Life is full of vulnerable moments—occasions when we feel off-balance, unsure of ourselves and our abilities—and in these moments we are likely to perform less well than we might. Social psychologists have developed a simple activity, called a values affirmation, that can intervene in such situations to restore our sense of equilibrium. Affirming values can help protect students from “stereotype threat” - that is, concerns that the ability to succeed is linked to one’s gender or race.

Here’s how it works: Make a list of the values that matter most to you, or for ten minutes, write in depth about a value that is central to your life. Perhaps it’s your close relationship with your family, or your skill with a camera or in the kitchen, or your strong religious faith. What matters is that it’s your value, your identity.

It’s a quick and simple exercise, but numerous studies have shown that it can have tremendous effects. Some of the things a values affirmation can do:

1. Tamp down stress. A study led by psychologist Traci Mann of UCLA found that participants who

“Often mistaken, never in doubt.” That wry phrase describes us all more than we’d like to admit. The psychological study of misconceptions shows that all of us possess many beliefs that are flawed or flat-out wrong—and also that we cling to these fallacies with remarkable tenacity. An earlier issue of The Brilliant Report examined how we can know what we don’t know. This week we’ll look at ways to actively disabuse ourselves or others of erroneous conceptions. Although much of this research concerns misguided notions of how the physical world works, the techniques it has produced can be used to correct any sort of deficient understanding.

The most important thing to realize is that just telling isn’t enough. Most methods of instruction and training assume that if you provide people with the right information, it will replace any mistaken information listeners may already possess. But this just isn’t so. Especially when our previous beliefs (even though faulty) have proved useful to us, and when they appear to be confirmed by everyday experience, we are reluctant to let them go. Donna Alvermann, a language and literacy researcher at the University of Georgia, notes that in study after study, “students ignored correct textual information when it conflicted with their previously held concepts. On measures of free recall and recognition, the students consistently let their incorrect prior knowledge override incoming correct information.” It’s what our mothers called “in one ear and out the other.” Here, three ways to make that new information push out the old:

Successful leaders often seem to have sharper minds than the rest of us—isn’t that how they got to the top in the first place? While we often assume that people become powerful because of their superior thinking skills, research shows that the relationship flows in the other direction as well: power changes the way a person thinks, making them better at focusing on relevant information, integrating disparate pieces of knowledge, and identifying hidden patterns than people who are powerless. People who feel powerful also show improved “executive functioning”: they are better able to concentrate, plan, inhibit unhelpful impulses and flexibly adapt to change.

Sitting at the head of the table may help you to think better.

A sense of power “has dramatic effects on thought and behavior,” writes Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School, in 2011 article in the journal Psychological Science. Indeed, “being in a high-power role transforms people psychologically.” The good news is that we don’t have to wait until we’re the boss to reap the mental rewards of powerfulness. Here, three ways to take advantage of the power of power:

Curiosity is the engine of intellectual achievement—it’s what drives us to keep learning, keep trying, keep pushing forward. But how does one generate curiosity, in oneself or others? George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, proposed an answer in a classic 1994 paper, “The Psychology of Curiosity.”

The Timeless Art of Maintaining Curiosity in the Classroom

Curiosity arises, Loewenstein wrote, “when attention becomes focused on a gap in one’s knowledge. Such information gaps produce the feeling of deprivation labeled curiosity. The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.” Loewenstein’s theory helps explain why curiosity is such a potent motivator: it’s not only a mental state but also an emotion, a powerful feeling that impels us forward until we find the information that will fill in the gap in our knowledge.

Here, three practical ways to use information gaps to stimulate curiosity:

What were creative adults—artists, dancers, musicians, actors—like when they were 16 years old? If we could figure this out, we could identify creative potential among today’s teenagers. This is the idea behind a research project at the University of Kansas, which is using biographies of creative people like Mark Twain and Woody Allen to develop tools to help teachers identify and support creative adolescents. Sarah Sparks of Education Week reports:

Woody Allen

“Barbara Kerr, the director of the university’s Counseling Laboratory for the Exploration of Optimal States, and former Kansas colleague Robyn McKay, now a psychology professor at Arizona State University-Polytechnic College of Technology and Innovation, analyzed biographies and interviews with famous creative adults to identify their characteristics at age 16.

This season, we’re thrilled to feature the work of Annie Murphy Paul, a writer who helps people understand how we learn and how we can do it better. Her Brilliant Blog features the latest research in cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience, revealing the simple and surprising techniques that can help us learn to be smarter.

