(About psychology rather than language.)
From the 4/25/16 issue of Psychological Science, “What Predicts Children’s Fixed and Growth Intelligence Mind-Sets? Not Their Parents’ Views of Intelligence but Their Parents’ Views of Failure” by Kyla Haimovitz and Carol S. Dweck of Stanford’s psychology department. The first sentence of the abstract introduces the crucial piece of background: Dweck’s important work on intelligence mind-sets and how they affect the way people (children, in particular) are motivated to work at certain tasks, thus affecting their ability to master those tasks (see Dweck’s 2006 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success). But, Haimovitz and Dweck ask, where do kids get their intelligence mind-sets?
