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In a previous blog, I posted a quote from Richard Nisbett, distinguished psychology professor at Michigan and Malcolm Gladwells guru on human intelligence, who indicated that intelligence is under our control. So how do you get our intelligence under control? Although there are a lot of answers to that question, including basics like nutrition and exercise, the best response is tied to the research of Carol Dweck, the world renown expert on human motivation. I have written previously about her work here, here and here. Dwecks early research focused on why some school children persist in the face of failure while others quit as soon as the going gets rough. Over the years her research has shown that it is crucial for parents to teach children that their intelligence is under their control. Indeed, she found that when children are praised for their intelligence, they resist accepting a challenge and doing things from which they can learn a lot. Here is Richard Nisbetts summary of that fascinating research: In a clever experiment . . .developmental psychologists Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck told children that they had done very well on problems from the Raven Progressive Matrices test and praised them either for being bright or for working hard. They then offered the children the opportunity to work on another set of problemseither easy ones (so Ill do well) or hard problems that would challenge them (so Ill learn a lot from them, even if I wont look so smart). Sixty-six percent of the children who were praised for their intelligence chose to work on easy problems that would show that they were smart; over 90percent of children praised for hard work chose problems that they would learn a lot from. If the children did well because they worked hard, they wanted problems that would test their limits and teach them how to do even better. | 
