Confronting Bias at Work
Describe how mindsets affect our everyday behaviour.
Mindsets are our fundamental understanding of how human attributes like intelligence and personality work. The specific mindsets that I study fall along two dimensions. The first is ‘malleability’ — whether people believe that things like intelligence and personality are stable or fluid. Stanford Professor Carol Dweck’s terms for this are a ‘fixed mindset’ vs. a ‘growth mindset’. The second dimension of mindsets that I study involves how people think potential is distributed across the general population — whether they believe high levels of potential are constrained among a select few or are distributed more widely.
How might mindsets explain why some people are more likely to confront everyday prejudice in the workplace?
In my research with Prof. Dweck on mindsets and confronting overtly-biased statements, we were interested in
