We provide a developmental perspective on two related issues: (a) why traditional preventative school-based interventions work reasonably well for children but less so for middle adolescents and (b) why some alternative approaches to interventions show promise for middle adolescents. We propose the hypothesis that traditional interventions fail when they do not align with adolescents' enhanced desire to feel respected and be accorded status; however, interventions that do align with this desire can motivate internalized, positive behavior change. We review examples of promising interventions that (a) directly harness the desire for status and respect, (b) provide adolescents with more respectful treatment from adults, or (c) lessen the negative influence of threats to status and respect. These examples are in the domains of unhealthy snacking, middle school discipline, and high school aggression. Discussion centers on implications for basic developmental science and for improvements to youth policy and practice.

We explored children’s developing understanding of mentallife using a novel approach to track changes in conceptualstructure from the bottom up by analyzing patterns of men-tal capacity attributions. US children (n=247) evaluated ele-phants, goats, mice, birds, beetles, teddy bears, dolls, robots,and computers on a range of mental capacities, allowing us toassess which attributions “go together” and how these concep-tual connections might develop over early and middle child-hood. Replicating previous studies with adults and older chil-dren, an exploratory factor analysis of older children’s (7-9y)responses revealed a three-way distinction between physiolog-ical abilities (e.g., hunger, smell), social-emotional abilities(e.g., guilt, embarrassment), and perceptual-cognitive abili-ties (e.g., choice, memory), corresponding to traditional no-tions of BODY, HEART, and MIND. Hints of this three-way distinction emerged among younger children (4-6y), butyounger children appeared to perceive markedly stronger con-nections among physiological and social-emotional abilities,while clearly distinguishing both from the MIND.

The folk theory of gender seems to involve two contradictorybeliefs that people can hold simultaneously. One belief is thatgender is biologically determined and immutable, and theother is that one has to earn gender membership by followinggender norms or otherwise risk disqualifying oneself as a realmember of the gender category. To explain this contradiction,as Leslie (2015) suggested, we turned to the dual-characterconcept framework proposed by Knobe, Prasada, andNewman (2013). Within this framework, we examinedwhether gender has two separate, parallel dimensions forevaluating category membership such that one can be amember in one sense but not the other. We found that genderconcepts appeared dual-character-like in metalinguisticjudgments but not in judgments of specific individuals whoviolate prescriptive gender norms identified by previousresearch. We might be witnessing a historical change wheregender categories remain dual-character-like, but adherenceto specific gender norms is no longer seen as definitional.

Philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have oftendivided the mind into fundamental component parts. Does thisintuition carry over into folk philosophy of mind? In a seriesof large-scale studies, we explore intuitive distinctions amongdifferent kinds of mental phenomena and consider how thesedistinctions might organize the conceptual space of thediverse “intelligent” and “social” entities in the modernworld. Across studies, independent exploratory factoranalyses reveal a common latent structure underlying mentalcapacity attributions, centered on three types of phenomenalexperiences: physiological experiences of biological needs(e.g., hunger, pain); social-emotional experiences of self- andother-relevant emotions (e.g., guilt, pride); and perceptual-cognitive abilities to detect and use information about theenvironment (e.g., hearing, memory). We argue for anexpanded model of folk philosophy of mind that goes beyondagency and experience (H. M. Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007)to make basic and important distinctions among differentvarieties of experience.

We investigated children’s understanding of mental life byanalyzing attributions of perceptual, cognitive, affective, andother capacities. 200 children (7-9y) and 200 adults evaluatedthe mental capacities of beetles or robots. By assessing whichcapacities traveled together when participants disagreed aboutthese controversial “edge cases,” we reconstructed the latentstructure underlying mental capacity judgments from thebottom up—a novel approach to elucidating conceptualstructure among children. For both children and adults, factoranalyses revealed a distinction between social-emotional,physiological, and perceptual-cognitive capacities, hinting atthree fundamental ways of explaining and predicting others’actions: as social partners, biological creatures, and goal-directed agents (each involving related forms of both“experience” and “agency”; Gray et al., 2007). Relative toadults, children attributed greater social-emotional capacitiesto beetles and robots, suggesting that intuitive ontologies ofmental life could be critical for making sense of children’sdeveloping understanding of the social world.

