Fixed or growth mindset? A quick test, and the science behind it

A fixed mindset is the belief that your abilities are more or less set, while a growth mindset is the belief that they can be developed with effort, good strategies and help from others. The idea comes from the psychologist Carol Dweck at Stanford University. PiViva's test uses ten statements to give you a score out of 50, and since larger studies have found smaller effects than the early work suggested, the score is best used as a gentle prompt to notice how you react when something gets difficult.

Why do you give up on some things so quickly?

There are probably things you're very good at, and that you'd happily practise for hours without noticing the time go by. And there are probably other things you tried once, found hard, and promptly filed under "not for me". For a lot of us that list includes maths, languages, public speaking, drawing, or cooking anything more ambitious than pasta.

That snap judgement can be surprisingly powerful. Decide at fourteen that you're "not a languages person", and you may spend the next thirty years nodding politely on holiday and letting someone else do the ordering, without ever really testing whether it was true.

The encouraging thing is that a judgement made that quickly can be revisited, and the mindset idea is a good way to start doing exactly that.

What is the fixed vs growth mindset idea, and what does the research say?

Carol Dweck spent decades studying how people respond when things get hard. She found that we each carry an underlying belief about ability: either it's fixed, so you've either got it or you haven't, or it can grow with effort and better strategies. Her 2006 book Mindset took the idea to a huge audience.

The belief matters most when you hit a difficulty. Fixed thinking treats the struggle as a sign you've reached your limit, while growth thinking treats it as the point where the learning begins.

It's only fair to say that the research has had a bumpy few years. In 2018, Victoria Sisk and colleagues published two meta-analyses that found only weak overall effects of mindset programmes on academic results. In 2019, though, a large study in Nature led by David Yeager found that a short online intervention did improve grades for lower-achieving students, particularly in schools where the people around them supported the message. So the effect is real for some people in some settings, and smaller than the posters in school corridors might suggest.

How does the mindset test work in PiViva?

The test has ten statements, half written from a fixed mindset and half from a growth mindset. You rate each one from one to five on how much it sounds like you, and you end up with a score out of 50.

Very few people are wholly one or the other. Most of us are growth-minded in some parts of life and firmly fixed in others, perhaps confident that we can get better at work while being absolutely certain we'll never be able to sing. The mixed statements are designed to catch exactly that.

Treat your score as a prompt to notice your own reactions, and take the test again in a few months' time. You'll probably find the movement between the two scores more interesting than either number on its own.

What if your score leans towards fixed?

Then you've found something worth working on, and that's a hopeful place to be. Working on Mindset is the natural next step, as it looks at what you actually do when things get hard, which is where change tends to happen first.

If there's one particular area where you've decided you're simply "bad at it", that's very likely a limiting belief, and Limiting Beliefs will help you trace where it came from and test whether it's actually true.

You can try it today. Whatever your score, it's a starting point, and many people find that simply noticing their reactions is enough to begin loosening some very old beliefs about what they can and can't do.