You agree or not, how your brain reacts to mistakes depends on your mindset, say researchers. A new study, led by Michigan State University, has found that people who think they can learn from their mistakes have a different brain reaction to mistakes than people who think intelligence is fixed.
“One big difference between people who think intelligence is malleable and those who think intelligence is fixed is how they respond to mistakes,” said lead researcher Jason Moser. People who think that they can’t get smarter will not take opportunities to learn from their mistakes. This can be a problem in school, for example — a student who thinks her intelligence is fixed will think it’s not worth bothering to try harder after she fails a test, say the researchers.
For this study, the researchers gave participants a task that is easy to make a mistake on. They were supposed to identify the middle letter of a five-letter series like “MMMMM” or “NNMNN”. Sometimes the middle letter was the same as the other four, and sometimes it was different. “It’s pretty simple, doing the same thing over and over, but the mind can’t help it; it just kind of zones out from time to time,” said Moser.
While doing the task, the participant wore a cap on his or her head that records electrical activity in the brain. When someone makes a mistake, their brain makes two quick signals: an initial response that indicates something has gone awry — Moser calls it the “‘oh crap’ response” and a second that indicates the person is consciously aware of the mistake and is trying to right the wrong. Both signals occur within a quarter of a second of the mistake. After the experiment, the researchers found out whether people believed they could learn from their mistakes or not.