How to Help Kids Succeed

Between teaching for 25 years and having a whole bunch of kids, I spent a lot of time around young people. I thought I had a pretty good idea of how to motivate them. Then I met today’s guest, David Yeager, and I realized, like most people, I’ve been doing all wrong.

YEAGER: If you can tap into that desire for status and respect then I think we can unleash this powerful source of intelligence and this powerful source for good in our culture.

Welcome to People I (Mostly) Admire, with Steve Levitt.

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 David Yeager is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and he spent his career trying to understand how the adolescent mind works. His randomized experiments have led to stunning results with implications for both schools and parents. He’s documented his research in his book, 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. But before we get into these successes, I asked David to talk about a few examples of programs that followed the conventional wisdom about how to motivate kids and why they failed so badly.

YEAGER: About 13 years ago, Disney teamed up with a health insurance company and some other people to create an attraction to try to promote healthy habits at Epcot. And their idea was that they would have the kids walk in and see their, like, avatar on the screen. And it’s usually kind of an overweight kid. And then you see heroes that are fit and trim — Callie Stenics I think was one of the characters.

LEVITT: Will Power was one of the heroes too. 

YEAGER: Will Power.

LEVITT: I love that name.

YEAGER: Yeah. From the gate, it’s implying that if you do jumping jacks and have self-control, then you would never be overweight. And as you go through the rooms of the attraction, you would do things like use a digital cannon to shoot broccoli at overweight people so that they would drop their cupcakes. And then your character would get skinnier and you would get prizes at the end. As you can imagine, it caused kind of a scandal. Because it comes across as very fat shaming. The worry was that kids were going to go home and go to the lunchroom in fifth grade and start throwing broccoli at overweight kids, which is obviously not something that you want to happen.

LEVITT: What kind of people thought this was a good idea?

YEAGER: Conventional public health epidemiology. It’s this general view that obesity is a behavioral disease that’s caused by bad behavior. And bad behavior is caused by poor information or poor self-control. And therefore, if only we could tell people to use self-control and tell them that junk food is bad and broccoli is good, then they would make wiser decisions. It’s a kind of dominant public health model that’s responsible for a lot of the ineffective public health campaigns in the ‘80s. But that kind of thinking has stuck around. It’s pretty dominant even to this day.

LEVITT: So when there was this furor against it, they called you in, right? And they gave you the chance to redesign it. What was your reimagined version?

YEAGER: Yeah, me and my colleague, Christopher Bryan, who’s a wonderful social psychologist, were brought in as a team to rethink the attraction; to achieve the same goals, but to use smarter behavioral science. The kind of high hanging fruit was to change behavior and make people feel good about themselves. And that’s a hard goal in part because something like eating has all this baggage to it. And on top of that, you’re talking about people on vacation. So the expectation is that you splurge and you go have a Mickey bar and have nine slushies. So, the first thing we did is we had the heroes be people like the participants, so medium-weight to overweight. We’re not trying to say that healthy habits are necessarily always associated with weight. Especially because when kids are going through puberty, often their weight is very independent of how much they exercise or what they eat because the body just stores fat in interesting ways as you’re going through sexual maturation. So we wanted to portray kids of multiple body types, still being awesome, but also making healthier choices. The second thing was that the bad guys in the old version were all like embodiments of poor habits. The snacker: it’s an overweight fairy who’s holding cupcakes; or lead bottom, like an overweight guy who breaks every couch he sits on. The worst one was they had like a red, alluring seductress who kind of approved of you whenever you ate a plate of cupcakes. We were like, That’s the wrong descriptive norm. So we flipped our bad guys to instead be, like, ghouls that are controlling you. There’s this heavy one who’s pushing you down on the couch while you’re trying to stand up to go exercise. Another sneaky one, as you’re reaching for healthy food, it’s replacing it with junk food. What we want to do is portray other people like you as trying to make the healthier choice and wanting to, but instead being prevented. The logic of it is that you want the rebellious, awesome, independent, autonomous thing to do, to be the healthy thing. Because we’re appealing to kids in the middle of puberty. And kids in the middle of puberty are often thinking about being independent, autonomous, rebellious, and awesome. When kids went through the attraction with this better framing, they were inspired, they felt better about themselves in the park, which was great; but also, they were more willing to eat healthy food in the park rather than junk food.

LEVITT: And how do you know this? You had a way of asking kids and tracking what they’re eating?

YEAGER: We had a team of people with clipboards approach people as they came into Epcot, and ask them if they’d like to experience a new attraction before it was released and complete a survey. We randomly assigned people to either go do the attraction first and then do the survey, or just do the survey. And then we gave people a coupon at the end to thank them for their participation. And the coupon could be spent on either junk food, so, like, Mickey bars or other ice cream or candy, or it could be spent on fruit or water. And, we had certain carts set up around Epcot where they could redeem these coupons. And so across the course of a few days, we could find out if on vacation people splurge their free coupon on either junk food or healthy food. And what we found was that kids were less likely to splurge their coupons on junk food if they had gone through our attraction as compared to kids who just took the survey randomly assigned.

LEVITT: That’s great.

YEAGER: We later thought that it would be better if we framed the bad guys, not as these ghouls that are controlling you, but as what they actually are: food companies that advertise to children with addictive foods like Hot Cheetos or Lunchables. And we were told that was not a good idea for Disney to do. 

LEVITT: Yeah, I bet.

YEAGER: All those companies advertise on Disney’s networks. And so we took it outside of the park and we ran our own experiments where we very explicitly named the food companies as controlling you. And we found that improved teenagers’ dietary choices in their regular cafeterias at school.