Feedback That Works

When effectively administered, feedback is a powerful way to build knowledge and skills, increase motivation, and develop reflective habits of mind in students and employees. Too often, however, the feedback we give (and get) is ineffectual or even counterproductive. Here, four ways to offer feedback that really makes a difference, drawn from research in psychology and cognitive science:

Chances are you’ve recently heard or read about the importance of “executive function”—the set of higher-order mental skills that allow us to plan and organize, make considered decisions, manage our time and focus our attention. (The famous “marshmallow experiment” was all about executive function.) No matter how smart or talented we—or our kids or our employees—are, not much will get done well without these key capacities. Aerobic exercise can grease the wheels of executive brain function.

The problem is that researchers don’t yet know much about how to strengthen executive functioning. A review from cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham reports that certain parental behaviors—”meaningful praise, affection, sensitivity to the child’s needs, and encouragement,” along with intellectual stimulation, support for autonomy, and well-structured and consistent rules—can help kids develop robust executive function skills over the long run. Shorter-term interventions, such as the school-based program Tools of the Mind, have shown mixed or disappointing results, and computerized “brain training” exercises have generally failed to show that improvements in executive function produced by such exercises transfer to real-life tasks.

This season, we’re thrilled to feature the work of Annie Murphy Paul, a writer who helps people understand how we learn and how we can do it better. Her Brilliant Blog features the latest research in cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience, revealing the simple and surprising techniques that can help us learn to be smarter. Avoiding overconfidence in the classroom.

Confidence is indisputably a good thing. But over-confidence can spell trouble—especially when we’re learning. Research has shown over and over again that we are not very good judges of how effectively we’re learning new information, or how accurately we’ll remember it. This means we may stop the studying or training process prematurely, before new material is truly absorbed, and it means we may be in for an unpleasant surprise when we realize (at test or performance time) that we didn’t know that material as well as we assumed.

This overconfidence shows up in all kinds of settings: among debate teams taking part in a college tournament; among hunters quizzed about their knowledge of firearms just before the start of hunting season; and among medical residents evaluating their patient-interviewing skills, to cite a few examples collected by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning in a study published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. In that study, Dunning and his coauthors found that the lowest-performing students in a college psychology course overestimated their own performance by an average of 30 percent.

This season, we’re thrilled to feature the work of Annie Murphy Paul, a writer who helps people understand how we learn and how we can do it better. Her Brilliant Blog features the latest research in cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience, revealing the simple and surprising techniques that can help us learn to be smarter.

We all know that confusion doesn’t feel good. Because it seems like an obstacle to learning, we try to arrange educational experiences and training sessions so that learners will encounter as little confusion as possible. But as is so often the case when it comes to learning, our intuitions here are exactly wrong. Scientists have been building a body of evidence over the past few years demonstrating that confusion can lead us to learn more efficiently, more deeply, more lastingly—as long as it’s properly managed.

How can this be? The human brain is a pattern-recognition machine. It evolved to identify related events or artifacts and connect them into a meaningful whole. This capacity serves us well in many endeavors, from recognizing the underlying themes in literature, to understanding the deep structure of a scientific or mathematical problem, to anticipating hidden complications and seeing their solutions in our work. Over time, exposure to these problem-solving situations gives us a subconscious familiarity with their essential nature that we can hardly articulate in words, but which we can easily put into action.

This season, we’re thrilled to feature the work of Annie Murphy Paul, a writer who helps people understand how we learn and how we can do it better. Her Brilliant Blog features the latest research in cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience, revealing the simple and surprising techniques that can help us learn to be smarter.

New research claims firstborns are be more motivated to learn, while secondborns are more motivated to win, reports Rachel Lowry of Deseret News:

“The study, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, examined almost 400 students. It found that birth order can be a lens through which first and secondborns see the world, in ways that impact their motivation and likelihood of career and personal success (though the roles often can be reversed with patience and practice).”

Curious to learn more, I looked at the study itself. Led by Bernd Carette of Ghent University in Belgium, the abstract reads in part:

“Using different analytic approaches, we show that birth order lies at the heart of people’s goal preferences as we consistently found that firstborns have developed a preference for mastery goals

This season, we’re thrilled to feature the work of Annie Murphy Paul, a writer who helps people understand how we learn and how we can do it better. Her Brilliant Blog features the latest research in cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience, revealing the simple and surprising techniques that can help us learn to be smarter.

A very interesting project from Yale psychiatrist Bruce Wexler, reported here by Karin Laub and Diaa Hadid of the Associated Press:

“Both Israeli and Palestinian schoolbooks largely present one-sided narratives of the conflict between the two peoples and tend to ignore the existence of the other side, but rarely resort to demonization, a U.S. State Department-funded study released Monday said.

