.. title: Not praising intelligence
.. slug: not-praising-intelligence
.. date: 2016-08-08 08:20:25 UTC-07:00
.. tags: parenting
.. category:
.. link:
.. description:
.. type: text

There are many supporting studies on this, and I came another one which explicitly stated that

**Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children's Motivation and Performance**

The study suggests that parents should praise their children for the efforts they put in their tasks instead of
praising the accomplishments or their intelligence for accomplishing the task.

Excerpt from the paper.

    Praise for ability is commonly considered to have beneficial effects on motivation. Contrary to this
    popular belief, six studies demonstrated that praise for intelligence had more negative consequences
    for students' achievement motivation than praise for effort. Fifth graders praised for intelligence
    were found to care more about performance goals relative to learning goals than children praised
    for effort. After failure, they also displayed less task persistence, less task enjoyment, more lowability
    attributions, and worse task performance than children praised for effort. Finally, children
    praised for intelligence described it as a fixed trait more than children praised for hard work,
    who believed it to be subject to improvement. These findings have important implications for how
    achievement is best encouraged, as well as for more theoretical issues, such as the potential cost of
    performance goals and the socialization of contingent self-worth.