LEVITT: Another domain in which we try to influence how kids think and act, and that’s trying to persuade kids not to do drugs. And there are two famous programs in that area, D.A.R.E. and Just Say No. But the statistical evaluations of those two programs have found they were both dismal failures. So it might be reasonable for some to say, “Look, D.A.R.E. didn’t work. Just Say No didn’t work,” and conclude, Well, it’s just impossible to stop kids from using drugs via an ad campaign. But then along came this other campaign called the “Truth” campaign, and somehow that managed to have a completely different outcome.

YEAGER: In the 1990s, 30 percent of all teenagers smoked. For a long time, people tried to solve that problem in the conventional way that you solve teenage poor-decision-making problems. And it’s by telling teenagers that their decisions are dumb, and that we, as a smart adults, have a better understanding. And then being shocked when teenagers don’t listen to us and then blaming teenagers for having such a shortsighted view of the world or for being so impulsive or for lacking self-control. The “Truth” campaign was launched in response to some conventional public marketing campaigns that were as big of a failure as D.A.R.E. or Just Say No. And two of them were called “Think. Don’t Smoke” and “Tobacco Is Whacko If You’re a Teen.” Alright, so I’m a teenager. I see a commercial made by adults and it’s in like scary lettering across the screen. It says, “Think. Don’t Smoke” What am I supposed to take away from that? The first word, “think,” of course, implies that I’m not thinking. So your immediate interpretation is these adults think that I’m an idiot, that I’m dumb. And then “don’t smoke,” of course is a command. It implies That adult thinks that they have control over my personal choices. They found that the more “Think. Don’t Smoke” was played, the more that kids wanted to smoke and the more that they liked the tobacco companies because they thought, Hey, these companies are looking out for me because the tobacco companies were the ones paying for the ads.

LEVITT: Okay.

YEAGER: And, “Tobacco Is Whacko If You’re a Teen,” is super lame, right? Can you imagine being after school, sitting in a circle with someone you have a crush on, you’re finally, like, close to her, your arms almost touch, and she offers you a cigarette and you’re, like, “Sorry, because I’m a teen that’s whacko.” Like 0 percent of teenagers would respond that way. So the “Truth” campaign was in response to these kind of terrible, conventional public health approaches that get adolescent psychology wrong. And it was started by this brilliant ad executive, not by researchers, this guy named Alex Bogusky. They let him run with an alternative plan. It was just a set of ads originally in Florida. And those ads try to basically contaminate the behavior to make it seem inconsistent with adolescent values. They do that by depicting tobacco executives wandering through the hallways of a hospital and they see an older man dying and wheezing. And the men in suits are looking at him and they say, “You’ve been such a great customer and thank you for all your years of service,” as the guy’s wheezing and dying. And then they say, “I don’t know how we’re going to replace you.” And then they turn and they look at a teenage girl sitting in the hallway and they creepily stare at her. And then they say, “There’s our source of replacement.” So the takeaway there for a teenager is, If I want to be on the team of old man creeps that are, like, killing people and laughing to the bank, then I would smoke. But if I want to say screw them, then I would not smoke. And that had this promising impact, reduced teen smoking pretty dramatically. And then Bogusky’s firm won the bid to create a national campaign. And in the national campaign, the famous commercial is a bunch of teenagers streaming into the streets. And they, on cue, while lined up outside of the high-rise building of a tobacco company — they all fall down, dead, pretend to be dead. And then one teenager holds up a sign that says how many thousands of people per day tobacco kills. And then the sign says, “Would you take a day off?” It shows teenagers with their peers flooding the streets, standing up for what’s right, and getting social approval as a part of it. They’re taking a stand against people controlling them, which are all really consistent with adolescent values. The “Truth” campaign has led teen smoking to go from around 30 percent in the late ‘90s to in some cases under 5 percent, 6 percent. It was a dramatic turnaround, but with none of the conventional public health thinking that many people presume you need in order to change adolescent health. 

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with David Yeager after this short break.

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LEVITT: All right, so those examples really spell out your view of the world, which is in stark contrast to what I think most adults carry around. The dominant view of teens is, Well teens have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex; they can’t make good decisions; they’re not good at planning; they have no impulse control. But your view is completely different as embodied in those examples.

YEAGER: Yeah, I was inspired by Bogusky’s work. It helped us come up with our Disney stuff and our healthy eating stuff for sure. What I realized later is the “Truth” campaign, our healthy eating idea, other things we’ve worked on, it’s a reaction to this worldview that I call the neurobiological incompetence model. And it’s what you described: Teenagers lack a prefrontal cortex, their brains are dumb and bad at decision making. And because we believe that, then our actions are a response to that belief. So whenever adults do all the thinking for a kid, when we make all the decisions and just expect immediate compliance with what we say, it’s in part coming out of this model because we don’t think their reasoning can be trusted. Now, I understand where the incompetence model comes from. It comes in part from classical philosophy, goes back to Plato, the idea that the passions are unruly and that over time you have to use discipline and education and life experience to get wisdom to govern the passions. And that has stayed with us throughout all of Western tradition. There are versions of it in Eastern Traditions as well. But then it really got solidified with modern neuroscience in the late 1990s, and that gave rise to this metaphor of, The teenage brain is “all gas, no brakes.” And that metaphor had some powerful uses. Probably the most important is in arguing that teenagers who commit extreme crimes, like murder, shouldn’t go to prison for life. And also shouldn’t get the death penalty because the argument went, Their brains will develop over time. And so, impulsive things may not necessarily be what they would do later in life. But what’s happened is then people take that argument to another extreme and it’s like, Well, if they can’t be held accountable for criminal decisions, then maybe, they shouldn’t vote under 25; maybe they shouldn’t drive a car; maybe they shouldn’t decide where they go to college, and on and on. My view of this is that a prefrontal cortex is for goal-directed behavior. And teenagers are great at goal-directed behavior when it’s a goal that they care about.

LEVITT: Yeah, have you ever seen a teen play Legend of Zelda? They can direct their goals very well.

