The Moral Costs of Growth Mindset: Blaming People for Their Intellectual Struggles

Research on growth mindsets, emphasizing the malleability of intelligence through effort, often highlights their benefits of boosting performance and reducing achievement gaps. Across four studies (N = 785), we investigated the unintended consequences of the growth mindset, hypothesizing that its emphasis on intelligence as controllable would lead to greater blame toward others for intellectual failure, compared to the fixed mindset, which views intelligence as largely innate. Study 1 found that participants primed with the growth mindset assigned more blame for low-difficulty intellectual failures than those primed with the fixed mindset. Study 2 showed that this effect diminished when intellectual failures involved highly challenging tasks. Study 3 highlighted the harm caused by an individual's intellectual failures and found that participants in the growth mindset condition still assigned greater blame than those in the fixed mindset condition. Study 4 explored a possible mechanism, finding that a growth mindset, compared to a fixed mindset, increased blame by leading participants to perceive less effort from the protagonist in the vignettes, even when both conditions were faced with identical intellectual failures. These findings underscore the need for nuanced implementations of the growth mindset.