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1.4rem 0;">Nobody's worried about the secondary appraisal of strangers thinking they're a bad parent. And so — because secondary appraisals matter so much — mindsets can influence how we cope. Early in my career, the question was: can we identify a really problematic appraisal that people are chronically making in a given situation, one that's making things worse than they need to be?

My dissertation work, for example: first week of high school, your middle school friends ignore you in the hallway. Does that mean you'll have no friends in high school, be alone at your reunion in 20 years, die alone? Or does it mean they're insecure and trying to make new friends themselves? Which interpretation you make matters enormously if you're a ninth grader going through that. Similarly with the classic fixed mindset around intelligence — I get a low grade on a math problem. Am I an idiot, does my teacher hate me? Or have I chosen a hard class, I'm in the process of learning, and the teacher is trying to identify my mistakes so they can help me learn more?

That was Carol Dweck's big contribution — not inventing attribution or appraisal theory, but the insight that your general theory about how the world works will shape the situational appraisals you make in any given moment. If I think the world is made up of winners and losers and the task is to end up in the winner group, I'm on the lookout in the first week of high school for early information about which bucket I'm in — and any sign I'm headed toward the loser bucket feels catastrophic and permanent. That's the fixed mindset insight. And the thought was: if I could convince you that these labels aren't permanent, that people can change, that someone who's mean to you now might see you differently later — I could hopefully prevent you from making that catastrophic secondary appraisal.

The Research

How Interventions Work

Richie Davidson

You've beautifully demonstrated that if you can bring people to the more adaptive positive mindset, these benefits accrue. But a question that arises from the kind of work Cortland and I have done: a person may be readily convinced of this — how do you help them remember they've been convinced when the rubber meets the road and they're in a really tough situation? Those are often the moments people forget. Have you thought about this?

David Yeager

What surprises people most about the work is not that I can get someone to feel better 30 seconds after stressing them out. It's: why would they get higher grades nine months later? Why less depression? I remember a very sceptical statistician who visited my office once and said: "I don't get it. I tell my kids things for 15 minutes all the time and they forget it the second I stop talking. You tell them something for 15 minutes and their lives are different a year later. It's impossible." And in my head I was thinking: do you hear how you sound? What kid of yours would ever listen? Of course they don't listen to you. I didn't say that, though.

But the truth is — I was a middle school teacher before I was an experimentalist. My interventions are conversations built on how I learned to talk to young people so that they actually remember. It's a reflection, not a download. Influenced very much by Norbert Schwarz's theory of questionnaire design: the participant isn't just answering a survey, they're reading the questions and inferring what the person who wrote them believes. So when I give a teenager an intervention, the first thing I say is: we're a bunch of lame adults. We don't remember what it's like to be a ninth grader. You know what it's like, because you are one. We want this to help future students, and the only way that will happen is if we benefit from your expertise. Then it's natural to ask them: we told you some brain science — would you mind writing to a future ninth grader convincing them it's true? They're not receiving information; they're generating it. And the subtle thing is respect. I would only ask for your opinion if I didn't already think I knew everything myself.

I always piloted every intervention live in inner-city Oakland, in general education classrooms where the teacher was like: take these kids for a day, I don't even want to talk to them. And my challenge was: can I keep their attention for the whole period? If I couldn't, the intervention wasn't going to work. Whatever moment I caught them — that ended up in the final version. Like a standup comic working out material before an awards show.

The timing matters too. I always tried to do an intervention at a moment when the person would need to use that mindset right away. Scarlet used the stress reappraisal immediately — she got up skiing that day. And because it paid off, it became a functional memory. She remembered it because it worked for her, not because a professor told her it was true. Jeremy Jamieson at the University of Rochester does exactly this in his GRE research — he teaches stress reappraisal and then immediately gives a practice GRE. He did it because he thought it was good practice, but it turns out the timing is part of why it works. Jeff Cohen does this too.

Richie Davidson

I can see how having an opportunity to use the strategy immediately helps to reconsolidate it in a way that is much more effective.

Mindsets Need Context

David Yeager

Now — how did we get from intervening on the kid to trying to influence the adults in the kid's life? Two things. First, I looked back at all the interventions that had worked — getting teenagers to eat healthy food instead of junk food, the bullying interventions, the stress ones — and asked: what do they all have in common? One common principle was status and respect. They always came from a place of honouring and valuing the young person, having them serve as a mentor to someone else.

But the second thing, Richie, is: imagine a world where I've changed your mindset, but you don't have a context in which you can use it. Either there's no opportunity, or worse — something in your context actively discredits the message I just gave you. We did a study where we delivered our growth mindset intervention to ninth graders — your brain can get smarter when you struggle — in a random sample of public schools. In some classrooms, if a student learned a growth mindset and showed resilience, the teacher would respond: that's amazing, you're a serious student, I'm invested in you. It paid off. In other classrooms, the student would say "I love making mistakes, I'm going to tell the teacher so we can fix them" — and the teacher would say "why did you make that mistake? I already told you five times. Get your act together before I help you." The teacher discredited the mindset we'd given the student. And that ends up being about half of classrooms in America.

The Implication

Changing the Adult: FUSE

David Yeager

So the question became: could you take those fixed-mindset teachers who are switching off the treatment, and change them? If you did, could you double the impact of the student intervention? That's the question I've been working on since around 2018. That's why I wrote the book. All of our new empirical work is on changing the adult — so they create what design people would call an affordance for the kid's mindset. A context in which the mindset is functional, where it pays off.

To understand what a mentor mindset actually looks like in practice, I spent two years sitting in the back of Uri Treisman's freshman calculus class at UT Austin — a MacArthur Fellow and perhaps America's greatest calculus educator. By the early 1990s, 40% of all Black Americans with a PhD in mathematics had graduated from his programme. I was like: what does he actually do? Some of it was scalable, some of it was uniquely him. So I needed to find more ordinary versions.

We did a statistical analysis of educators in Texas — a network of about 1,500 teachers teaching college-level courses in high schools — and found the 20 most value-added teachers, the ones where growth mindset was functionally true: regardless of struggle, students could actually improve. We brought them to Austin, spent three days with them, had them explain what they do. My favourite was a physics teacher named Sergio Estrada. If Yoda and the Buddha co-taught high school physics — that's how I'd describe him.

There were systematic things these teachers were doing: asking questions far more than they told. Letting students revise and resubmit exams and quizzes. Establishing the culture of their classroom explicitly on the first day. So we asked: can we train newer, more mid-distribution teachers to emulate the practices of that top 5%? That became FUSE — Fellowship Using the Science of Engagement. A teacher professional learning programme built on mentor mindset practices. Things only scale in education if they're acronyms, so at the very least I made sure the letters on the logo were fused together. I'm pretty proud of that contribution.

Richie Davidson

I'm glad I noticed the hat.