YEAGER: Oh my God. Yeah, I mean, just to kill Ganon without wearing a shirt on Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. My 13-year-old does it in five minutes and it’s very impressive. And it took him hours and hours of discipline and self-control and dying in the game to get good at it. Just ask a teenager to sneak out of the house and go to a party. They’re thinking five days in advance, three weeks in advance. Who do I have to lie to? Give me a map of the sewers. All kinds of self-control and discipline when it’s for something that they care about. The problem is we often want young people to do stuff that they don’t care about. We want ’em to factor trinomial worksheets, but they want to look awesome. When those things are inconsistent, then it appears as though they’re incapable of planning. We’ve created tasks that don’t engage their value and reward system, and we’ve asked them to do things in ways that are disrespectful and turn off their natural sensitivity to feeling socially respected and valued.

LEVITT: Okay, so your book is entitled 10 to 25, the Science of Motivating Young People. And that age range, 10 to 25 — most people would think that the strategies one would use to motivate a 10-year-old would be totally different than those that one would use on a 25-year-old. But you disagree. So what’s the common thread that allows the same strategies that motivate a 10-year-old to also work on a 25-year-old?

YEAGER: Yeah, 10 is roughly the start of gonadal maturation. So in boys and girls, that’s the increase in testosterone, estradiol, estrogen, etc. We know from basic animal models that these have an impact on reward sensitivity regions of the brain, especially for rewards that have social implications. Feelings like pride and shame never feel as powerful as they do in the start of pubertal maturation. That’s why 10 is a good starting point where most of the time the kid you’re talking to is in the start of this process that’s changing the brain and therefore changing how they’re motivated. So why 25? The brain continues to develop till 25. And one way to think about that is that young people are still dumb until they’re 25. They don’t have our smart adult brains. That’s I think the wrong way to think of it. Even though our brains are still changing and developing, we’re not inherently dumb. But you can think of the changing brain into the mid- to late-twenties as keeping open this period of plasticity so they can continue to adapt to what is necessary for social success in their culture. So the same motivations I’m arguing are there from 10 to 25, and it’s the motivation to find a place for yourself, a powerful reputation, a way in which to view yourself as someone who’s valuable. And because of that, then many of the things that motivate a 10-year-old are also going to motivate a 25-year-old.

LEVITT: You’re saying 10 to 25 year olds, the thing they crave more than anything else is status and respect, but the problem is that their position in society is almost completely without either status or respect. And it’s that mismatch between what they crave and what they have that creates really powerful forces pushing them to behave in ways that, to adults, seem bizarre if you’re not looking through the lens that you’re looking through.

YEAGER: Yeah, that’s right. I call this the “adolescent predicament.” I don’t want to characterize adolescents as like a broken period where we need to hide ’em in a closet for 15 years. Instead, it’s hormonal and neural and socially heightened sensitivity to status and respect. But then a society that often works to either deprive them of it or to threaten that status and respect, and when that’s done poorly, we see a lot of the acting out behavior that infuriates us as adults who care for young people. But when you harness it, then you see amazing energy. The teenagers who learn how to code in order to fight injustice around the world, or the teenagers who master social media to contribute to some social movement.

LEVITT: So when adults interact with adolescents, they tend to adopt in your words, one of two mindsets. One of those mindsets is an “enforcer mindset,” and the other one is called a “protector mindset.” Could you explain what you mean by those two terms? I think it’d be pretty familiar to people once you put actions along with those words.

YEAGER: So enforcer I describe as having exceptionally high standards being really, really demanding, but being generally unsupportive. You can think of the 1980s football coach who yells at everyone and makes you run laps. You can think of the high school calculus teacher who fails everyone except the two smart kids that he thinks they’re going to Princeton. In the enforcer’s mind, I think what they’re trying to do is to uphold exceptionally high standards for performance. Maybe ’cause they think of themselves as a gatekeeper for whatever organization or group that they represent. They’re not going to lower standards to pat you on the back and boost your self-esteem. But of course that comes across as disrespectful for most people they interact with. The protector is someone who has low standards, but they’re very caring and kind and supportive. And in the protector’s mind, they think of a young person as fragile, stressed out, traumatized, and in need of protection. And therefore they see their role as one in which they are trying to move difficulty out of the way of the kids, so that way they don’t crumble like a house of cards. That’s the stereotype of the 1990s self-esteem movement. There’s a version of helicopter parenting that’s similar to that. But you see it in schools as well. I call those “mindsets” because I had the realization that they’re not just leadership styles. I think they grow out of this neurobiological incompetence model. If you truly believe young people are unruly, selfish, shortsighted, dangers to themselves and society, then it feels like you need to enforce really strict discipline in order to do what’s right. If you think young people are feeble, fragile, traumatized, incapable of thinking, juvenile, then you protect them. You keep them in a box. And I think that the first step to getting out of this enforcer-protector dichotomy, is to interrogate our beliefs about young people and start moving beyond this neurobiological incompetence model.

LEVITT: And the reason we want to get out of those mentalities is ’cause empirically they don’t work. Neither the enforcer nor the protector mindset seems to do very well at motivating young people. But there’s a third way that you propose, which you call the “mentor mindset,” and that holds the key to connecting with kids. What’s the mentor mindset?

YEAGER: The mentor mindset is the best of both. It’s the very high standards of the enforcer and the high support of the protector. It’s this idea that I’m going to be tough on you because I care about you and I’m invested in you, and I’m going to walk the journey with you until you meet this high standard. You need to do the work. It’s on you. I’m not doing it for you, but every resource I have to help you master this skill or to perform well is at your disposal. And that comes from a different kind of belief. That when properly motivated, adolescents have great intelligence and agency and they can do things. And the mentor mindset works better in part because it’s more respectful. It comes from this presumption of competence, this presumption of goodwill on behalf of the young person. It also helps the young person to earn a respect worthy reputation by having authentic accomplishments. In the protector, you might get a pat on the back, but you don’t do anything actually impressive. So you have fake status and fake respect. In the enforcer world, if you’re one of the 1 percent who make it, then, yeah, you’ve done something impressive, but the other 99 percent have failed. And so again, you haven’t earned a basis for a meaningful reputation or respect. In the mentor, you’re doing something that’s hard — it might be so hard you’re crying all the time, right? It’s painful. But not everyone would do it. And you did it because you had someone walking the journey with you. And now you get to own that status and respect of having done something impressive. And there’s a lot of studies we’ve done to show that in the mentor mindset, everyone in general does better, but you especially see fewer disparities. You get greater excellence for all and therefore it’s not just good for individuals, but also for groups in society.