The study by Israeli, Palestinian and American researchers, billed as setting a new scientific standard, tackled a fraught issue—Israeli claims that Palestinians teach hatred of Israel and glorify violence in schoolbooks.

Last week, learning expert Annie Murphy Paul wrote about the “Curse of Expertise” and the challenges it presents for educators. This week, she offers practical solutions for those struggling to make their expert knowledge accessible for the uninitiated. Find more articles like these on The Brilliant Blog.

This week, one particular number got the attention of a lot of readers. I quoted Ken Koedinger, a professor of human-computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, as saying that experts can articulate only about 30 percent of what they know. This is a problem when designing courses, he noted, because the experts creating them often can’t adequately explain what they know to the novice learner.

This phenomenon is called the “curse of expertise,” and it shows up in all sorts of settings—not just the instructor who can’t communicate what she knows to her students, but also the parent helping with homework who can’t get a concept across to his child, the marketer or salesperson who misjudges what customers knows, and the manager who’s frustrated that his employees don’t “get it” more quickly. Here, four practical ways to lift the curse of expertise and share your knowledge effectively with others:

Use data. Ken Koedinger, the CMU professor, also notes that designers of online courses now have a wealth of objective data on what learners find difficult to understand and master. This information, gathered with every keystroke the students make while proceeding through the courses, removes the bias that experts have (“But that’s so easy!”), revealing precisely where novices’ difficulties lie. You can use data, too, by setting aside your assumptions about what’s easy or hard and looking at the evidence instead.

Remind yourself of your own experiences as a learner. Experts’ judgments about their field are colored by the “availability heuristic”: that is, the memories that are most recent and thus most available to them are not memories of struggle and confusion but memories of ease and understanding. Prompting ourselves to remember in detail what it was like when we first started out can make the beginner’s mindset more accessible to us. A study led by psychologist Roger Buehler, for example, found that asking computer programmers to recall their own experiences as learners led them to make more accurate estimates of how long it would take a novice programmer to write a new program.

Draw up a list of the problems learners might face. As psychologist Tom Stafford notes, “learning makes itself invisible”—it subtly but thoroughly changes our perceptions and our judgments so that it’s hard to see how much we know, and how much others don’t. In particular, we “anchor,” or base our assumptions, on our own experiences as an expert, and then fail to make sufficient adjustments for the very large gap between us and the inexperienced. Generating an explicit list of the hurdles that novices must surmount, psychologists Patrice Engle and J. Bradley Lumpkin found, helps experts develop a more realistic sense of the challenges beginners face.

Break it down, then break it down again. As we gain expertise, tasks that were once a jumble of apparently unconnected steps become organized into simple and efficient mental patterns (“Just do this, and then this, and then you’re done”). The beginner, however, must still labor over each detail. We can help novices attain the mastery we enjoy by analyzing our own knowledge and breaking it down into steps—even “microsteps,” or tiny increments of knowledge—and making sure they understand each one. Once that’s been achieved, we can then help learners assemble the discrete steps into the streamlined mental models we ourselves use.

What if you’re the novice? Ask your teacher to adopt one or more of the strategies above. Or find someone who is just little more advanced than you are to explain. Research shows that people with “intermediate” knowledge can often be more helpful to the beginner than experts.

Top Dog, a new book by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman about “the science of winning and losing,” is in large part a celebration of competition. The authors of the bestselling NurtureShock explore the benefits of what they call “competitive fire”—stories of Olympic swimmers, champion chess players, and upstart political candidates who reached the top by racing someone else. But just as interesting are the cases in which we do better without the element of competition. Sometimes, it turns out, competing against others can actually make our performance worse. Here, a guide to managing competition—starting with three scenarios in which competition is counterproductive:

Competition - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

1. When we feel threatened. Bronson and Merryman describe an experiment in which researchers gave 124 Princeton University underclassmen a test that drew its questions from the GRE, the graduate school admissions test. For some of the students, the investigators added to the stress of this difficult exam in two ways. First, the students were asked to report which high school they’d attended and how many of their high school classmates were also at Princeton. “This was intended to make most test-takers feel as if they were alone at Princeton, that they were lucky to be at Princeton, and that they had barely made the bar for admittance,” Bronson and Merryman explain.

