Growth mindset
The belief that intelligence and ability are malleable — improvable through effort — as opposed to a fixed mindset, the belief that intelligence is a fixed trait determined early in life. Grounded in research by Carol Dweck and Ellen Leggett, “A Social-Cognitive Approach to Motivation and Personality” (1988, Psychological Review).
The mechanism
Per The Gamer’s Brain (book) (Chapter 6): people who believe intelligence is fixed tend to gravitate toward performance goals — seeking positive judgment on how they’re doing — because a challenging learning goal carries the risk of failure, which threatens to reveal incompetence. People who believe intelligence is malleable (the more accurate belief, per Hodent) instead gravitate toward learning goals — increasing actual competence — because failure along the way isn’t an indictment, it’s part of the process.
Hodent flags this finding as debated, but notes its implication is significant: children (and, by extension, players) may engage more with a task once they understand that being skilled is a process, not a fixed state. This is also why she cites the common psychological recommendation to praise a child’s effort (“you worked hard and it paid off”) rather than innate ability (“you’re so smart”) — the former reinforces a growth mindset, the latter reinforces a fixed one.
Why it matters for games
The brain is presented earlier in the same chapter as continuously plastic — even IQ is not fixed — which is the underlying basis for treating “intelligence is malleable” as the more accurate of the two beliefs. For game design, this connects to how failure states are framed: a growth-mindset-compatible design treats losing or struggling as visible evidence of the learning process (not as a verdict on the player), which keeps players engaged with learning goals rather than dropping out to protect a performance-goal self-image after a setback.
Related
- Big Five personality traits — another individual-difference factor covered in the same chapter
- Self-Determination Theory — competence (one of SDT’s three needs) is closely related to growth-mindset learning goals
- Constructivism (learning theory) — the broader learning framework this individual-difference factor sits alongside