LEVITT: So hearing you say this, it makes me reflect back on my own style as a professor. And it’s interesting that with the undergraduates I absolutely started with a mentor mindset, the one that you’re saying is a good one. I had very high standards, but I also invested a ton in creating experiences that showed the students I cared. I went with them to the Cook County Jail and I took them to the gun range to shoot guns and we would have dinner afterwards. I think the students felt my interest in them, and actually I won a university-wide teaching award that very first year, even though I never taught anything to anybody before. I’m still in touch with a handful of those students 25 years later. But being totally honest, being a good mentor to the students was a lot of work, and I had a lot of demands on my time, and so I just slid more and more into acting like I had a protector mindset. Not necessarily ’cause I thought the students weren’t capable of more, but just because it was so much easier to just do the minimum; to always say yes when a student asked if they could turn in homework late; to give into grade inflation; and, oh God, when Covid came, whatever rigor I demanded just completely disappeared. I wonder if my path is when you see very often where someone actually has pretty good instincts for mentoring, but then because of other incentives in the system, they end up doing just an awful job in the end.

YEAGER: It’s a super interesting behavioral science question actually. How do you change the behavior of the leader? But a related point is how do you help people sustain it over time? Because maybe you can do it, but it’s a flash in the pan. And that’s the frontiers of what we’re working on. And I don’t have an answer, but I have, like, what our hypotheses are. There’s a version of mentor mindset that could be a lonely thing. And I don’t know what Chicago’s like, but at a lot of public institutions, like, I don’t know if anyone’s ever asked me about my teaching. There’s not an incentive really, aside from integrity to go all out on mentor mindset. I wonder how much of having the adults be able to do the mentor mindset depends in part, on the institutional structures around them and are we supporting them? There’s a big question, there’s a lot there, but that’s the new line of research that we’re working on.

LEVITT: Relevant to that, let me tell you how different my mindset was with Ph.D. students. So the basic ethos of the U of C economics Ph.D. program is one of absolute enforcer mindset. We are just ruthless. So to fit in, that’s what I did too. Also to fit in what I was teaching in my classes were these cutting edge, incredibly complicated papers that, honestly, I only halfway understood myself most of the time. And then, in roughly the middle of the first semester I was there, in one of my lectures, a Ph.D. student raised his hand as I was talking about a data paper, an empirical paper. And he asked me, “What do you mean when you say the authors ran fixed effect regression?” And I’m not going into the details of what that even means, but of all the things we were covering, nothing was simpler or more obvious or more basic than a fixed effects regression. I thought even every undergraduate econ major knew that. But when I asked the class who was familiar with it, almost no one was. I realized, at Chicago, the students had learned enormously difficult math techniques. They could prove theorems I could never prove, but they knew nothing about how to succeed in the field of economics. So for my next lecture, I just walked in the room and I said, “At the risk of insulting your intelligence, I just want to spend 30 minutes today walking through the basic structure of an academic paper. What goes where?” So I literally started with the title. And far from being insulted, the students were totally engaged. It became clear to me that the most valuable thing I could teach the students were strategies for thriving in our profession; where to submit their papers; how to manage difficult faculty members; how to act in job interviews. And these were incredibly important skills, but no one had ever paused to explain them to students. And so, the next year I taught a Ph.D. level class that was literally just how to be an economist. Not how to do economics, but how to be an economist. And this was all done very much from a mentor mindset. So it’s interesting that at the same time that I was flipping the opposite direction on the undergrads, I was flipping, in a good way on the graduate students.

YEAGER: Yeah, this is a great example. There’s a cultural inclination to do enforcer mindset, and then the implication of that is that students never reveal that they lack basic knowledge and information about being successful in the field. Because it could imply to anyone they’re talking to that they were an admissions mistake or that they’re not worth investing in. But there’s this idea that the enforcer is a shortcut, right? It’s easier to just be the genius and tear down everybody’s work. And then convince ourselves that we are the stewards of rigor in a highly selective environment. But this enforcer mindset harms you in the long run, even if you’re purely self-interested because you don’t end up getting curious about what other people know, and then you don’t hear their ideas, and then they don’t contribute to innovation, and then you don’t adapt and change. And so there’s selfish reasons to do mentor mindset, even if it’s a little more time because it’s an investment in a culture of growth and learning in the future.

LEVITT: We’re talking about behavior change. And lots of ideas for changing behavior usually have no impact at all. Or if you’re lucky, you see some kind of impact, but it quickly fades away. At least that’s true of all the interventions I’ve tried to do. But you, David, are somehow the exception to that rule. Over and over you’ve devised these really tiny little interventions that somehow lead to these outsized impacts and impacts that often persist for as long as anyone bothers to try to measure them. And it’s super awesome. So I just want to walk through a couple of these and hear you talk about them. How about we start with what you call the “synergistic mindsets intervention.” What problem were you trying to solve there?

