The Science
False growth mindset.
When the growth mindset language is adopted, and the contextual cues stay the same.
An organisation adopts the words of a growth mindset. The environment still rewards what it has always rewarded. People learn the vocabulary, and image management becomes key rather than growth.
What is a false growth mindset?
“Many educators who professed to have a growth mindset did not fully grasp what it was and were implementing practices that failed to communicate a growth mindset to their students. In some cases, we believe they were succeeding in doing just the opposite. We called this false growth mindset, a term coined by our Australian colleague Susan Mackie.”12
Dweck & Yeager, 2019
A false growth mindset occurs when an organisation adopts the language of growth mindset, while leaving the conditions that determine what people do, unchanged. The CEO declares that a growth mindset is a priority. Strategy documents are updated. Leaders give short talks, and within weeks, everyone learns to use the language of a growth mindset.
The term “false growth mindset” was first identified by Susan Mackie, GMI’s co-founder, in 2013, while running a growth mindset and metacognition intervention in classrooms. Carol Dweck and David Yeager later wrote about the discovery in their 2019 retrospective in Perspectives on Psychological Science.
This approach leads to a growth mindset becoming socially mandatory. People start claiming it to avoid the stigma of being fixed and burying their fixed mindsets. The result is image management instead of embracing change and growth. The behaviours growth requires are not safe: speaking up early, surfacing mistakes, asking for help, and trying things that might not work.
“A growth mindset became a positive attribute, and a fixed mindset became a negative attribute. People began proclaiming they had a growth mindset to avoid being stigmatised as having a fixed mindset, even though they hadn’t changed their basic beliefs.”
Professor Carol Dweck
The phenomenon now has independent empirical support. That evidence is covered in section 04.
Why is it worse than a fixed mindset?
When someone holds a fixed mindset, the signals are at least clear, and you know where you stand. With a false growth mindset, people believe growth is possible and experience the environment blocking every attempt to pursue it. That dissonance can be exhausting.
“A false growth mindset is worse than a fixed mindset. With a fixed mindset, at least you know where you stand.”
Professor Carol Dweck
An organisation that celebrates growth language while penalising the behaviours growth requires (admitting uncertainty, surfacing mistakes, asking for help early, trying things that might not work) creates exactly the gap between espoused values and lived reality that the false growth mindset fills.
When leaders hold a false growth mindset, their teams may hear words that seem to promote growth, but the real cues tell a different story. The way performance is supported, how mistakes are handled, and the consequences of admitting uncertainty often send an unconscious message that what is expected is effortless perfection and getting it right the first time. People learn to trust the response that follows their actions and the consequences attached to it, more than the leader’s words.
The conditions that produce a false growth mindset are specific and identifiable. Any organisation can ask: does the environment celebrate growth language while penalising the behaviours growth requires? If the answer is yes, a false growth mindset is already present.
Does the environment celebrate growth language while penalising the behaviours growth requires?
If the answer is yes, a false growth mindset is already present.
How to recognise a false growth mindset.
Three patterns show up in every organisation we work with. Five more appear often enough that we look for them too.
They have a fixed mindset.
Leaders label team members as having a fixed mindset rather than examining systems and supports, leaving blame with individuals.
Mistakes are still a risk.
Leaders say mistakes are learning opportunities. Their visible reactions to errors reveal a negative response to risk that rewards “proven” ability and effortless perfection.1
The individual fixes a structural problem.
Organisations run one-off growth mindset workshops while leaving structures and cues (promotion, feedback, rewards, error norms) unchanged.2
Five more patterns
It’s only about effort.
Effort is praised even when strategies are ineffective and help-seeking or honest progress checks are absent. People need a repertoire of strategies, access to others’ input, and persistence. Effort matters when paired with effective strategies, asking for help without judgement, and an honest assessment of progress.3
The positivity glaze.
Positivity glosses over real performance gaps rather than providing clear, developmental feedback. The concern is that growth mindset language props up the failed self-esteem movement, leaving people feeling good in the moment while the real problem remains untouched.35
Growth mindset as an identity.
