I Was Told I Was Very Smart

http://theferrett.livejournal.com/1346357.html

by mtinkerhess • 17 years ago

309 113 17 years ago

theferrett.livejournal.com

unalone2• 17 years ago

I can't say this is a universal reaction. As a child I was told I was smart, and subsequently wrote off all my failures with the flippant "I learned something here, and have become even smarter." Insecurity exists regardless of intelligence or hype.

nopassrecover2• 17 years ago

I think you are an exception to the rule. Lots of research and similar anecdotal accounts support the article (kids who succeed early self-sabotage for the rest of their life).

lionhearted• 17 years ago

> Insecurity exists regardless of intelligence or hype.

Author is probably referring to the study that kids who are praised on being "smart" do less well than kids who are praised on being "hard working".

Here's the first google result, looks like it:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-...

Jives true to me as well. Most of the people who have identities based on being smart far underperform their intelligence. I was praised for being smart growing up, I fight that off like crazy now. "Me? Not smart at all. Just curious." "Nah, I'm dumb as a box of rocks. I just keep going." And so on. It's done wonders for me. (Also, realizing just how much I didn't know was pretty humbling - and the scariest is realizing how much that I'm not even aware I don't know...)

thaumaturgy6• 17 years ago

I am embarrassed to be among the crowd here that will all chime in and say, "I was told I'm smart too". And I, too, was a thoroughly mediocre student.

But the reason had nothing to do with fear, and everything to do with not seeing any value in what I was being asked to do. I knew the amount of effort that would be needed to slide by, and that was all the effort that I put in.

Nor do I shy away now from being "smart". My intelligence is a tool, and I should use it well, and I am not ashamed -- or afraid -- of it.

RevRal• 17 years ago

> Jives true to me as well. Most of the people who have identities based on being smart far underperform their intelligence.

Best example, William James Sidis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sidis).

Someone I think we all can identify with on a lot of levels.

"A true man in a world full of animals." Powerful words.

unalone2• 17 years ago

Most of the people who have identities based on being smart far underperform their intelligence.

Most people who have identities based on any single term underperform. I think you'd find that people who live life in a singleminded "athlete" way, or "gamer" way, or on and on, underperform similarly. Possibly they're happy that way, possibly they've just pidgeonholed themselves.

lutorm• 17 years ago

Yeah, I've touted Carol Dweck's research on HN before. It's one of the most fascinating pieces of education research I've learned about. And it's clearly what the author refers to.

dcx• 17 years ago

That may be a separate factor: that people who believe intelligence is malleable tend to recover better from failures - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/instance/1838571/

If you've been taught to judge your worth by your intelligence, and simultaneously believe intelligence is fixed at birth, it's a logical consequence that you might do a lot of dumb things to preserve your internal belief that you're smart.

hegemonicon• 17 years ago

The most famous study confirming this is the one where they give two groups of kids relatively easy math problems. The first group they tell "wow, you must be really smart to complete all those!", the second group they tell "wow, you must have worked really hard to complete all those!". They then give them another set of problems far above their skill level. The second group of kids, the 'hard-workers', work much longer at the problems before giving up on them. And when both groups are given another set of relatively easy problems, the first group's performance takes a nosedive.

andreyf8• 17 years ago

And when both groups are given another set of relatively easy problems, the first group's performance takes a nosedive.

The other part (working longer on hard problems) is important, but this is probably not so bad - there's rarely a point in doing math problems below your skill level.

btilly3• 17 years ago

Um, I think you missed the point. After encountering a challenge the group that was initially praised for brains saw their performance drop on problems that should have been within their skill level. The group that was initially praised for effort saw their performance improve after that same challenge.

The moral is simple. When you praise children, you motivate them to seek more praise. If your praise is about something that is out of their control, such as innate intelligence, you discourage them from trying to take control of their circumstances. But if it is within their control, such as effort, they apply energy in a useful direction.