YEAGER: I love that paper. We were trying to solve the problem of how to talk to people when they’re under stress in a way that will help them out. Not as a therapist but if I’m just a regular friend. For almost all these interventions, we’re usually reacting to some really dumb idea that everyone thinks is right but it’s either useless or harmful, the “Think. Don’t Smoke” kind of stuff. And stress is a great example of that because typical people think that the way you should help someone under stress is to give them advice for avoiding stress or suppressing it or getting it out of your mind. You see a lot of memes where it’s like, “Top 10 ways to de-stress: Go for a walk, drink chamomile tea, take a bubble bath.” And that just strikes me as, like, really dumb. Because if I’m ready to give a presentation for my boss and my entire professional reputation depends on my performance there, that’s not the time for me to take a nap or go look at nature. You got to get amped up and get in the zone and get prepared. What I had learned from Alia Crum, who’s at Stanford, she’s a wonderful psychologist, is that societally we have this view that’s called a “stress is debilitating mindset.” It is just that stress is always bad and will harm your performance. And because we believe that, the advice tends to be, Avoid the stress because the stress is bad. And what we wanted to do was to flip that and say, “No, actually, stress is like a wave.” Like, if you’re surfing and there’s no waves, that’s not a fun day surfing. You have to have force and power and energy. Now you don’t want the wave to crash over you and destroy you, but you do want to catch the energy in just the right way where it propels you forward and it causes momentum on the board. We wanted to reframe stress as a resource. And to do that, I drew on my friend Jeremy Jamieson’s research, who’s at Rochester, is a wonderful psychophysiologist. And the way he explains it is, like, Steve, if you had your favorite paper ever and you’re about to give a conference presentation in front of all your colleagues, you’re not, like, calm and about to fall asleep. Maybe you’re sweaty; your heart’s racing; you’re breathing hard. But what that’s doing, Jamieson and others describe, is it’s actually getting oxygenated blood to your brain and to your muscles. Your heart’s racing to get that blood through the body. You’re releasing hormones like adrenaline in order to optimize performance. You can think on your feet; your brain is remembering things; it’s forming connections because it’s a high-arousal state. Another example I like to give is if you’re going to ski a double-black diamond and you’re at the top of the mountain. If you’re there and you’re a good skier, your heart is racing, your mind is alert, and you’re imagining yourself making four awesome turns and then getting down the mountain. But if you think you’re a bad skier, then all you’re imagining is your skis exploding and yard sale-ing and, like, My legs going to break and my pole’s going to be over there. You feel terrified. The former is what we call a challenge-type state in the body, and the latter is what we call a threat-type state. And interestingly, it comes down to, do you think you have the skills or resources to meet the demand of this stressful moment? The demand is the double-black diamond. Your skiing level is your resources. If you think your skills are at the level of the double-black diamond, great. You’re excited. If you think your skills are below, then you’re in a threat-type state. So we were harnessing that idea and we thought if only we could get people to view stressful situations as a challenge, then when we put them in stressful situations, they could optimize their performance.

LEVITT: Okay, can you call this thing the synergistic mindsets intervention because you tried to draw together two different ideas in psychology. There’s something you had worked a lot on, which is called the “growth mindset,” and then there was this other thing, I think it’s called the “stress-can-be-enhancing mindset.” And the idea was, Well, what if you built an intervention that tied those two together?

YEAGER: Yeah, we started with this insight and we, Chris Bryan, Danielle Krettek, Jeremy, and others. We started with the stress-can-be-enhancing idea that I just described. And then we thought, Well, in a stressful situation, it typically feels hard, whatever you’re doing. And if you think that hard thing means that you’re dumb or bad and that you can never get better, then it doesn’t matter how much you think you can use your stress because you think your skill level is fixed. So our realization was that the growth mindset idea that your skills can be developed, especially during difficulty, went hand in hand with the stress mindset. So imagine a teenager taking a hard test. In a fixed mindset they’re like, Oh, this is hard ’cause I’m dumb at math. Stress can be debilitating. They’re like, Oh, and my heart’s racing. My palms are sweaty. That must mean I’m going to fail. I have anxiety, and this anxiety’s going to be the worst. So those double on each other. The fixed mindset and the stress-is-debilitating. 

LEVITT: That same student, if they’ve got both the growth mindset and a stress-can-be-enhancing mindset, what are they thinking when they’re sitting down to that same math test?

YEAGER: So now kids sitting down at the math test, their growth mindset is, Oh, this is hard because I chose to challenge myself and take a hard class and do difficult material. The fact that it’s hard means I’m growing and learning. And I’m going to perform at the level of my preparation, and then I’ll learn from whatever mistakes. But I also noticed my heart’s racing, butterflies on my stomach, my palms are sweaty ’cause I want to do well. And the fact that my heart’s racing, that’s actually getting me fuel to help my brain remember what it needs so I’m as prepared as I can be and I can optimize my performance. Let me give you a concrete example of how I used this in my own parenting, with my daughter Scarlett. Scarlett’s 14 now, but a few years ago, she was auditioning for first chair for cello. And she got in the car and said, “Daddy, I’m nervous. I have butterflies on my stomach. I don’t think I can do the audition today.” And if you’re in a protector mindset, you call the school and say, “Sorry, my daughter’s sick.” If you’re an enforcer mindset. You’re like, “Suck it up. Stop being a wimp.” But I knew I was writing a book about mentor mindset and I knew that no one would hold me more accountable than a teenage daughter, so I was like, I’m going to use the synergistic mindset situation. And I was like, “Scarlett, you know what I’m going to tell you?” And she said, “Yeah, you’re going to tell me that, my heart is racing because I care a lot about this and it’s important and it’s getting oxygenated blood to my brain. It’s going to help me perform to the level of my prep —” she does the whole thing. I’m like, “Scarlett, how did you know I was going to say that?” And then she reminded me that two years earlier she was water skiing. And I was floating in the water holding her skis. She said the same thing: “I’m super nervous. I don’t think I can do it.” I was writing the synergistic paper that summer. And so I said, “Well, Scarlett, that’s getting oxygenated blood to your muscles. It’s going to help you hold onto the rope. As long as you hold on the boat’s going to pull you right up, and then you’re going to just ski. And it’s going to be amazing. You’re nervous for a good reason. It’s that human beings are not meant to float on top of water. So of course it’s a little frightening, but once you do it, you’re going to be proud of yourself; it’s going to be thrilling. So embrace that stress, let it get you stronger, etc.” And she, of course, popped right up and skied for 30 minutes. But she never forgot that years later, and that helped her nail the cello audition. She’s learned to internalize this synergistic mindset. Anytime she’s got, like, a ballet audition or taking the PSAT, she reframes the stress as a positive source of energy rather than as a source of anxiety.

