The pschychologist Oliver James, in an investigation of depression, was intrigued by a world health organisation table showing prevelance of emotional distress in different countries during a twelve month period. At the top was the USA with twenty six point four percent and at the bottom was China with just 4.3%. The trend in the table was for more developed countries to have higher rates of depression - but Shanghai is a fully developed city. James went to Shanghai to investigate and concluded that a crucial difference was in attitudes to self esteem. In America government task forces, schools, parents and self help books promote the boosting of self esteem but in China the confucian insistence on modesty produces a focus on personal shortcomings. Further more, where as in America worldly success is the only ratification of self esteem, The Chinese are satisfied with striving itself. And James also cites studies showing that the most aggressive americans are those with grandiose self esteem, who are likely to become violent if their self esteem is not acknowledged.
Hence a profound irony - the boosting of self esteem, which is intended to promote a sense of wellbeing and to discourage aggression may instead be a cause of depression and violence. And attempts to realise children's potential by praising them for their talents may instead inhibit or destroy potential. Parents would be wiser to take the Chinese approach and praise their children for effort rather than innate ability.
The psychologist Carol Dweck actually tested this hypothesis by giving several hundred New York school children a test and afterwards praising half for effort (You must worked really hard) and the other half for intelligence ( You must be smart at this). Then the pupils were offered a choice of two further tests - one at the same level as the first or another more difficult. Of those praised for effort, 90% chose the hardest test and of those praised for intelligence a similar majority took the easier option. So the form of the single short sentence of praise had an enormous effect - showing once again that it is better to concentrate on the striving then the outcome. Dweck's conclusion was that the intelligence group became scared of failure. While the effort group was encouraged to learn from mistakes. When the two groups were invited to look at the test papers of those who had done better than themselves or those who had done worse, the intelligence pupils almost all chose to boost their self esteem by comparison with those below, while most of the effort pupils wanted to understand their errors by examining better test papers. And, in subsequent tests, the effort pupils raised their average scores by 30%, while the intelligence average dropped by 20%.
So the way to success is to focus on failure. And in general it would be wiser to concentrate on our shortcomings.
