when things got difficult, some couldn’t cope with having to put forth the effort. Somewhat sad that some of the people I went to high school with still work at Walmart and as tellers at the local bank. There’s honor in any profession, but seeing people squander their potential due to lack of effort on their part is not a pretty sight.
I’ve always found praise kind of a mixed bag. Growing up with Cerebral Palsy I often got praised to the heavens for ordinary things specifically because I had a disability. I’ve had people call me brilliant for things that had nothing to do with talent and everything to do with tenacity.
Then there were times when I would get absolutely verbally stomped because I hadn’t made a masterpiece of epic magnitude. There were people that felt I should be the poster child for cerebral palsy and that meant I should be able to do fantastically amazing things because I had to prove to people I was good enough.
I prefer praise when it is warrented. Too much or too little causes creativity to wither on the vine.
I’ll fess up: I’m one of those people who never had to work particularly hard in school, and so, I didn’t.
Let me preface my experiences with the disclaimer that I hope the regular commenting crew knows me well enough by now to know I’m not a bragging asshat. I’m sharing this, not to make myself look good, but to give you some insight into the view from the other, ‘lazy’ side of the fence.
Praising effort is all well and good… sometimes. In my case, it wasn’t.
When I was very young, no one really knew what to do with me. I was smart enough that my parents refused to tell me my test scores or IQ, afraid I’d get a swelled head. I spent most of my time in school being yanked out of the regular class for one-on-one instruction, which depressed me to no end — the only other kids who got pulled out of class were the ones my classmates cruelly called retards. So I figured I must be equally stupid and needing extra help, because I was never in the regular class to see what was normal. And that was also my family: my father was a physics professor at USC, and a polymath; my mother was a polyglot who also taught everything you could imagine. I grew up surrounded by academics, scientists, and other assorted extremely bright people. So I didn’t think it was particularly strange that, for example, I was reading the Silmarillion in kindergarten. To say that expectations were high would be a severe understatement.
Whether through some conspiracy with my parents, or the pedagogy in fashion at the time, I wasn’t praised at all for how I did in school, since it all came naturally to me. When you test off the charts, being in the 99th percentile becomes your baseline for achievement, and it’s simply expected. And while I get it — why praise the kid who’s not working hard, right? — it sets up a situation where you have to question just how much harder you can work.
For example, let’s say if I spent 5 minutes on an assignment at my grade level, I’d score 100%. No matter how much longer I worked on it, I couldn’t do any better than perfect. One solution was just to move the bar and give me an assignment several grade levels above me. Okay, then I’d spend maybe an hour or two on it, and still score 100%. You see the problem, I’m sure — if the school system had had its way, I’d have skipped enough grades to put me in college when I was 14. (My parents wisely vetoed this cracksmoking idea.) At some point, you have to ask what’s a reasonable standard for achievement when you’ve got that kind of potential, and also weigh the emotional impact on a kid. My parents tried hard to walk that line between pushing me to excel academically, and still letting me be as much of a normal kid as possible, so my emotional development could catch up.
So in an effort to make things fair and fit in with my peers, I just got assigned more and more work to keep me busy, if not engaged in school. This set up a lifelong dynamic of more work for little, if any praise, which continued through grad school. As a result, working hard at anything rapidly became synonymous with extreme boredom, inefficiency, and pointless jumping though hoops to fit in and avoid being envied. This isn’t exactly incentive.
On the contrary, it can breed a lot of resentment when you see the colossal disparity in the standards set for you and other people. After years of watching ticker tape parades get thrown for someone else fogging a mirror, while it’s just assumed you’ll make your own mirror out of sand, you get a bit… stabby. This is how one becomes a perfectionist and prone to feeling never good enough.
At some point after decades of this, there’s a massive temptation to just dig in your heels, rebel, and say, ‘Screw this! Screw your expectations! I’m not going to solve cold fusion/write my dissertation/become both an astronaut and a doctor! I’m going to sit on my ass and play video games like other people!’ Granted, it’s not a particularly mature impulse, but I see the allure. (I instead chose to rebel in college by drinking heavily and sleeping around. Like you do.) In light of what my potential is, I’m undoubtedly an underachiever, and yet, I’ve still been quite successful by normal standards. But compared to what I was expected to do with my life? I might as well be working at Walmart or flipping burgers.
This probably seems like a luxury complaint: ‘Oh, the agony of being too smart. Such a problem I should have.’ And I can certainly understand that sentiment. But that’s one reason why the extremely gifted sometimes end up slacking and not living up to their full potential. It’s not always because they’re praised for being innately smart; sometimes it’s because they’re not praised at all.
“On the contrary, it can breed a lot of resentment when you see the colossal disparity in the standards set for you and other people. After years of watching ticker tape parades get thrown for someone else fogging a mirror, while it’s just assumed you’ll make your own mirror out of sand, you get a bit… stabby. This is how one becomes a perfectionist and prone to feeling never good enough.”
You’re singing my tune!
“…pointless jumping through hoops to avoid being envied.”
The passive aggressive secret weapon: envy directed at “Privilege Girl”.
Envy People don’t have to cripple you, they assail you with baby duck bites until you cripple yourself.
Not anymore.
I just remembered that saying:
“To whom much is given, much is expected.”
Yep, it can be a huge pain. Envy People — I like that.
I have found a quote I was looking for: “Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.” –JK Rowling, from her commencement speech at Harvard in June 2008.
VT, so much of your story rings familiar to me… except that I did not get the extra work piled on me. Probably because I slacked off just enough in classes that I wasn’t sticking out like a sore thumb. And that was intentional in some ways. I was marginally conscious that being *too* much in the forefront would make one a target. About the only two areas I didn’t care whether I “stood out” or not was in art classes and in English classes. Those I cared about – for myself, as it were – and I wanted my work to be my best.
That’s one way I managed to avoid the Envy People. That, and the fact that I was always independantly minded enough that I really did not care what my classmates thought of me. I had my circle of friends, and beyond that, if people liked me that was fine, and if they didn’t, I didn’t care as long as they left me alone. Which, mostly, they did. Peer pressure meant pretty much zero to me, in the long run.
Scribbler, if I’d been wiser when I was younger, I’d have slacked off more.
There will always be people who will tell you you don’t work enough. There will always be people who will tell you you work too much.
There will always be people who tell you you you are too smart for your own good, or not smart enough.
You are not pretty enough, or you are coasting on your looks.
You are too fat, or you are too skinny.
You are too conceited, or you have low self esteem.
Sometimes the same people will tell you all of the above depending on what day it is and what kind of a rise they think they can get out of you at the moment.
The only compass to follow is the one you carry.
You’ll always be off course following someone else.