LEVITT: Okay, this is great — you had one intervention with Scarlett where you talked to her, and then two years later she still remembers it. That’s essentially more or less what you’re finding in your academic work. So the intervention you did to try to get them into this synergistic mindset was a 30-minute online tutorial, and then you measured their response to a bunch of stressful situations, some that you created, and then others that arise naturally, like taking a hard math course. One of the stressors that you put people under is called the Trier Social Stress Test, and it epitomizes the image that people have of what a psychology experiment is. Could you just talk about that stress test for a minute?

YEAGER: All right, so imagine you’re a 18-year-old University of Rochester undergrad. We bring you in the lab and we hook you up to all this heart equipment. We’re measuring electrical signals in your chest cavity. And then you take our synergistic mindset intervention, it’s reading and writing, and you write your opinions and then you pause and then we say, “Surprise! It’s time to do public speaking.”

LEVITT: Okay. ‘Cause the idea is you want to put people under as much social stress as you can manufacture in a lab.

YEAGER: Yeah. So the nerd version is what we call “social evaluative threat,” that your reputation in the eyes of someone whose opinions you care about is an open question and could be threatened. So the social stress test here is, “Surprise! It’s time to give a public speech about what makes someone like you popular.” And then we’re going to bring in evaluators who are going to sit there with clipboards. And we train those evaluators to be impossible to impress. They’re like the worst possible dissertation committee. And so you have three minutes to write your speech, and then we’re like, “Boom, you have to give it. And you have five minutes to win over this audience and show them that you know about not being a loser.” So that goes on for five minutes. And then we say, “Surprise! It’s time to do mental math. And those same people sit there with clipboards and stop you and make you start over every time you screw up. The measure of stress in that one is called total peripheral resistance. It’s basically the constriction of the vasculature in your body. And the reason why that matters is because if you’re under a physical threat, like you’re going to be killed by a bear, then you want to bleed as little as possible so your body stores more blood in your chest cavity and not in your extremities. But if you think you can beat the bear, then you need as much oxygenated blood in your muscles so your legs can run fast and your arms can fight strong. And so the dilation is a measure of your body storing more blood peripherally, and the constriction is it storing it centrally. And so what we find is that under control, you just walk in, you do this task, your blood vessels constrict a lot, especially during the speech. And then your cardiovascular system hasn’t recovered even minutes after the math test. But, interestingly, if you got the synergistic mindset and you were told right before you gave that speech and did the math, “Hey, if you notice yourself feeling really stressed, that’s your body mobilizing energy. And if you make a mistake, that’s a chance to learn, etc., etc.” Then we actually see a difference in your blood vasculature. More of a challenge-type response where they’re more dilated, less constricted, and less of a threat-type response

LEVITT: What did you find for long-term results of this intervention?

YEAGER: In parallel, as we were running the lab studies, we worked with the low-income urban charter school in New York State, and we got all the freshmen and maybe freshmen, sophomores to complete the intervention in the first few weeks of the school year. Anywhere from two weeks later to a month later, we find kids are coping better with their daily stresses if they got the intervention. And these are super low-income, almost all students of color, which, I raise because they’re facing environmental stressors, whether it’s discrimination or low-income housing or just the stressful stuff that happens with poverty. But even with that, this treatment that only talked about social evaluative stressors and academic stressors changed their overall stress response about five weeks later. And then at the end of the year, we get their grades from the school. And we find that kids are more likely to pass their classes, especially their math and science classes.

LEVITT: To someone like me who spends his life trying to change anyone’s behavior and almost never has success, it seems almost bizarre that you could take these young kids, show them an online video, and then a year later you’re finding that they’re passing their math and science courses more often. I’m just looking at the paper now — 63 percent of the students who got your treatment passed the courses versus 47 percent. So we’re talking about a 16-percent increase in pass rates from a 30-minute intervention that took place half a year before. From the perspective of cost effectiveness, it’s just off the charts, right? Because your intervention is free, essentially. (DY^Yeah, it’s free.) And then it has these results. I think that’s really remarkable. But I don’t want to get lost in the details of the study because someone might say, “Oh, how am I going to get my hands on that 30-minute video?” But I think that totally misses the point, which is you can explain really simply to me what a growth mindset is. And you can explain really simply to me that there’s a mindset that stress can be enhancing. And look, I’m a parent, I’ve got 18 years to find settings in which to teach my kids. And I sure as heck should be able to do better than a 30-minute video. That’s what I don’t want to get lost as we talk about this.

YEAGER: When we first started doing these studies 15 years ago, the initial reaction was that it sounds like magic. My answer to the magic trick response was, “Okay, let’s do more studies. Let’s make ’em bigger.” And I’ve made a career of large-scale replications for these kinds of results. But I don’t think the solution to our mental health problems is only a little 25-minute thing. I think it’d be a lot better if parents were equipped to talk to kids in critical situations. If every youth baseball coach could go to the mound and have a version of this synergistic mindset with a kid who’s struggling, or a peer could say it to a peer on the free-throw line. Or someone gets broken up with, that they knew how to talk about stress. Kids remember stuff that helped them in a really hard time. And that’s all we’re doing. We’re giving you a better, more adaptive way of viewing yourself and your situation. The new challenge is not just to scale-up our online things, but rather to help the support of adults in young people’s lives, to consistently convey the kinds of messages in critical moments that are memorable and good.

