You can’t change your basic ability, but you work at things, and that’s how we get hard things done: Testing the role of growth mindset on response to setbacks, educational attainment, and cognitive ability.

Mindset theory predicts that a growth mindset can substantially improve children's resilience to failure and enhance important outcomes such as school grades. We tested these predictions in a series of studies of 9-13-year-old Chinese children (n = 624). Study 1 closely replicated Mueller and Dweck (1998). Growth mindset manipulation was associated with performance on a moderate difficulty postfailure test (p = .049), but not with any of the 8...