On the BBC “Future” blog, Tom Stafford explains why teaching is so hard to do well. It has to do with what is called the “curse of knowledge,” a psychological quirk whereby, once we have learned something, we find it hard to appreciate how the world looks to someone who doesn’t know it yet:

“Once you are familiar with a topic it is very hard to understand what someone who isn’t familiar with it needs to know. [To do so requires us to] recruit what psychologists call our ‘Theory of Mind,’ the ability to think about others’ beliefs and desires. Our skill at Theory of Mind is one of the things that distinguish humans from all other species—only chimpanzees seem to have anything approaching a true understanding that others might believe different things from themselves. We humans, on the other hand, seem primed from early infancy to practice thinking about how other humans view the world.

The fact that the curse of knowledge exists tells us how hard a problem it is to think about other people’s minds. Like many hard cognitive problems—such as seeing, for example—the human brain has evolved specialist mechanisms which are dedicate to solving it for us, so that we don’t normally have to expend conscious effort. Much of the time we [can understand others’ perspectives,] just as most of the time we simply open our eyes and see the world.

The good news is that your Theory of Mind isn’t completely automatic—you can use deliberate strategies to help you think about what other people know. A good one when writing is simply to force yourself to check every term to see if it is jargon—something you’ve learned the meaning of but not all your readers will know. Another strategy is to tell people what they can ignore, as well as what they need to know. This works well with directions (and results in instructions like ‘keep going until you see the red door. There’s a pink door, but that’s not it.’)

With a few tricks like this, and perhaps some general practice, we can turn the concept of trying to read other people’s minds—what some psychologists call ‘mind mindedness’—into a habit, and so improve our Theory of Mind abilities. Which is a good thing, since good theory of mind is what makes a considerate partner, friend or co-worker—and a good giver of directions.” (Read more here).

And a good teacher or parent, I’d add. Teachers out there, do you find yourself deliberately trying to see the world from the perspective of your students? How do you go about it? Same with parents—how do you imagine the world through your child’s eyes?

This season, we’re thrilled to feature the work of Annie Murphy Paul, a writer who helps people understand how we learn and how we can do it better. Her Brilliant Blog features the latest research in cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience, revealing the simple and surprising techniques that can help us learn to be smarter.

In 1979, when Jim Stigler was still a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he went to Japan to research teaching methods and found himself sitting in the back row of a crowded fourth-grade math class, Alix Spiegel of NPR reports:

“‘The teacher was trying to teach the class how to draw three-dimensional cubes on paper,’ Stigler explains, “and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, “Why don’t you go put yours on the board?” So right there I thought, “That’s interesting! He took the one who can’t do it and told him to go and put it on the board.”‘

Stigler knew that in American classrooms, it was usually the best kid in the class who was invited to the board. And so he watched with interest as the Japanese student dutifully came to the board and started drawing, but still couldn’t complete the cube. Every few minutes, the teacher would ask the rest of the class whether the kid had gotten it right, and the class would look up from their work, and shake their heads no. And as the period progressed, Stigler noticed that he — Stigler — was getting more and more anxious.

‘I realized that I was sitting there starting to perspire,’ he says, ‘because I was really empathizing with this kid. I thought, “This kid is going to break into tears!”‘

But the kid didn’t break into tears. Stigler says the child continued to draw his cube with equanimity. ‘And at the end of the class, he did make his cube look right! And the teacher said to the class, “How does that look, class?” And they all looked up and said, ‘He did it!’ And they broke into applause.’ The kid smiled a huge smile and sat down, clearly proud of himself.

Stigler is now a professor of psychology at UCLA who studies teaching and learning around the world, and he says it was this small experience that first got him thinking about how differently East and West approach the experience of intellectual struggle.

‘I think that from very early ages we [in America] see struggle as an indicator that you’re just not very smart,’ Stigler says. ‘It’s a sign of low ability — people who are smart don’t struggle, they just naturally get it, that’s our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity.’

In Eastern cultures, Stigler says, it’s just assumed that struggle is a predictable part of the learning process. Everyone is expected to struggle in the process of learning, and so struggling becomes a chance to show that you, the student, have what it takes emotionally to resolve the problem by persisting through that struggle.

‘They’ve taught them that suffering can be a good thing,’ Stigler says. ‘I mean it sounds bad, but I think that’s what they’ve taught them.’

Granting that there is a lot of cultural diversity within East and West and it’s possible to point to counterexamples in each, Stigler still sums up the difference this way: For the most part in American culture, intellectual struggle in schoolchildren is seen as an indicator of weakness, while in Eastern cultures it is not only tolerated but is often used to measure emotional strength.

It’s a small difference in approach that Stigler believes has some very big implications.” (Read more here.)