You’re listening to People I (Mostly) Admire. I’m Steve Levitt. After this short break, David Yeager and I will return to talk about how much change a Post-It Note can make.

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 Before the break, we were talking about how a 30-minute intervention led to long-lasting positive effects on students. But how much difference could a single Post-It Note make? I asked David about what has come to be known as the “Post-It Note study.”

YEAGER: So in that study, we’re trying to address the problem of how to give critical feedback, especially across some kind of power divide, where the person criticizing has more power and the person receiving the criticism has relatively less power. And this is a problem that Geoff Cohen has called the “mentor’s dilemma.” So Steve, imagine if you are giving feedback to a graduate student’s paper. In your mind, you’ve given them a gift like you’re an expert, you have limited time and you’ve chosen to use that time to critique their work so that way it could get published. From their perspective, they might think, One of the world’s most famous and brilliant economists thinks I’m an idiot. And they could think that even if you did nothing wrong. They could just presume that any criticism is coming from a place of saying, “You’re not smart enough to be here, you’re no good, etc.” So that’s the kind of problem we’re working with, this frustrating situation of an expert providing criticism, wanting it to be helpful, but it’s received in a way that comes across as either offensive or threatening. And therefore the comments are not as impactful as they could be.

LEVITT: All right, so how does this study unfold?

YEAGER: The basic insight of the study is that it’s a communication problem that the intent of the mentor in this case is opaque to the lower status mentee in this situation. That suggests that you should just clarify what you mean whenever you’re providing critical feedback. And so the test of this was we had seventh graders write first drafts of essays and then we had teachers critique the hell out of ’em. They weren’t overly mean, but they were thorough and they gave lots of comments. And then we had the teachers hand write notes that clarified their intentions in one condition or it was a placebo in the other condition. So the clarifying intentions one said, “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high standards and I know that you can meet them.”

LEVITT: This fits right in with your mentor mindset and with growth mindset. So it’s very much consistent with the ideas we’ve been talking about so far.

YEAGER: Yeah, the second note was a placebo. It just said, “I’m giving you these comments so you have feedback on your essay.”

LEVITT: So these are real seventh graders, real teachers —

YEAGER: And real essays.

LEVITT: Real criticisms.

YEAGER: We did this with students who were B, Cs range. So it’s students who have room to grow randomly assigned, then you seal it in envelopes and the teacher hands it out as a regular assignment. Kids get the envelopes back, they go home, open the envelopes, see the essay with the note, and then they have a week to revise their essay or not. And so what we find is that in the control group, 40 percent of kids turn in revised essays. So 60 percent looked at their comments and said, “No, I’m good. I’m not going to fix any of this stuff.” Which is just soul crushing for the teachers. I’ve sympathized with them, having been a middle school teacher in my past. But then 80 percent of kids revised their essays when they got the high standards and feedback note. And then we ran it the next year, same teachers, but new kids. And then there we required all the kids to turn in essays, but then we looked at the revised ones and painstakingly counted how many of the comments were fixed. And again, we found that more than twice as many of the comments were fixed when kids got the feedback note assuring them that the teacher had high standards and believed in their potential.

LEVITT: Okay, so that would be fine, but we wouldn’t be talking about this paper if that was the only thing you found. But, again, what’s so incredible about this is that you’re able to follow the kids and you see these long-term effects. What were the long-term effects you found from this intervention?

YEAGER: This was one of the most amazing results we’ve ever had — we checked this data so many times ’cause we couldn’t believe it initially. But we collected the discipline incidents at the school, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, and we find a reduction in discipline incidents a whole year later.

LEVITT: This is from one Post-It Note on one paper. There’s no other intervention at all, and the teachers know nothing about who was treatment and control. It’s like literally from one Post-It Note, you’re seeing a year later, fewer discipline incidents.

YEAGER: Yeah. And then whatever happens when kids do better, happens. So does the teacher view the kid differently? Are they a little more patient with the kid? does the kid feel like their effort is being met with a sense of respect from the teacher? So there’s what we call a recursive process that’s partially institutional because you’ve got grades and records, but then partially relational where the teacher might view the kid differently, the kid may have a different view of themselves. We think the operating thing here is a sense of trust. For middle school kids, one of the best predictors of discipline incidents is not just poor self-control or dysregulation, it’s also a sense that the school is unfair and out to get you. Because when you think rules are designed specifically to harm you or your group, then you’re less likely to follow those rules. This is a classic procedural justice theory. But then this trust restoring note — this person who has power over you is viewing you as someone of potential that they’re investing in. And that created a kind of cognitive shift in the kid where they started trusting more in the system. Their discipline incidents were down. And then the amazing part was we find kids are more likely to be in college, especially four-year colleges, six years later, if they had gotten that note.

LEVITT: Amazing. We live in this world where everyone’s looking for these life hacks, these cheap ways to figure out how to do better. And it seems like you’ve really tapped into that. You’ve figured out little things that everybody should be doing — parents, teachers, coaches, and nobody’s doing them. It’s interesting for me now having become more and more familiar with your work to try to figure out how I can actually start doing these simple things instead of being on autopilot.

YEAGER: The way I try to think of it when I teach it is that I have a starting assumption that not all behavior change problems, but a lot of them are due to some kind of misunderstanding that people with good intent and goodwill have, and that leads them to make decisions that we view as suboptimal in some way. There are problems of ill intent. There are problems where people see clearly and choose to do bad things, but I think a lot more than people appreciate, it’s really a misperception. If you’re a black kid in a school in New Jersey, and the teachers are treating you like s**t, feels like you shouldn’t trust them and you should act out. It’s not until we introduce some alternative view that all of a sudden what they already want becomes available to them. ‘Cause most kids don’t want to be in trouble. Most kids do want to do well. They would prefer to not be humiliated and ashamed in awash in cortisol. We just found a way to align an alternative worldview they wouldn’t have thought of with what they already care about. And then we do it in places and at times where the system can let it persist.

