The science of success

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New Scientist March 8, 2014
Michael Bond

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The genes people inherit matter, but so does their environment. Even IQ, which has been claimed to measure innate intelligence, can be changed by a person’s upbringing. This means that there are plenty of things that can be done to make people more successful – but are governments, schools and parents doing the right things?

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Edward Melhuish of Birkbeck, University of London, who studies child development, warns that children under 5 who don’t receive consistent affection and responsive communication from their parents or care-givers have impaired social and emotional development. Crucially, this affects their language skills, which Melhuish says is a major reason why children from disadvantaged families generally do poorly at school. “Improved language development helps boost cognitive development, literacy and educational attainment as well as social skills,” he says.

The effects of the environment, in other words, are profound. An impoverished upbringing can dent a child’s cognitive ability by as much as nine IQ points (Child Development, vol 65, p 296). By contrast, a privileged background can boost IQ. Adopted children born into poverty but brought up in well-off households have shown big gains in IQ compared with their non-adopted siblings.

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Developmental psychologists have shown that having a fixed mindset – viewing attributes such as intelligence and personality as set in stone – causes people to fear failure, react badly to criticism and avoid new or difficult assignments, hardly a recipe for success. The belief that your traits are malleable, on the other hand, makes you more willing to stretch yourself and learn new skills.

Over the last decade, a team led by Carol Dweck at Stanford University has improved the grades and attendance records of thousands of school and college students across the US simply by teaching them that intelligence isn’t fixed, that hard work can make you smarter, and that struggling to adjust to college is a normal learning process and not a sign of poor intellect. A “growth” mindset is advantageous at all stages of life, says Dweck. “It allows you to take on more challenges, and you don’t get discouraged by setbacks or find effort undermining.”

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Encourage dreaming? That may not seem like a recipe for success to some, but it is perhaps the most important factor of all. US psychologist Ellis Paul Torrance followed the lives of several hundred creative high-achievers from high school into middle age, among them academics, writers, inventors, teachers, consultants, business executives and a song-writer. He noticed that it wasn’t scholastic or technical abilities or achievements at school that set them apart, but characteristics such as having a sense of purpose, the courage to be creative, delighting in deep thinking and feeling comfortable in a minority of one. Most important of all, he thought, was to “fall in love with a dream”, preferably at a young age, and then pursue it with intensity.

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