Growth mindset becomes an identity badge: “we’re a growth mindset organisation,” rather than an honest reflection on the fixed mindset reactions that are then normalised. That reluctance to acknowledge fixed mindset reactions leaves them invisible and still shaping decisions. Banning a fixed mindset creates a false growth mindset at scale, and using mindset measures for accountability then scales the problem across the organisation.24
Language adoption without practice change.
People adopt the language of a growth mindset without changing practices, which can make others feel more fixed about their abilities.56 In organisations, this looks like a growth mindset listed in a strategy document, with no changes to cues, policies, or practices. They still measure their people on output and numbers, not on development.
Context blindness.
Organisations design their mindset approach around what they think is wrong in people’s heads, assuming that will fix the problem, while ignoring the cues the context provides. Beliefs about ability can be embedded in policies, norms, and practices: grading systems that sort rather than develop, promotion criteria that reward innate-looking performance, hiring processes that screen for “natural talent.” No amount of individual mindset coaching overrides what the structure tells people about whether they can grow with certainty.
The research on false growth mindset.
The phenomenon has independent empirical support. Here are five studies (across individuals, classrooms, organisations, and the leadership layer) that show that a false growth mindset is widespread, measurable, and consequential. (Open any study to read the detail.)
Do people who say they have a growth mindset all believe the same things? Three groups of participants (US adults, college students, and elementary teachers) answered mindset questions in three different ways: the standard growth mindset scale, plus separate questions about whether effort drives change and whether ability itself can change.
When they sorted people by the pattern of answers across all three, five distinct groups appeared in every sample. One was the false growth mindset cluster: people who endorsed growth statements on the standard scale but, on the other measures, still believed that ability is mostly innate and that effort does not drive growth. This group was substantial across all samples: 15% of adults, 12% of college students, and 25% of teachers. On outcomes that matter (in this study, maths anxiety and beliefs about who can succeed in maths), they behaved the same way as the fixed mindset group.7
A study of more than 12,000 ninth-graders and their teachers found that 38% of teachers held a false growth mindset. Their students’ learning outcomes were no different from those of students whose teachers endorsed a fixed mindset.8
Four pre-registered experiments with 3,235 adolescents (including a US nationally representative sample) tested whether growth mindset messages from a teacher translate into students taking on challenges. The answer: only when the structures around the message also support growth (opportunities to revise work, time to try a different approach, feedback that points to strategy). Without those structures, the words produced no effect. The cleanest finding came from the fourth experiment: a warm, kind teacher with fixed mindset practices produced the same outcomes as a cold teacher with fixed mindset practices. Warmth does not compensate for a false growth mindset.9
A review of the evidence on mindset cultures in workplaces found that fixed mindset cultures communicating through hiring criteria, evaluation practices, leadership language, and what counts as “talent” show lower trust, weaker commitment, more unethical behaviour, and larger performance gaps between demographic groups.
False growth mindset shows up in four common patterns. Leaders stop using the term “fixed mindset” because the label has become stigmatised, leaving the underlying response ignored. Leaders recognise their own fixed mindset reactions and suppress them rather than work with them, which damages their leadership capability. Growth mindset gets reduced to “try harder”, losing the link to strategy, help-seeking, and learning from setbacks. Mindset itself becomes a hiring filter, treated as a fixed trait people either have or don’t have.
In one Fortune 500 study, companies with fixed mindset language in their mission statements had more negative employee reviews on Glassdoor.10
A synthesis of thirty years of research on mindsets in leadership found that leaders with a fixed mindset showed lower coaching receptivity, less follower development, more attribution errors, and more punishment endorsement than leaders with a growth mindset. A leader holding a false growth mindset produces the same behavioural profile. Despite this evidence base, only 12% of leadership development programmes address mindset at all.11
“Current direct-to-student programs do not tell us about the full potential of growth mindset concepts and practices to enhance motivation and learning. We will understand this more clearly when educators (and leaders of all kinds) create environments in which challenges are greeted with relish rather than dread, mistakes are learned from rather than punished, people collaborate to formulate effective learning strategies, and everyone’s talents are deeply respected and vigorously developed.”12
Carol Dweck & David Yeager, 2019
A false growth mindset also distorts the evidence base.