There are lots of times that I read self-help books, and the ideas sound great, and it’s fun to read, but a few weeks later, I’ve forgotten all about the advice. For me, David Yeager’s book was different. It fundamentally changed the way I think about communicating with young people. It’s changed the ways I listen to and talk to my own kids. And it’s become required reading for everyone involved in the new high school I’m helping to launch this fall on the campus of Arizona State University. David’s book is called 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People.

LEVITT: So now is a point in the show where I welcome my producer Morgan on to tackle a listener question.

LEVEY: Hi, Steve. So in a recent episode, you interviewed Tom Holland, who is the co-host of a podcast called The Rest Is History. You asked our listeners at the end of that episode to go to the archive of The Rest Is History, find a topic that seemed completely boring to them, and listen to 15 minutes of the episode. You then wanted listeners to send us an email telling us A, did they find the 15 minutes of that episode that they listened to interesting? And B, what percent of other PIMA listeners who did this task would also find the episode they listened to interesting? So you tallied the responses and you’re going to do a little quiz, and I’m going to have to guess the answers, correct?

LEVITT: That is exactly right. And let me start, Morgan with what share of the listeners who dredged up the worst, least interesting sounding episode, do you think after 15 minutes thought, Hey, that’s pretty good. What’s your guess on that percentage?

LEVEY: Seventy-five percent.

LEVITT: The exact same number that I had written down and predicted as we entered into this. And the actual number was only 61 percent. What do you make of that? 

LEVEY: Oh. Well, it’s still the majority, so I’m going to take it as a win for me.

LEVITT: I do think if you flipped it around and Tom Holland went to his listeners and said, “Go and listen to the most boring episode you could imagine from People I (Mostly) Admire,” I do not think we would get a 61-percent positive. So, despite the numbers not being as high as we expected, you’re right. It wasn’t a total loss. Okay. So we asked people not only to tell us if they were interested, but also to guess at whether others would be interested. What do you think people anticipated the number would be?

LEVEY: I’m going to go high. I’d say 85 percent.

LEVITT: Well, 73. They were actually just like you and me. But it turns out that was overly optimistic. It’s this rare case where the wisdom of the crowd is not exactly on. And interesting in that regard because in so many settings you find that if you just take the average of what everybody thinks, it turns out to be almost exactly right.

LEVEY: How do you think the numbers would change if instead of asking listeners to find the topic that they thought would be incredibly boring, and instead just let them pick any episode?

LEVITT: The obvious answer is, Oh, well if you let people pick a random episode or even one they like, they’re much more likely to find it interesting. But we had a number of listeners who wrote and said, “Oh, I listened to this episode that I was not expecting to be interested in, and I loved it. And then I thought, Wow, I’m going to go listen to another episode of something I know a lot about.” And it really seemed that the more that the listener knew about a topic, the less likely they were to be impressed by the podcast, which I think probably makes sense because the podcast is not aimed at people who are experts in a topic. It’s aimed at people who know nothing about it.

LEVEY: Okay, do you have any more questions for me in this quiz? 

LEVITT: I do. Okay, so let’s divide now all the listeners who responded into those who found the episode they heard interesting and those who didn’t. I want you to guess, of those who did not find the episode interesting, what their guess was about whether other people would find the episode interesting.

LEVEY: I think even if they didn’t find the episode they listened to interesting, I bet they were optimistic about other PIMA listeners, so I bet 70 percent of them thought other people would find the episode interesting.

LEVITT: So actually it was 57 percent. (ML^Oh!) Okay, so the people who didn’t like it only put a 57 percent chance. They were actually almost right on the money ’cause the true answer was 61. Among the people who did like the episodes, 83 percent thought that others would like the episode. And this is a pattern that you always see. Inevitably, when you look at data, there’s a bias of if you, yourself, like something you end up overestimating the likelihood that other people like it, and then if you don’t like it, you tend to underestimate. That’s a mistake in forecasting. People’s own preferences just get too much weight when they think about what other people want. It’s one of those behavioral economics biases, and one you can be on guard for and try to protect yourself from when you’re out in the world.

LEVEY: Steve, were you a fan of The Rest Is History podcast before we had Tom Holland on the show?

LEVITT: So, in fact, Morgan, I had never listened to The Rest Is History podcast. As a result, I wasn’t really sure that Tom Holland would be a good guest. And actually I went through the exact exercise that I asked listeners to go through. I found the episode that looked the most boring to me. It’s one from 2024 called “The Suit, Savile Row, and Smartly Dressed Men.” And anyone who knows me knows that I’m one of the worst dressers and least interested people in fashion who ever lived. And much to my amazement, 15 minutes in, I thought, Wow, this is fantastic! And that made me so excited to bring Tom Holland onto the show.

LEVEY: Listeners, thank you for participating in our poll. If you have a question for Steve Levitt, our email is PIMA@Freakonomics.com. That’s P-I-M-A@Freakonomics.com. Steve and I read every email that’s sent and we look forward to reading yours.

Next week, we’ve got an encore presentation of a conversation with Annie Duke on the art of quitting. It’s one of the most downloaded episodes we’ve had. And in two weeks, we have a brand new episode featuring Bill McGowan. Twenty years ago, he helped Stephen Dubner and I improve our public speaking. I’m hoping his advice can do the same for you.

MCGOWAN:   Everything that comes out of your mouth has got to be truthful. Let’s just start from there.

As always, thanks for listening, and we’ll see you back soon.

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People I (Mostly) Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levey. And mixed by Jasmin Klinger. We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme music was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be reached at PIMA@Freakonomics.com, that’s P-I-M-A@Freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.

YEAGER: Won’t your teeth get yellow? And they’re like, “Maybe when I’m 50, but like, not right now.”