Three studies examine how organizational mindset-whether a company is perceived to view talent as fixed or malleable-functions as a core belief that predicts organizational culture and employees' trust and commitment. In Study 1, Fortune 500 company mission statements were coded for mindset language and paired with Glassdoor culture data. Workers perceived a more negative culture at fixed (vs. growth) mindset companies. Study 2 experimentally manipulated organizational mindset and found that people evaluated fixed (vs. growth) mindset companies as having more negative culture norms and forecasted that employees would experience less trust and commitment. Study 3 confirmed these findings from more than 500 employees of seven Fortune 1000 companies. Employees who perceived their organization to endorse a fixed (vs. growth) mindset reported that their company's culture was characterized by less collaboration, innovation, and integrity, and they reported less organizational trust and commitment. These findings suggest that organizational mindset shapes organizational culture.

How do people respond to information that counters a stereotype? Do they approach it or avoid it? Four experiments showed that attention to stereotype-consistent vs. -inconsistent information depends on people's implicit theories about human traits. Those holding an entity theory (the belief that traits are fixed) consistently displayed greater attention to (Experiments 1 and 4) and recognition of (Experiments 2 and 3) consistent information. whereas those holding an incremental (dynamic) theory tended to display greater attention to (Experiment 1) and recognition of (Experiment 3) inconsistent information. This was true whether implicit theories were measured as chronic structures (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) or were experimentally manipulated (Experiment 3). Thus, different a priori assumptions about human traits and behavior lead to processing that supports versus limits stereotype maintenance.

Here we evaluate the potential for growth mindset interventions (that teach students that intellectual abilities can be developed) to inspire adolescents to be "learners"-that is, to seek out challenging learning experiences. In a previous analysis, the U.S. National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM) showed that a growth mindset could improve the grades of lower-achieving adolescents, and, in an exploratory analysis, increase enrollment in advanced math courses across achievement levels. Yet, the importance of being a "learner" in today's global economy requires clarification and replication of potential challenge-seeking effects, as well as an investigation of the school affordances that make intervention effects on challenge-seeking possible. To this end, the present article presents new analyses of the U.S. NSLM (N = 14,472) to (a) validate a standardized, behavioral measure of challenge-seeking (the "make-a-math worksheet" task), and (b) show that the growth mindset treatment increased challenge-seeking on this task. Second, a new experiment conducted with nearly all schools in 2 counties in Norway, the U-say experiment (N = 6,541), replicated the effects of the growth mindset intervention on the behavioral challenge-seeking task and on increased advanced math course-enrollment rates. Treated students took (and subsequently passed) advanced math at a higher rate. Critically, the U-say experiment provided the first direct evidence that a structural factor-school policies governing when and how students opt in to advanced math-can afford students the possibility of profiting from a growth mindset intervention or not. These results highlight the importance of motivational research that goes beyond grades or performance alone and focuses on challenge-seeking. The findings also call attention to the affordances of school contexts that interact with student motivation to promote better achievement and economic trajectories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

A global priority for the behavioural sciences is to develop cost-effective, scalable interventions that could improve the academic outcomes of adolescents at a population level, but no such interventions have so far been evaluated in a population-generalizable sample. Here we show that a short (less than one hour), online growth mindset intervention-which teaches that intellectual abilities can be developed-improved grades among lower-achieving students and increased overall enrolment to advanced mathematics courses in a nationally representative sample of students in secondary education in the United States. Notably, the study identified school contexts that sustained the effects of the growth mindset intervention: the intervention changed grades when peer norms aligned with the messages of the intervention. Confidence in the conclusions of this study comes from independent data collection and processing, pre-registration of analyses, and corroboration of results by a blinded Bayesian analysis.