David Yaeger, professor in the department of Psychology, shares his journey from being a K-8 teacher to a professor today focused on researching teen development and how we might design social and learning environments that encourage the growing of a belief that they can change, rather than the more negatively impactful sense of personality as fixed forever.
Guests
David YeagerAssociate Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin
Hosts
Frederick Luis Aldama, aka. Professor LatinxJacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin
[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to Into the Colaverse, a podcast that takes us on the unique journeys of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Join me your host, Frederick Luis Aldama as we learn of the many ways that our faculty and their cutting edge work is transforming the world today.
[00:00:22] Frederick: It is my absolute pleasure and honor to be with David Yeager, associate professor of psychology and co-author of dozens of articles in the top journals. PI with Dr. Carol Dwk, Stanford, University of UT’s, National Study of Learning Mindsets. Welcome David. Thanks for having me. I, I don’t even know where to start with my kind of questions. , I mean, you have such an incredible. Experience a very interesting journey. You were a K through eight school teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma at the same time that you were also, you know, finishing bas MAs, uh, or Meeds, um, uh, University of Notre Dame.
[00:01:08] Frederick: And um, then went on to Stanford to get an a master’s and a PhD. Um, yeah, I just, incredible. And also the focus of your research is, Absolutely for all of us parents, for all of us who have teens in our lives, um, children coming up to become teens. So absolutely extraordinarily important. Let’s start with the big question, kind of why, why, why did you get into, um, you know, cognitive, social, cognitive, uh, behavioral.
[00:01:47] Frederick: Questions, teens, um, and all the things that teens go through. Depression, stress, bullying, um, academic underperformance. Yeah. How, tell us how you got here with your journey to this place.
[00:02:01] David: Yeah. Thanks for, um, thanks for asking. So, um, it really came from my work, uh, as a teacher and I started out, um, just really feeling like there.
[00:02:13] David: Our, our kids need us to be a lot better than we are at interacting with them. And the guidance that we got often and being trained to be teachers wasn’t very good or scientific. Um, and I just remember being a teacher sitting in the back of the room at a professional development workshop and I look around and all of the best teachers were grading their papers and not listen.
[00:02:38] David: and I’m like, This is a sign maybe that the people who know what they’re doing and know how to spend their time are feeling like this is a waste of their time. And um, eventually when it came time for me to decide whether I was gonna stay in the classroom or try something else, I realized I wanted to be the person who.
[00:02:56] David: Did the research that ended up in the actually useful and like not worthless professional development, uh, training programs. Um, and so I, I kind of had a, a pivot. I was thinking about going to law school for a while and um, realized that’s not really how I wanted to spend years of my life getting, uh, good at something.
[00:03:18] David: What if I was gonna get good at something and I wanted to be more directly related to my interest in helping young people. So I kind of pivoted to apply to graduate schools and was lucky to get in. And then I had just kind of been off to the races ever since. And it’s been, um, really fun journey for me doing the work we do on teenagers and, and motivating them and helping to, to help them to meet their goals.
[00:03:42] David: Um, and it’s really the impact that sustains us in a lot of ways.
[00:03:47] Frederick: David, what for, for people maybe outside of your field? What is beha? The be behavioral side of psychology? What is the cognitive side? And then how does your work kind of, wed these or bring the insights and advances together to help you answer some of the questions that you have?
[00:04:08] David: Yeah, so I think the, the, the major thing is that we often look at. Students under performance, right? Like students who maybe try hard but didn’t fail, um, in, um, in our large gateway classes, for instance, whether it’s freshman, uh, algebra one in high school, or whether it’s um, uh, you know, chemistry or physics or calculus in college.
[00:04:34] David: And we tend to attribute their lack of success to things about them, like lack of ability. Uh, or to their back background. So maybe their high school wasn’t any good or maybe their parents didn’t really motivate them. And we kind of end up making attritions that are about the kind of person they are and the traits that they have.