If you're a parent, which would you prefer to do?

btilly3• 17 years ago

You can find more on that study at http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/.

But I have a fundamental disagreement with the simplistic message of complimenting effort rather than brains. And that disagreement is that you're training kids to work hard, but not necessarily well. In my childhood the messages we got pushed us to always look for the trick. As an adult I really value the mental habit of always looking for the shortcut that makes things easy.

Another interesting variant I find myself using with my son is to compliment him for showing smarts, but follow it up with a theory that brains need practice to continue working. Thus "smart" becomes a compliment for what he does, and not what he is. For instance I'll say something like, "How did you get so smart? You must have been really using that brain! Just look at what you've learned!"

hxa7241• 17 years ago

The principle is to commend something that is improveable and controllable. That can be refined by adding information: encouraging the best/most-effective activities.

Bluem003• 17 years ago

You might be interested in the book "Punished by Rewards" by Alfie Kohn. It goes into detail about why praise can be detrimental, and what to substitute for it. From the description on his site <http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm>, it "[draws] from hundreds of studies, [and] demonstrates that people actually do inferior work when they are enticed with money, grades, or other incentives." The biggest revelation for me was that 'other incentives' includes both praise and punishment.

liquidben• 17 years ago

So to restate: We need to praise intelligence as an applied behavior, not an intrinsic trait.

This mode of reinforcement really should be reapplied to anything "natural" vs practiced: athletics, grace, popularity, ninjitsu...

Radix3• 17 years ago

Do you have a daughter? Since this article is still on the front page I would like to ask HN how does one deal with the similar issue of letting a young girl know she's pretty without suggesting it's of central importance? The problem is physical attractiveness is more inate than intelligence. I think the best course is to suggest innate attractivness is happy chance to be taken advantage of, generally it should be treated with indifference. I don't want my little sister to be swept off her feet by the first boy who gives her flowers, but you don't want her to ignore any advantages she may have. It may also be useful to point out how much attractivness depends on cultural assumptions of beauty.

chrischen• 17 years ago

I think that relates to how smart is synonymous with lazy: it's because smart always try find the easy way out.

The hard way to do something would require a lot of effort, but actually very little brain power. An example would be trying to modify a set of data. The hard way would be to do it by hand. That's the most obvious method and thus requires little brain power to arrive at. However the faster way is to write a Python script that does it.

Probably part of the de-emphasis on smarts is society's general attitude towards innate intelligence. We don't like to believe that some people are simply born better than others, so we stress that more effort is better instead.

There's no arguing the fact that not everyone is equally gifted in terms of brain power, so I think it's kind of silly to try to ignore intelligence. Intelligent people are creative, open minded, and flexible. But an intelligent person who's allergic to actual effort is the real problem we want to avoid. Also we're probably more equal in intelligence than we are in our ability to work hard. So in practice, this is probably why effort is a better indicator of ability to succeed than intelligence is.

cojadate2• 17 years ago

What would be really is interesting is the same study but with the first group being told they're hard-working and the second group not being given any praise at all. That would help test how far the "praise/incentives diminish performance" theory really goes.

hvs2• 17 years ago

I was always told that I was very smart and, at least when it came to computers, I was generally better than every one around me. I never had to try very hard in school to get mediocre grades, and never felt the need to try harder.

Then I went to a top university in Computer Science. I was suddenly surrounded by people that were orders of magnitude better at computer science than I was. I had to study for hours to understand something they seemed to understand implicitly. It took two years of struggling to finally reach a point where I considered myself "good" at computer science. After that, it came fairly easily but I still had to work much harder than my friends who did it effortlessly.

I learned over time that I am fairly smart. Not off the charts smart, but I've got my strengths. I still have to work harder than those in the top of my field, but I'm certainly on the down slope of the bell curve.

But the most important thing that I've learned is that it doesn't matter how smart you think you are. There will always be those more or less smart than you. What's important is what you do with it, and how hard you work to achieve what you want.

cperciva2• 17 years ago

There will always be those more or less smart than you.

Subject to the (entirely reasonable, I believe) presumption that humanity is finite, a lack of maximal and minimal elements implies that "is smarter than" is not a strict partial ordering. (All finite partially-ordered sets have maximal and minimal elements.)

This seems profoundly counterintuitive to me; both the asymmetry and transitivity of the "is smarter than" relation seem almost axiomatic (and the irreflexivity is indisputable).

It seems to me that there must be thousands of individuals who are maximally smart -- each of them, naturally, incomparable to the others.

hvs2• 17 years ago

Compared to six billion people, I don't think you have to worry too much about being, or meeting too many of those people.

andreyf8• 17 years ago

both the asymmetry and transitivity of the "is smarter than" relation seem almost axiomatic

Hah, you can't be serious! Look around you - asymmetry is so painfully obvious that even pop theories propose to split intelligence into "book smarts", "street smarts", "social smarts", etc.

In reality, I don't think "smart" is a word that makes much sense, outside of the context of signaling social status (pIQ).

krakensden• 17 years ago

Is modeling humanity as finite really the right way to go? There's always a stream of new humanity coming in, and old humanity dying off. Not to mention the way you change as you age- even if you're maximally smart at 16 (which everyone is, of course) eventually you won't be.

aristus• 17 years ago

"...there must be thousands of individuals who are maximally smart..."

I think that's the core truth of "genius". Melville put it, "Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round".

Joseph Campbell, Isamu Noguchi, Martha Graham, and Rudy Arnheim were all geniuses in very different fields, but they were also drawn to each other in friendship & collaboration. They can't compare to each other on any scale, but somehow shared something in common.

roundsquare2• 17 years ago

First of all... thats not the point. That statement wasn't meant as an absolute truism as much as something most people should keep in mind lest they get too cocky.

Secondly, even for someone X who is maximally smart, the statement "Y is smarter than X" can be true if its in a particular context. E.g. take two people who are maximally smart... there no one smarter than X in math (or whatever) and no one smarter than Y in history. Then X is smarter than Y and Y is smarter than X... depending on how you use the word.

Edit: So long as no one is maximumly smart.

pbhjpbhj2• 17 years ago

Surely there is only a single individual who is maximally smart - I'd imagine you'd need an identical brain to be identically smart; assuming that (as is normal) even speed of application of knowledge is measured as part of smartness.

Now define "smartness".

Confusion• 17 years ago

I was suddenly surrounded by people that were orders of magnitude better at computer science than I was. I had to study for hours to understand something they seemed to understand implicitly.

I think seemed is the key word here. Many people that are good at what they do give the impression that it's a breeze for them. When examining it closer, it isn't: they spend plenty of time studying. I've never really gotten to the bottom of it, but the difference seems to be that they simply talk less about the studying and more about the material itself, which gives the impression they know their stuff very well, even though they studied hard as well.

asciilifeform• 17 years ago

> they spend plenty of time studying

A comforting half-truth.

Periodic• 17 years ago

I bet most people don't talk about their studying, and if you don't see the person studying, what stands out is their ability. So if the person goes home and spends twice as much time studying as you do, you still only see the part where they demonstrate their knowledge. If they studied ahead, they'll look like they know everything when really they are working twice as hard as you.

Basically, we humans are really bad at judging things, particularly abstract things like "intelligence". Heck, we can't even really define it yet.

Just get your results, and be happy with those.

WilliamLP• 17 years ago

The trouble is that really smart kids quickly figure out that they are smart without being told. (Or, equivalently, that the other kids are just kind of stupid.)

ahlatimer5• 17 years ago

I don't think that's necessarily the case, though. I find myself to be above average intelligence, and I've been told that throughout my life. However, it wasn't until somewhat recently (probably in past 3 or 4 years) that I truly started to accept it. I imagine I accepted it when I was very young, just as I accepted pretty much everything that was told to me, but there was definitely a large gap in my development where I didn't find myself to be anything above average.

JoeAltmaier5• 17 years ago

My parents told their 6 farm kids "You are all really smart; you will all go to college". No financial support, no reading at bedtime, no clubs or activities other than chores. 4 computer professionals, 1 Environmental researcher, 1 Clinical Researcher. 3 VPs in Fortune-500 companies (not me)

hexis• 17 years ago

I don't think the issue is whether or not the kids know they are smart. I think the issue is what quality of theirs gets them positive feedback and attention.

albertsun• 17 years ago

I don't buy the connection between being told you're smart and having a fear of failure. Just because many people have been told they're smart and many people fear failure doesn't mean that there's any relationship between the two.

And I also don't think the second one is necessarily a new phenomenon.

sophacles• 17 years ago

It's not a random correlation based on observations of adults, it's studies that show small children behave in the mentioned ways when told they are smart, when compared to being told they are hard working. A lifetime of this can ingrain certain behaviors.

JCThoughtscream• 17 years ago

I think I was lucky enough to have gone from "wow, you're smart" to "what do you mean you're struggling to catch up?" relatively early on. Also, joining the debate team and getting quashed repeatedly the moment I stepped above Novice rank helped sandblast apart any lingering arrogance I might've had. /Being/ smart is hard work - discovering that was a little painful, but at least I /did/ learn that lesson.

3pt14159• 17 years ago

I was told I was smart and I worked hard. Country living left no room for insecurities about losing what was special about my identity. When I didn't do the math homework it wasn't because I didn't want to be discovered as a simpler person than other told me I was, it was because I was busy hacking away at some silly QBASIC code. Even playing Civilization or making minor explosives, I learned more there than a year long of "Egyptian History" in grade 6. Teach your kids to be independent, smart, kind, and get 'em to do at least 10 hours of chores a week and they'll be fine.

sfnhltb2• 17 years ago

I would especially recommend the chores thing - maybe this is relating to watching something on BBC3 where they dumped a load of 18-25 year olds still living at home into a house and essentially simulated them having to live on their own, manage their own budgets, cook their own food, do their own shopping, do worklike tasks during the day, etc. They obviously completely failed in every way imaginable.

It is very easy with all the labour saving devices we now have for parents to just do pretty much all the chores, rather than expend the possibly greater effort of browbeating the kids into do them regularly. The other part is to mix it up - they all need in the end to be able to iron, wash clothes, put out trash, help with shopping, etc., so ensure they all do some of each rather than one "easy" chore they like every day/week (some are age dependant of course, but you have a decade or so to cover everything so that shouldn't be an issue)

Dove2• 17 years ago

I think it depends on what conclusion you draw from being smart.

For me, it became obvious very early in elementry school that I was smart. So my mother told me that my mind was a gift. She also told me that being given such a gift meant I had a special responsibility to develop it to its fullest capacity.

Henceforth, it was not failure in any given project that I feared. On the contrary, I routinely failed and thought that if I didn't, I wasn't taking on sufficiently difficult challenges. What I feared was not pushing myself hard enough. Not living up to my potential.

In elementry school, I set my own intellectual pace, and as a professional, I still do. I sought out challenges and ideas, and still do. I feared complacency, and still do. Being taught that intelligence equated to responsibility has done more for me than raw intelligence ever might have.

wglb• 17 years ago

This story illustrates it is all influenced by how your parents and others around you help you build your expectations and convey their expectations.

I skipped second grade (not recommended) and heard a lot about "potential". I wouldn't wish that on anybody.

JoeAltmaier5• 17 years ago

As a Scout leader I have learned that young people (boys anyway) behave exactly how you expect them to. If you say "We are the best Troop in the district!" then they are. By any measure - leadership, deportment, competition, participation - they do it all if you assume they will, and make that clear by providing support and opportunity.

Eliezer• 17 years ago

I think that's exactly it. Age eleven is when I first saw my percentile written down, and before then I had some idea that I was smart; but I also knew about the phenomenon of failed prodigies, like Sidis, and I was terrified of failing to live up to my potential. And yes, the idea of a responsibility to live up to it was also there, very strongly.

roc2• 17 years ago

The counter-examples of in this thread all share the strong correlation that they were explicitly taught that 'being smart' wasn't an achievement and that praise was withheld until some nebulous 'potential' was fulfilled.

Which is why I don't think they're actually counter examples. The danger described is of teaching children that 'being smart' is, in and of itself, praise-worthy.

Dove2• 17 years ago

I agree. There is danger in taking pride in the gift half. But there is merit in taking pride in the achievement half.

mronge• 17 years ago

If you're interested in this, check out the book Mindset by Carol Dweck. I recommend it, it's amazing how hackable your mind is.

http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Success-Carol-Dweck...

hrabago• 17 years ago

I think a lot of people would like to think of themselves as smart. I do, too. I'm smart, you're smart, and he's smart as well, but it's all relative.

Instead of thinking about how smart I am, I instead think about how much I don't know, especially about things I need to know, either for my professional life or for my personal life. This list can quickly grow, especially since the more you know, the more you become aware of the things you don't know. This is a more concrete measuring stick. Yeah we're both smart, but you know things I need to know to get through my day, so at least today, you're better off than I am. But hey, I'm so smart, maybe I'll figure it out.

andreyf8• 17 years ago

I've never heard a clear definition of "smart" and "stupid" that didn't involve huge inconsistencies. If anyone has a consistent definition, I'd love to hear it. Otherwise, I propose we drop the words from the language for being too vague.

japherwocky• 17 years ago

in dogs, the metric is how many feedback loops it takes to learn a new trick, iirc. e.g., Fluffy takes 50 treats to learn to "sit" on command; Einstein takes 25.

nopassrecover2• 17 years ago

That's clever. My labrador learned sit in about 6-8 tries I think.

tel2• 17 years ago

How do people account for complexity of the tricks? Is there a standard trick or is that number fairly stable?

andreyf8• 17 years ago

Summary: That's not "smart". That's "experienced", which is an integral of "determined" over time.

Reasoning: Is it intrinsic that Einstein needs 25 tries, or is it because he also knows "fetch", "lay", "roll over", and "play dead"? It's a very important distinction, and most usage of "smart" implies the former - intrinsic ability. That's the difference between "smart" and "experienced".

Among my peers, however, I don't see any intrinsic differences in learning whatsoever. If person A needs less iteration than person B to learn the classwork, she's either more determined or has more related experience (or both). The two go hand-in-hand, because experience is just the integral of determination over time. Intrinsic "smartness" is completely unnecessary in describing learning ability.

gbookman• 17 years ago

I think it's interesting how praise, in this case being told you're smart, can lead to insecurity.

I guess that by being told you're smart, it builds up high expectations within your own mind, leading to emotional distress when you fail to meet those expectations.

andreyf8• 17 years ago

It's not that counter-intuitive, it's just a vague definition of "insecurity". When you praise someone for X, you show them that your admiration depends on your perception of X in them, they try to keep your perception of X alive, but avoiding things that would disprove X.

Instead of "admiration", let's say I give you $100 a day as long as you're "smart". Now, do you want to risk my perception by trying something new, or keep doing whatever you're good at?

It's still utility maximization, through and through.

ztravis• 17 years ago

I've come across this line of reasoning before (in reference to the study with math problems/telling kids they're smart versus hard working) but I'm not sure if I believe this is particular to being designated as smart. In fact, I would imagine that telling students that they're not in the 'smart' range, or having peers designated as smart while they are not, is more damaging to academic motivation/leads to more fears and emotional distress. I think both are just manifestations of an underlying fear of being judged, regardless of the expectations - fears of not living up to high expectations, or confirming low ones, or in general moving from a comfortable position of uncertainty in one's skill/intelligence (leaving open the possibility of it being unexpectedly high) to a better defined and therefore less appealing position.

