Believing You’re Smarter Makes You Smarter? No.

“The majority of academic/general success is the result of effort, not aptitude. Aptitude only kicks in at the highest levels of difficulty.”

On the other hand, it lets intelligent people do better on things they don’t care about or apply effort to. If the ratios were reversed (80% intelligence, 20% behavior) and intelligence was still being tapped “full-bore” that success is a result of aptitude, not effort, and that effort only kicks in at the highest levels of difficulty.

Or you could say that only behavior is tapped full-bore and intelligence is off in imagination-land unless called upon, so even a 90-10 split in favor of intelligence would be behavior-bound.

I don’t really see the point. Making people believe they can succeed isn’t the answer–getting them to want to succeed is. IMHO, anyway.

But making people believe they can succeed essentially IS getting them to want to; that really was the point of the experiment. My point is that the interest (and subsequent effort) is what yielded results, not an increase in intelligence.

I think you guys missed the point of the article.

I’m going to refer to the two parts of “intelligence” as “behavior” and “aptitude”.

The author states (quite contrary to the title of the article) that people that believe they will always be dumb are right. In other words, if you take a test when you’re young that says you have a below-average IQ, and you weren’t taught that those numbers could change, you’re likely to give up on yourself as a retard.

On the other hand, if you’re tested as having a low IQ and you’re taught that you can make changes to yourself, you’re more likely to push yourself to become more intelligent.

Here’s the difference between a hacker and a mouth breather:

A hacker never loses the willingness to push himself in order to become more apt. Maybe he was born bright, or maybe someone told him he was dumb and he set out to prove that person wrong.

A mouth breather, on the other hand, accepted at a young age that he was never going to be good at anything. Thus, he never pushes himself to learn. He’s listened to all those people that told him he was dumb, or maybe at some point he thought he was “smart enough”.

But here’s the kicker. I guess what I’m saying is that behavior begets aptitude. If you have the right frame of mind, you can overcome your intellectual barriers. At the same time, aptitude begets behavior. If you’re smart enough to believe in yourself, you can ignore what people say about you.

I guess behavior and aptitude are much like horsepower and torque.

Well, I was going ot say (more or less) what Tim said … if people believe that they’re stupid and that this is not fixable, then they will indeed remain stupid. I would choose to use the word ignorant, but ignorant people are more likely to use the word stupid to describe themselves.

So, it’s critical that teachers not tell students that they are stupid.

On the other hand, if teachers hand out meaningless grades or tell students that they understand everything (when this is not the case), then students don’t have any motivation to work harder.

So, it’s critical that teachers not just tell all their students that they’re smart.

I think that built-in (innate) intelligence is a low percentage of overall intelligence. Perhaps 20% of intelligence is innate, and 80% comes from experience and training (learning). So, what teachers need to do is tell students that they are not working hard enough. Intelligence CAN be changed … or aptitude can … and I’m not convinced that they are really different. Or .. at least, I’m not convinced that we can really separate out the innate intelligence from aptitude.

OK … this will have to go out unedited .. pardon any messy logic or sentences … I’ve a meeting to run off to.