[00:04:56] David: And it’s a kind of deficit thinking that pervade so much of our policy and so much of our programming. It’s like we, we locate problems in the flaws of individuals and then we try. Either fixed, flawed people or keep flawed people out. Those are the dominant policy approaches when you have a, a trade based view of, of deficiencies, right?
[00:05:21] David: Um, the social cognitive perspective is different. We say, look, a lot of underperformance comes from the different interpretations and meanings that people make out of their experiences in the exact same objective experience. Whether it’s getting critiqued by a teacher. Or being left out by a friend, or, um, just getting a score that’s lower than what you wanted can be portrayed to yourself in a totally different way, depending on the cues that you perceive in your environment.
[00:05:52] David: Um, and so we, we tend to focus on those subjective meetings. So if you’re a high schooler taking Algebra one and the problem, it’s you’re having a hard time factor Trinomial. We say, Well, what does it mean to you that that’s hard to you? And if it means to you that you’re dumb in math and you’re not a math person, then what if we could get you to have it mean something different like that you just haven’t mastered yet and haven’t gotten enough support?
[00:06:18] David: If you’re bullied by other kids in middle school, what does that mean to you? If it means to you that you’re a loser and you’ll never have friends and these bullies are terrible people, then you wanna like take revenge, or you feel ashamed, right? You wanna hide. You don’t problem solve, but if it means to you that other people are misguided and have this terrible way of seeking status that they need to get out of, then you might be angry.
[00:06:42] David: But you don’t, You’re not filled with rage and hatred and you don’t wanna take revenge. You don’t feel as ashamed and on and on and on. So the, the whole point behind the cognitive side is to really take us out of a world where we’re trying to blame and judge individuals for having flawed trades and into a world where we take seriously.
[00:07:02] David: What it means to someone else when they’re going through a hard time and try to figure out how we can help them reframe everyday experiences so that they could can really kind of unlock their motivation of a potential.
[00:07:12] Frederick: David, you’ve done some really fascinating research on entity theory of personality and also on incremental theory of personality for.
[00:07:23] Frederick: Say the lay listener, lay, um, you know, person. Um, hearing our podcast right now, what are exactly is that and how does that play into a kind of mindset model that you’re,
[00:07:36] David: you’re developing? Yeah, so those are entity and incremental labels are the kind of inside baseball terms for fixed mindset and growth mindset.
[00:07:47] David: So they’re really interchangeable. Um, fixed mindset is the idea. You are a certain way and there’s nothing you can do to change it or that other people are a certain way, there’s nothing you can do to change it. So, um, it, it’s their, their morality, their intelligence, their personality. Those are fixed traits that can’t change.
[00:08:07] David: The growth mindset is the idea that people can develop those qualities, that they can grow incrementally, which is why we call it incremental theory. Um, and that’s a, your own personal lay theory or, or mindset. About, um, growth and the potential for change. And the reason this matters is because if you think about the origins of despair and hopelessness, they’re really rooted in the belief that things can never get better, right?
[00:08:36] David: Um, and what is the origin of hope, right? It’s the belief that it’s plausible and possible for things to improve. So what we try to do in a lot of our studies is give people. A good reason to believe in a possibility of change, and then that inspires ’em to go out and look for evidence that that might be true.
[00:08:58] David: And so we kind of embolden people to have a sense of hope and actually cultivate a sense of hope, um, when they’re going through a hard time. And in
[00:09:06] Frederick: fact also on the teacher side of things as well. Right. Um, I mean, after all, you, we started this conversation talking about, you know, teachers checking out because they weren’t being given productive, Say models for understanding how to be in the classroom in ways that, you know, change student mindsets.
[00:09:29] Frederick: Um, yeah. I mean, from the teacher side of things, Tell me what you’ve been able to share with, you know, education audiences.
[00:09:40] David: Yeah, yeah. So for a long time we were interested in changing kids’ mindsets. So telling them, Hey, um, if you feel like science is hard, for instance, it doesn’t mean you’re dumb at science.
[00:09:51] David: It means you’re growing your science brain while you’re being challenged, right? And we found that that was good for kids in a lot of ways. So in our large randomized trial conducted with a national sample of schools, We found that, uh, even a, a less than 45 minute exposure to this growth mindset idea through the internet on they did it on their own, could improve their grades, especially in math and science at the end of the year.
[00:10:17] David: Um, however, kids only profited from that treatment that they got when their teachers also reinforced the growth mindset idea. If the kids got a growth mindset. But in a classroom where a teacher. Basically look to your left, look to your right. Half of you aren’t smart enough to do well. Then we then the teachers squashed the growth mindset of effect, and we’re now finding even four years later, treatment effects from a short intervention at the beginning of ninth grade on whether kids are graduating from high school, ready for college four years later, but only in schools that had cultures that continue to support growth mindset.
[00:10:54] David: If the school culture made you feel like embarrassed or ashamed for asking for more challenges or for trying harder in school, then you don’t see the long lasting effects. So that has pushed us to thinking about teachers as an agent for change in school culture. What are all the subtle ways that teachers communicate to students?
[00:11:13] David: That some of them are smart enough to do well and others aren’t, or by. That everyone has the potential to learn and improve if they put in the work and if they are willing to revise and so on. So I think our, our newest work is really focused on the mindset of the teacher and how they create a culture that emboldens all students to feel safe and included in the the journey of learning.
[00:11:37] David: Ava, do
[00:11:38] Frederick: you, uh, have a book proposal called The Mentor Mindset? Is, is there some additional nuances, some other areas? Does it expand to say US parents?
[00:11:52] David: Yeah. Yeah, so I think what’s happened is for a long time we thought let’s just teach teachers to have a growth mindset, and then they’ll create a growth mindset culture, and we’re learning, it’s a little more complicated.
[00:12:06] David: Um, and then so that’s led me to think of this idea of a mentor mindset. And what’s nice about a mentor is that they hold you to high standards. They’re tough, right? They’re not a pushover, but it’s clear that they’re there to help you achieve your goals. They’re aligning themselves in their, their actions with your goals.
[00:12:28] David: And so, um, a good teacher creates this mentoring relationship with the student. And it’s, it’s a combination of high standards and high support. It turns out, however, that the best managers do the same and the best parents do the same, and the best coaches do the same. And um, there’s this kind of magical combination of rigorous standards and highly supportive relationships that helps young people thrive.
[00:12:59] David: And so we’ve been doing things like working with Microsoft to. You have something like, um, 20,000 managers, Microsoft. So who are the top 50 that create a mentor relationship with, with people? And how do you elevate them and how do you find out what they’re saying, what they’re doing? Um, I, I found, uh, this, this, this woman who’s a parenting coach.
[00:13:25] David: So if money is no object to you, you have all the money in the world as a parent, who’s the person you hire as your parenting coach? Come in your home and like watch what you do. And so I found her and talking to her and it’s really interesting. I’m learning a lot. Um, and I’m also finding exceptional educators.
[00:13:42] David: So who is the teacher who creates the most equitable outcomes, Um, uh, across the state of Texas. And his name is Sergio Estrada and he teaches at Riverside High School. And it’s like he can see the, the wireless river, right? There’s why it’s called Riverside. At a school where 2% of his kids are college ready, according to the SATs, 95% pass college physics, right?
[00:14:05] David: So I’ve been, I talk to Sergio every Friday and, um, it’s just incredible to see the commonalities between the best managers, the best parents, uh, parenting coaches and the best teachers. And they all have this mentoring approach, um, of high standards plus high support.
[00:14:23] Frederick: A how does this.
[00:14:26] David: May, may, maybe, or maybe not.