I love the story that starts off Alix’s report—it captures so vividly the value of celebrating effort. In our culture we are so reluctant to allow kids to struggle, which means that our children never get to experience the well-earned feeling of pride and accomplishment felt by that little boy.

Attention educators. This season, we’re thrilled to feature the work of Annie Murphy Paul, a writer who helps people understand how we learn and how we can do it better. Her Brilliant Blog features the latest research in cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience, revealing the simple and surprising techniques that can help us learn to be smarter. In this week’s column, she weighs in on the educational possibilities of toys during the holiday season.

With electronic toys from Leap Pads to Wii U consoles topping many a holiday gift list, one way many parents justify the purchases, particularly with younger children, is to focus on their educational possibilities, writes KJ Dell’Antonia on the New York Times‘s Motherlode blog. But these possibilities may be illusory, she notes:

“A report from the New America Foundation and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, ‘Pioneering Literacy in the Digital Wild West: Empowering Parents and Educators,’ suggests that parents should be wary of those claims. In examining the iTunes App Store, the researchers found that more than 80 percent of the top-selling paid apps in the Education category targeted children, with 72 percent targeting preschoolers.

But parents surveying those apps, or the educational titles available for every gaming console, will find little to guide them toward which (if any) offer much beyond the most basic skill-building blocks. Very few literacy-focused games and apps even attempt to target more advanced skills like comprehension, grammar and story-telling—meaning that for older children, their utility may be limited.

Parents hoping to take advantage of a particular platform’s educational benefits should look for games that make age-appropriate demands of player—and can’t be circumvented. Open-ended questions are rare, for obvious technological reasons, but they are out there. Some math games allow for a written answer rather than offering multiple choice. Other games could prompt children to take photographs in the real world, draw their chosen tools to solve a problem, or record a story as they draw.

‘These are great opportunities for helping children make connections between the learning in the game and the learning they are doing in the physical world,’ said Lisa Guernsey, a director of the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation and one of the authors of the report.

‘If parents are going to justify a game purchase as a way to augment children’s learning, they need to make sure not to cede their responsibility to actually talk with their kids about what they are playing with,’ she added, via e-mail. ‘Children have all sorts of thoughts, questions and confusions about what they are doing on iPads and other devices, and these are key moments for kids and their parents to come together. Those conversations have the potential to be even greater learning opportunities than the apps themselves.’” (Read more here.)

I like Lisa Guernsey’s point that it’s the conversations that parents and kids have around these tools that are the real source of their “educational possibilities.”

I interview scientists for a living, but I’ll confess: Sometimes I still feel intimidated in the presence of these very accomplished, very knowledgeable people. (That’s why I like “The Secret Lives of Scientists” so much—it shows us that there are real people under those white lab coats.) Sometimes I’ll fumble with my pen and notepad, or get confused asking about material I know perfectly well. This article I wrote explains why all of us at times experience this “conditional stupidity.”

I have an op-ed in the “Sunday Review” section of the New York Times, about the social nature of intelligence:

“We’ve all been there: you feel especially smart and funny when talking to a particular person, only to feel hopelessly unintelligent and inarticulate in the presence of another.

You’re not imagining things. Experiments show that when people report feeling comfortable with a conversational partner, they are judged by those partners and by observers as actually being more witty.

It’s just one example of the powerful influence that social factors can have on intelligence. As parents, teachers and students settle into the school year, this work should prompt us to think about intelligence not as a ‘lump of something that’s in our heads,’ as the psychologist Joshua Aronson puts it, but as “a transaction among people.’”

Read more here, and tell me what you think!

Attention educators. This season, we’re thrilled to feature the work of Annie Murphy Paul, a writer who helps people understand how we learn and how we can do it better. Her [Brilliant Blog(http://anniemurphypaul.com/) features the latest research in cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience, revealing the simple and surprising techniques that can help us learn to be smarter.*

Neurobiologist Susan Barry knows first-hand how learning changes the brain: she learned how to see in three dimensions after a lifetime of being “stereoblind.” The study I write about in the following blog post is also about how learning changes the brain. It turns out that when we become experts at something—in this case, automobiles—we actually see the objects of our expertise differently. It’s another reason learning is so important: it shapes the way we see the world.

When we look at faces, a small part of our brain, located in the temporal lobe and called the fusiform face area, is activated. Now, the most detailed brain-mapping study of that area yet conducted has confirmed that it isn’t limited to processing faces, as some experts believed, but instead serves as a general center of expertise for visual recognition. From the Vanderbilt University website: