When I was trained as a psychologist in the 1980s, the dominant way of thinking about intelligence and personality tended towards what we now call a fixed mindset. Broadly speaking, we were taught that both intelligence and personality can hardly be developed after a certain age (say, 18). Personality was broadly defined as the set of stable behavioral tendencies of individuals. Individual differences in personality were thought to be relatively unchangeable and also meaningful for how we should organize our lives (think of career choices, for example). The word 'stable' meant two things. Fir ..read more

During an informal occasion, I met Mats. At one point during our conversation, he told me that he really enjoyed his work but that his manager's attitude frustrated him. What he told me reminded me of Douglas McGregor's influential insights that he described in his book The Human Side of Enterprise. Read full post ..read more

Mary Murphy, professor of psychology at Indiana University, has published the book Cultures of Growth. In 2006, she was a student of Carol Dweck, the founder of mindset theory. Dweck's previous work showed that people with a growth mindset are more likely to take on challenges, learn from mistakes, and achieve more in the long run than people with a fixed mindset. Murphy suggested that not only individuals but also environments embody a mindset. Nearly two decades later, Murphy and her colleagues have conducted extensive research in numerous organizations. Cultures of Growth reports on this ..read more

CEOs regularly emphasize the importance of achieving profits, shareholder value, market share and other results. Wu and Shen (2024) conducted a study to identify the detrimental influence of executives' bottom-line mentality (BLM) on employee creativity. Read full post ..read more

In a new article, Max Roser of Our World in Data argues that it is possible to end global hunger and protect the world's wildlife. He suggests that by increasing agricultural productivity and consuming strategically, we can combat hunger and restore natural habitats without causing further damage to nature. Read full post ..read more

Peter, a reader, responded to my article on workplace democracy. He informed me that there was unrest within his department after the previous manager, who was not functioning well, had to leave quickly. The management started a recruitment procedure, and Peter and his colleagues noticed that they were not involved. Read full post ..read more

Antoinette Weibel has sparked an interesting discussion on LinkedIn about the feasibility and utility of workplace democracy. In her post, she refers to an article by Roberto Frega and colleagues, in which the pros and cons of this concept are discussed. Read full post ..read more

  A recent study by Renoux et al. (2024) sheds interesting light on how preschoolers think about differences in school performance. This study, conducted among 610 French preschoolers, reveals that children tend to pointed to inherent factors (such as intelligence) rather than extrinsic factors (such as access to educational resources) as explanations for why some children perform better at school than others. Read more about what this inherence bias means and what its consequences are. Read full post ..read more

In the current education system, where grades often dominate, concerns about the mental health of students are growing. The emphasis on performance has led to an increase in stress and a competitive atmosphere that can undermine students' intrinsic motivation and well-being. Gradeless learning, an approach that focuses on the learning process rather than numerical assessments, may provide a solution to these problems. Read full post ..read more

Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, was not only a scientist and politician, but also an observer of human nature. One of his insights concerns the psychology of doing favors, a phenomenon known as the Benjamin Franklin effect. In this article I discuss the Benjamin Franklin effect, the phenomenon that people like others more after they have done them a favor. Read full post ..read more