[00:14:29] David: Um,
[00:14:31] Frederick: move into, move our understanding into areas that we can also help youngsters. Um, improve, say, or, um, get more of let’s maybe sleep, um, coping mechanisms, um, just day to day issues that they constantly face, including, of course, this omni present social media stuff that we have to deal with. Yeah,
[00:14:58] David: social media is really tricky not to crack.
[00:15:00] David: Um, and I would say that the. The evidence is really mixed. So on the one hand, it can cause a lot of harm. And so we’ve done some studies where we had had hundreds of teenagers join in a social media, um, platform that we developed, and then we randomly assigned them to over the course of an experiment. So this wasn’t out in the wild.
[00:15:29] David: Randomly assign them to either get the second fewest likes out of a group of 12 or the second most likes out of a group of 12. And so no one got dislikes, no one got bullied, no one got made fun of, but some people were the bottom rank for likes and other people were at the top. And we find that this has a huge effect.
[00:15:49] David: Kids are, um, uh, twice as likely to say they don’t like themselves if they got fewer like. And it, um, the extent to which they don’t like themselves when they get, she likes, predicts onset of depression over, over the first year of high school. So really important effects. Um, so on the one hand, there’s a big risk from this world where you are constantly comparing yourself to others.
[00:16:13] David: And again, it goes back to meaning making. You’re saying to yourself like, I objectively just got liked by a hundred people, but my friends got liked by a thousand people, so I’m less than them. So your main takeaway, the meaning you make out of it is I’m less than other people. Right. And that’s, that’s, But there are different ways to tell yourself a story about the same experience.
[00:16:34] David: So how can you encourage positive appraisals or positive meaning making about social media that’s like really hard not to crack? Um, the, the one we’re focused on right now is, uh, stress and and anxiety. And the particular angle we take on it is the idea that, um, It feels like everything is impossible right now.
[00:16:58] David: It feels like you’re being asked to do more than anyone can do, and you’re not being given any more resources and you have to do it faster than ever. And the stakes are higher than ever. So, um, it’s a kind of race to nowhere they call it. So, um, what’s the advice that adults tend to give to teenagers in that circumstance and the answer?
[00:17:22] David: Pretty terrible advice. Normally what people say is, um, basically they get you to disengage from your stressors. So it’d be like, go do yoga, go drink chem t, go like, uh, meditate. And those are all perfectly fine and good things to do. But, um, if you are, if you were racing to get your college applications in, or if you’re preparing a presentation for your boss, Or you’re like about to have the most important state championship matched for whatever activity you’re doing.
[00:17:57] David: That’s not the time to take a nap and like drink home tea. Like you need to be on top of your game at those points. So this message of like run away from your stress is often wrong when you’re talking about the very real demands that are placed on young people for performance. So we’ve, I. Said, Well, what if you could learn to embrace your, um, stress and worry and anxiety and use it as a resource?
[00:18:24] David: Now, there are certain times when you’re totally like in lizard brain mode and you just, you’re totally anxious, like hyperventilating. That’s not the time to do this message I’m telling you about. But that’s, those are rare times. Most of the time we just feel like always on. And, um, there’s a way to start embracing the racing heart and the sweaty ponds.
[00:18:46] David: And the heavy breathing as a means for preparing your body for optimal performance. And it’s by realizing that, um, the way the brain gets smarter is by having more oxygen, um, going to the neurons. The way your muscles get stronger, it’s by having more oxygen, uh, to the muscle fibers. And the way it does that is by breathing more, pumping more blood more quickly.
[00:19:09] David: Um, and the sweat cools your body down so that you have cooler, uh, blood going to your brain and your muscle. So we have people reappraise their, make different meaning out of their body’s physiological stress experiences and in a new paper, it’s coming outta nature. We show that that helps teenagers deal.
[00:19:29] David: A lot of stressors, including even the stress of, uh, being isolated during Covid 19.