(you might argue that labeling a child as 'not smart' or at least not singling out a child as 'smart' might motivate them to prove the evaluation wrong - but I think those cases are by far the exception rather than the rule)

Now, the label of 'hard working' is on a very different scale from intelligence; I can understand how calling kids 'smart' rather than 'hard working' could decrease their performance. Nevertheless, over the course of our academic lives I think we all get a sense of how we fit in, intelligence-wise, even if we aren't explicitly labeled, from grades, peer performance, parent/teacher expectations and evaluations... the smart ones fear being 'found out' as dumb or tarnishing their reputations, the 'dumb' ones fear (even more, I would imagine) the criticism or negative evaluation of their work they expect to be forthcoming, the average ones fear being confirmed as merely average...

chanux• 17 years ago

And to add to this, it's not just being told "it's Believing that you are smart", (which can happen without any one else involved) is the formula of destruction.

It's already said in a better way.

"When you’re ripe you rot, when you’re green you grow"

jorleif• 17 years ago

I wish someone did a study on how being told other things affect intelligence. For example, there is the stereotype of the dumb blonde. Perhaps being told (or knowing) that one is attractive leads to lower effort and therefore to less knowledge and lower intelligence. Maybe high intelligence is something geeks develop, only because they are not very good at anything else, such as being popular or good at sports etc.

JoeAltmaier5• 17 years ago

Mensa (top 2% on intelligence test) have a demographic of high-ability non-achievers. Bookstore employees, lab assistants etc. Rarely the boss.

echair• 17 years ago

Surely it's Mensa membership that correlates with low achievement, not scoring well on IQ tests per se.

thaumaturgy6• 17 years ago

That's the primary reason I didn't join their party. They seem to think that the mere possession of intelligence is something noteworthy.

I might as well join an organization of naturally brown-haired people.

simplegeek• 17 years ago

I'm not sure why this guy keeps getting rejections because I think he can write.

jordan_stewart• 17 years ago

Right on man, he can definitely write! Perhaps he just doesn't write about the right thing?

davidw• 17 years ago

My reaction to this kind of article is along the lines of "yeah, ok, sounds right, let's move on to something more interesting".

rythie• 17 years ago

Basically, if your smart, you risk under achieving because compared to your perceived peers, your doing well and don't try any harder. However, compared to other people who are similarly smart your under achieving.

whyleyc• 17 years ago

His conclusion - throw yourself into your life and your work whilst you are still young enough to be able to, so that you don't regret it when you are older.

FreeRadical• 17 years ago

Why not self publish?

coliveira• 17 years ago

The problem with being smart is that you're never smart enough. In school I was considered very smart, and that was great. In grad school, I was smart, but not the most, and this makes you hurt inside. Then you start to learn that is effort that really matter.

nice1• 17 years ago

There is something to this, but it is also quite misleading. It is (sometimes painfully) obvious that there is a huge variation in innate ability. There are extremely talented people, there are those who find just about everything difficult, and all the shades in between. You can see this even with quite small children. Success is very often correlated with hard work, but in no way does that imply that some people aren't much smarter than others.

drewcamealong• 17 years ago

The article doesn't imply that hard work trumps smartness at all, and it doesn't imply or state that there is little innate variation in ability. What it says is that if you tell a very smart or talented person how smart they are when they're younger, they're more likely to be afraid to take risks that would jeopardize that label. It's better to emphasize to them that they work hard, according to the author (and, I believe, studies that back him up).

gamble• 17 years ago

Conversely, it's usually to your advantage to be perceived as smart, rather than just hard-working. Everyone believes they could work hard, if they wanted to. The people who impress us are the ones who make it seem effortless.

teeja• 17 years ago

"Far better to tell a kid that they're hard working."

Sorry. Working smart beats working hard. EOM

I Was Told I Was Very Smart

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