Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth

by Stuart Ritchie

Even with such a small benefit, if you could roll it out across thousands or millions of students, then on aggregate you might do a decent amount of good.36 But that’s not how Dweck chose to frame growth mindset, nor would that kind of framing have made parents and teachers flock to buy her book. Instead, she hyped up its individual effects, making it sound almost revelatory.37 The risk of such overhyping is that teachers and politicians begin to view ideas like mindset as a kind of panacea for education, focusing time and resources on them that might be better spent on dealing with the complex web of social, economic and other reasons that some children fail at school. Reality can’t help but pale in comparison to the bombastic claims in Dweck’s book – claims, incidentally, that go against the intellectual humility that science demands. As we saw in the previous chapter, complex phenomena are made up of lots of small effects: scientists should know better than to promote the idea that there’s a single ‘quick fix’ for anything as complex as a child’s education.38