From “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” by Carol S. Dweck, PhD
Aside from hijacking people’s abilities, stereotypes also do damage by making people feel they don’t belong. Many minorities drop out of college and many women drop out of math and science because they just don’t feel they fit in.
To find out how this happens, we followed college women through their calculus course. This is often when students decide whether math, or careers involving math, are right for them. Over the semester, we asked the women to report their feelings about math and their sense of belonging in math. For example, when they thought about math, did they feel like a full-fledged member of the math community or did they feel like an outsider; did they feel comfortable or did they feel anxious; did they feel good or bad about their math skills?
The women with the growth mindset – those who thought math ability could be improved – felt a fairly strong and stable sense of belonging. And they were able to maintain this even when they thought there was a lot of negative stereotyping going around. One student described it this way: “In a math class, [female] students were told they were wrong when they were not (they were in fact doing things in novel ways). It was absurd, and reflected poorly on the instructor not to ‘see’ the students’ reasoning. It was alright because we were working in groups and we were able to give & receive support among us students…We discussed our interesting ideas among ourselves.”
The stereotyping was disturbing to them (as it should be), but they could still feel comfortable with themselves and confident about themselves in a math setting. They could fight back.
But women with the fixed mindset, as the semester wore on, felt a shrinking sense of belonging. And the more they felt the presence of stereotyping in their class, the more their comfort with math withered. One student said that her sense of belonging fell because “I was disrespected by the professor with his comment, ‘that was a good guess’ whenever I made a correct answer in class.”
The stereotype of low ability was able to invade them – to define them – and take away their comfort and confidence. I’m not saying it’s their fault by any means. Prejudice is a deeply ingrained societal problem, and I do not want to blame the victims of it. I am simply saying that a growth mindset helps people to see prejudice for what it is – someone else’s view of them – and to confront it with their confidence and abilities intact.