#72251 - "The Smart One"

[Katya]

I think smart kids have a hard time adjusting when they find themselves in a situation where they aren't competent, so they start avoiding them. I think it's also hard for them to develop an identity outside of their intelligence.

I that's probably also true of anyone who has their identity highly invested in just one thing, be it sports, music, performing, etc.

[Katya]

It seems to me that praising a kid for hard work only works if the kid actually did work hard, and a lot of smart kids don't really have to work in school. When I got praised for being hard-working after I aced a test without any effort, I only learned that (1) being smart is a great substitute for being hard-working, and adults can't seem tell the difference; (2) it's easy to fool people into thinking you have other positive attributes so long as you're smart; and (3) sticking with things you're naturally good at gives you praise without the effort that would otherwise apparently be required. I was smart enough to know that my success derived from natural ability, not application, and adults lying to me about it just made me doubt their perceptiveness.

I think a few people are misunderstanding the experiment, so let me clarify some things. The point of Dr. Dweck's research is not to lie to kids and tell them that they are hard working if they're not. The point of her research was to examine how children react when faced with a challenge, depending on their self-identity. So, children who self-identified as hard working were more resilient in the face of a challenge than children were who self-identified as smart. The reason that she ran the study in the way she did was to set up a random sample that she could quantitatively compare, but it's not a model for a long term approach. (Her other research and writing does a better job of looking at long term strategies and effects.)

[Katya]

So called "humility" is an intensely harmful concept in this regard, particularly for women.

I don't disagree with this, but the reality of navigating this sort of thing as a women is much more complicated than most men realize.

I was thinking about this, and I think there's a counterpoint here worth sussing out. Namely, that for men it is the inverse, which includes a bevy of its own complications. Specifically, men are taught to take action, be aggressive, and get things done. If a man thinks insufficient of his own capability, he is seen as weak or incompetent. We tell our women to beware of pride and they are often paralyzed with a fear of failure, and we tell our men they are responsible to always be strong and capable, and then they cannot rest or connect emotionally.

At the risk of throwing this thread into entirely different tangents, it seems like men are often a lot more complicated than we are given credit for. A woman often wants a man who will understand her, but does not appreciate the full meaning of understanding him.

You know, (some) women tend to think of being male as like being female, but without all of the hard parts. And then sometimes we learn about some hard thing that men are constantly dealing with, and we say "whaaa?" because that's not even a thing for us.

Regarding the "humility" thing, men often tell women that the way to overcome sexism is for women to simply act more like men. (This isn't exactly what you were saying, Marduk, but it's where my mind went.) However, there is research that shows that women are often penalized for acting like men. (For example, Deborah Tannen has done research about how women tend to speak less than men in mixed-sex groups, and if they speak as much as men, both men and women perceive that they have actually dominated the conversation.) So, telling women they just need to act like men is a simplistic solution that doesn't take into account the realities of how men and women interact. (Which, again, isn't what you were saying, but it's something I think about from time to time.)