"Growth mindset" shrinks under the evidence

Heard about "growth mindset"? You probably have. It's been everywhere, from business to education, and people have made a *lot* of money from it.

Trouble is, the evidence behind it has always seemed thin.

And now comes a new study from Brooke Macnamara and Alexander Burgoyne published in Psychological Bulletin.

Let me quote one important sentence: "Authors with a financial incentive to report positive findings published significantly larger effects than authors without this incentive."

This thing happens time and again in our field, and it needs to stop.

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People won't trust that psychology can have real-world benefits if we keep having so many flawed and biased studies.

The overall effect of growth mindset interventions was nonsignificant after correcting for these publication biases.

Some might say "that doesn't mean growth mindset doesn't exist/have an impact". But I'm not sure what that really means if the interventions designed around the theory don't work.

For now, I'll remain a "growth mindset" sceptic.