A false growth mindset also distorts the evidence base. When a study includes participants who report growth beliefs but lack the underlying mindset, the intervention’s effect appears smaller than it is. Effect sizes are suppressed. Meta-analyses are skewed. The public conversation about whether mindset interventions work at all has been shaped, in part, by this measurement problem. Separating true growth from false growth changes the picture.
What it looks like in leaders.
The same research base maps what fixed mindset behaviour looks like at the top of an organisation. A leader holding a false growth mindset produces the same behavioural profile under a different label. The patterns are concrete and observable.
Leaders with a fixed mindset (and its hidden false growth mindset variant) tend to:
- Protect self-worth by avoiding situations where they might fail.
- Internalise failure rather than treat it as data.
- View feedback as a threat rather than information.
- Avoid coaching when their own performance dips.
- Attribute others’ poor behaviour to internal traits rather than context.
- Endorse blame and criticism when things go wrong.
- Hold confident attributions about people and resist revising them when new information appears.
- Underinvest in developing their direct reports.
Why a false growth mindset is so consequential at senior levels.
Three of these (blame and criticism, attribution error, and underinvestment in development) compound at scale. They shape promotion decisions, performance management, and who gets coached and who is not supported. Context plays a significant role in people’s performance, and it is not just up to the individual. The pattern is hidden when leaders use growth mindset language, which is why a false growth mindset is so consequential at senior levels and leads to a culture of genius.11
What changed the question.
The false growth mindset finding moved the work somewhere new. The question stopped being “Do you have a growth mindset?” and became three sharper ones.
What activates your fixed mindset triggers?
The eight triggers (measured personally, in teams, and at organisational level by the Mindset Profiler™) map this.
Explore the eight fixed mindset triggers →How do you learn to work with them?
The trigger work (regulate, reflect, act) addresses this. Map your own triggers with the Mindset Profiler™.
Take the Mindset Profiler™ →How does the culture around you cue for growth mindset behaviour?
Cultures of growth and cultures of genius are built, not inherited.
Growth mindset culture →
Take the Profiler
Map the fixed mindset triggers for yourself, your team, or your organisation.
The Mindset Profiler™ measures eight trigger dimensions. Fifteen minutes. Benchmarked against 90,000+ profiles across 500+ organisations in 40+ countries.
References
- Haimovitz, K. & Dweck, C. S. (2017). The origins of children’s growth and fixed mindsets: New research and a new proposal. Child Development, 88(6), 1849–1859.
- Murphy, M. C. & Dweck, C. S. (2010). A culture of genius: How an organization’s lay theory shapes people’s cognition, affect, and behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(3), 283–296.
- Dweck, C. S. (2015). Carol Dweck Revisits the ‘Growth Mindset’. Education Week.
- Murphy, M. C. (2024). Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations. Henry Holt and Co.
- Patrick, S. K. & Joshi, E. (2019). “Set in stone” or “willing to grow”? Teacher sensemaking during a growth mindset initiative. Teaching and Teacher Education, 83, 156–167.
- Sun, K. L. (2018). The role of mathematics teaching in fostering student growth mindset. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 49(3), 330–355.
- Barger, M. M., Xiong, Y. & Ferster, A. E. (2022). Identifying false growth mindsets in adults and implications for mathematics motivation. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 70.
- Buttrick, N. (2020). False growth mindsets negatively impact student beliefs and performance. OSF Preprints.
- Hecht, C. A., Dweck, C. S., Murphy, M. C., Kroeper, K. M. & Yeager, D. S. (2023). Efficiently exploring the causal role of contextual moderators in behavioral science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(1).
- Murphy, M. C. & Reeves, S. L. (2020). Personal and organizational mindsets at work. Research in Organizational Behavior, 39.
- Gottfredson, R. K. & Reina, C. S. (2021). Illuminating the foundational role that mindsets should play in leadership development. Business Horizons, 64(4), 439–451.
- Dweck, C. S. & Yeager, D. S. (2019). Mindsets: A view from two eras. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(3), 481–496.