We label people by the
characteristics they show all the time.
We think of a particular person as being a bully, a nerd, a musician, or
an athlete. The label may be a reasonable
reflection of who they are right now, but it also carries a belief that the
behavior reflects a person’s essence.
When you say that someone is a
bully, you not only mean that they tend to bully other people, but also that—at
their core—they are the kind of person who bullies others. I have a cartoon on my office door of two
prisoners sitting in a cell. One says to
the other, “You’re not a murderer, you’re just a person who happened to murder
someone.” This cartoon works, because
being called a murderer feels like it carries something essential about the
individual.
If you use terms to describe
people and you believe that they cannot change, then life can be
stressful. Every time that someone
treats you badly, you take that as evidence that they are a bad person and not
just that they did a bad thing. So, if
you are able to think about people’s personalities in a less fixed way, perhaps
that would decrease your overall stress.
This question was explored in a
paper in the June, 2014 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by David Yeager,
Rebecca Johnson, Brian Spitzer, Kali Trzesniewski, Joseph Powers, and Carol
Dweck.
One paper looked at simple
correlations between beliefs and stress in high school students over the course
of a school year. At the start of the
school year, ninth graders were given a brief questionnaire about whether they
thought people’s personality could change.
They were also given a test of their reaction to social exclusion. This test is called Cyberball. In this game, participants sit at a computer
and think they are passing a ball along with two classmates playing at other
computers. After the ball is initially
passed to everyone, the participant is excluded for several minutes as they
other players pass the ball only back and forth to each other. After this exclusion, participants rated how
stressful they found the game to be.
Finally, at the end of the school year, the students provided
information about their stress level and their physical health. The researcher also looked at the students’
grades at the end of the year.
The more participants believed
that personality can change, the less affected they were by being excluded
while playing Cyberball. In addition,
the more that people believe that others can change, the lower their stress,
the better their health, and the higher their grades at the end of the year.
This result raises the possibility
that if people were trained to think that personality characteristics can
change, then they might do better in school.
In two additional studies, the researchers used an intervention of this
type. One study was done in a fairly
wealthy school district, while the other was done in a very poor district. In each study, participants were ninth-grade
students who were at risk for failing out of school.
At the start of the school year,
participants in an experimental intervention condition read an article about
how personality can change. They also
read stories that were supposed to have come from upperclassmen talking about
how this knowledge helped them. Then,
students wrote their own stories that they were told would be used by future
students. Students in the control
condition read about how athletic ability can be changed. As in the study just described, all
participants then played the Cyberball game.
In addition, their stress, health, and grades at the end of the year
were measured.
Even though, this intervention was
brief, it had a significant and lasting impact on participants. Compared to students in the control
condition, those who got the intervention reacted less strongly to the
Cyberball game. At the end of the year,
they experienced less stress, had fewer health problems, and had higher grades
than those in the control condition. This
effect was strongest for those students who did not already believe that
personality could change over time.
Why does this intervention
work? Statistical analyses suggest that
believing that personality can change leads to a smaller reaction to social
exclusion (as measured by the Cyberball game).
Reacting less strongly to social exclusion has a cascade effect over
time, and lowers stress levels while also having a positive impact on performance
in school.
These studies fit with a growing
body of evidence by Carol Dweck and her colleagues demonstrating that the
belief that people can change has many benefits. Students who believe their own behavior and
performance can change work harder in school to overcome academic
difficulty. People who believe that
others can change are more likely to work with them to regain trust after they
have a bad experience.
Ultimately, it is important to
realize that you should not completely define the people in your life by their
current behavior.