[00:19:34] Frederick: Oh boy. Yeah. We need, we do need, we need all of that research that you’re doing and we need it, um, in accessible forms, um, in the way that you’re, you’re doing. Um, David, as we wind us down here, um, what are you reading? Uh, what’s on your pro proverbial nightstand?
[00:19:53] Frederick: Um, That’s exciting and interesting for you. And that could be fiction on fiction. Um,
[00:19:59] David: anything really? Yeah. Well, I’m always, I, I always try to read the latest, uh, Walter Isaac biographies. So like the Ben Franklin one is my favorite one then. So I reading the Jennifer DK one now, which I like a lot. Um, just cause I like to see where the science comes from and how people developed the ideas and so on.
[00:20:19] David: Um, But I’m also just reading a ton, uh, as I have been for several years about just our nation’s history of systemic inequalities and where they come from and how they constrain opportunities for people. Because I think the next continued evolution of our work is gonna need for it to be into contact with, um, the kind of long stem standing inequities that make it hard for people, even when sufficiently motivated and even when they’re coping with stress to, uh, overcome barriers to inequality.
[00:20:48] David: So, um, Uh, the color of law is a good one. It’s just the history of red lighting, uh, and other policies like that in our country. Um, and a few other books like that I think are just continuing my evolution and thinking about, um, systems that perpetuate inequalities. And, and then what I wanna find is where is their leverage and human behavior where maybe the.
[00:21:13] David: Who, who constrain opportunities, whether it’s teachers or managers or police officers or principals or other actors in the, in the institutional level, um, where we might be able to shift their behaviors to make systems more fair and equal. So powerful.
[00:21:29] Frederick: Um, absolutely. And so all of your work, all your research, all your findings, having a direct impact in and through policy making, but I love that you know the readings, the active reading that you’re doing is constantly keeping you on your toes in terms of your framing questions.
[00:21:46] Frederick: That’s so important. Absolutely. So important. Um, David, you, you also like karaoke. Yeah, tell us about karaoke. I know it’s mentioned, you mentioned this along with, uh, you know, your, your students and being a, an, um, an active role model for your students. But yeah, as we end this karaoke
[00:22:10] David: Yeah, no, I think I’m, I’m a pretty big fan of high fives and karaoke.
[00:22:15] David: Um, uh, the nice thing about karaoke if you do it right, is it’s not about looking better than others. Being discovered or anything like that. Um, it’s about like being vulnerable with friends. And I think we have so few spaces these days where you can be publicly vulnerable. I mean, even social media, which started out as a place for your non-professional self to let your hair down now has to be perfectly curated cuz it’s evaluated by so many others.
[00:22:47] David: Um, and so I sometimes I think the right room for karaoke with the right vibe. Is one of the last safe places to just be a goofball in front of people and not, um, worry about like being a scandal or like feeling excluded. Like you could just sing Sweet Caroline and just you, I don’t know, like, this is great.
[00:23:11] David: So I’m not a good, particularly good singer or dancer, but I, I, my favorite activity is to create very inclusive karaoke spaces for people who wouldn’t normally. Be publicly vulnerable in front of, front of others. Um, and I don’t mind a little, um, Lieber to La Marque, um, where, uh, other Lama del Tango was one of my favorites.
[00:23:34] David: Um, so, uh, yeah, I have a few favorites that I like throw in there too. David,
[00:23:39] Frederick: thank you so much for all the work that you do. Um, asking, asking, first of all, asking the the right questions, designing experiments. Creating solutions, interventions, opening pathways for our, you know, new generations, but also for us as parents, for us, as teachers, coaches, all of us.
[00:24:02] Frederick: And finally, I. Look forward to your book, The Mentor Mindset. I can’t wait for that. Thank you, David.
[00:24:09] David: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:24:12] Outro: Into The Colaverse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts Sound Engineering by the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. You can find Into the Colaverse Podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. Thanks for listening and see you next time.