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A growth mindset is the belief that human capacities are not fixed but can be developed over time, and mindset research examines the power of such beliefs to influence human behavior. This article offers two personal perspectives on mindset research across two eras. Given recent changes in the field, the authors represent different generations of researchers, each focusing on different issues and challenges, but both committed to “era-bridging” research. The first author traces mindset research from its systematic examination of how mindsets affect challenge seeking and resilience, through the ways in which mindsets influence the formation of judgments and stereotypes. The second author then describes how mindset research entered the era of field experiments and replication science, and how researchers worked to create reliable interventions to address underachievement—including a national experiment in the United States. The authors conclude that there is much more to learn but that the studies to date illustrate how an era-bridging program of research can continue to be generative and relevant to new generations of scholars.

The efficacy of academic-mind-set interventions has been demonstrated by small-scale, proof-of-concept interventions, generally delivered in person in one school at a time. Whether this approach could be a practical way to raise school achievement on a large scale remains unknown. We therefore delivered brief growth-mind-set and sense-of-purpose interventions through online modules to 1,594 students in 13 geographically diverse high schools. Both interventions were intended to help students persist when they experienced academic difficulty; thus, both were predicted to be most beneficial for poorly performing students. This was the case. Among students at risk of dropping out of high school (one third of the sample), each intervention raised students' semester grade point averages in core academic courses and increased the rate at which students performed satisfactorily in core courses by 6.4 percentage points. We discuss implications for the pipeline from theory to practice and for education reform.

In recent years, the field of psychology has begun to conduct replication tests on a large scale. Here, we show that “replicator degrees of freedom” make it far too easy to obtain and publish false-negative replication results, even while appearing to adhere to strict methodological standards. Specifically, using data from an ongoing debate, we show that commonly exercised flexibility at the experimental design and data analysis stages of replication testing can make it appear that a finding was not replicated when, in fact, it was. The debate that we focus on is representative, on key dimensions, of a large number of other replication tests in psychology that have been published in recent years, suggesting that the lessons of this analysis may be far reaching. The problems with current practice in replication science that we uncover here are particularly worrisome because they are not adequately addressed by the field’s standard remedies, including preregistration. Implications for how the field could develop more effective methodological standards for replication are discussed.

Over the past three decades, billions have been invested in community policing to foster positive interactions between officers and community members. Yet, public trust in police continues to decline. Our qualitative analysis of over 500 hours of naturalistic observations suggests a potential reason: the questioning styles of officers in community policing may make community members feel threatened. Observations also point to a solution: transparent communication of benevolent intent. Building on this, a pre-registered field experiment ( N  = 232) finds that community members feel less threatened and report greater trust when officers use a brief transparency statement (e.g., “I’m walking around trying to get to know the community”). These findings are supported by exploratory natural language processing and sympathetic nervous system measures. Six online experiments (total N  = 3210) further show that transparency statements are effective across diverse groups and isolate the conditions where they work best. This multi-method investigation underscores the importance of transparency in fostering positive community-police relations. Much investment goes into improving police-community interactions, yet trust in police remains low. Here, the authors show that community members report feeling less threat and more trust when officers use transparency statements to start interactions.

There is growing policy interest in identifying contexts that cultivate self-regulation. Doing so often entails comparing groups of individuals (e.g., from different schools). We show that self-report questionnaires—the most prevalent modality for assessing self-regulation—are prone to reference bias , defined as systematic error arising from differences in the implicit standards by which individuals evaluate behavior. In three studies, adolescents ( N = 229,685) whose peers performed better academically rated themselves lower in self-regulation and held higher standards for self-regulation. This effect was not observed for task measures of self-regulation and led to paradoxical predictions of college persistence 6 years later. These findings suggest that standards for self-regulation vary by social group, limiting the policy applications of self-report questionnaires.

Past research has shown that hostile schemas and adverse experiences predict the hostile attributional bias. This research proposes that seemingly nonhostile beliefs (implicit theories about the malleability of personality) may also play a role in shaping it. Study 1 meta-analytically summarized 11 original tests of this hypothesis (N = 1,659), and showed that among diverse adolescents aged 13–16 a fixed or entity theory about personality traits predicted greater hostile attributional biases, which mediated an effect on aggressive desires. Study 2 experimentally changed adolescents' implicit theories toward a malleable or incremental view and showed a reduction in hostile intent attributions. Study 3 delivered an incremental theory intervention that reduced hostile intent attributions and aggressive desires over an 8-month period.

Students from higher–socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds show a persistent advantage in academic outcomes over lower-SES students. It is possible that students’ beliefs about academic ability, or mindsets, play some role in contributing to these disparities. Data from a recent nationally representative sample of ninth-grade students in U.S. public schools provided evidence that higher SES was associated with fewer fixed beliefs about academic ability (a group difference of .22 standard deviations). Also, there was a negative association between a fixed mindset and grades that was similar regardless of a student’s SES. Finally, student mindsets were a significant but small factor in explaining the existing relationship between SES and achievement. Altogether, mindsets appear to be associated with socioeconomic circumstances and academic achievement; however, the vast majority of the existing socioeconomic achievement gap in the U.S. is likely driven by the root causes of inequality.

Adolescents may especially need social and emotional help. They're learning how to handle new demands in school and social life while dealing with new, intense emotions (both positive and negative), and they're increasingly feeling that they should do so without adult guidance. Social and emotional learning (SEL) programs are one way to help them navigate these difficulties. SEL programs try to help adolescents cope with their difficulties more successfully by improving skills and mindsets, and they try to create respectful school environments that young people want to be a part of by changing the school's climate. In this article, David Yeager defines those terms and explains the changes that adolescents experience with the onset of puberty. Then he reviews a variety of SEL programs to see what works best with this age group. On the positive side, Yeager finds that effective universal SEL can transform adolescents' lives for the better. Less encouragingly, typical SEL programs—which directly teach skills and invite participants to rehearse those skills over the course of many classroom lessons—have a poor track record with middle adolescents (roughly age 14 to 17), even though they work well with children. But some programs stand out for their effectiveness with adolescents. Rather than teaching them skills, Yeager finds, effective programs for adolescents focus on mindsets and climate. Harnessing adolescents' developmental motivations, such programs aim to make them feel respected by adults and peers and offer them the chance to gain status and admiration in the eyes of people whose opinions they value.

In the past decade, behavioural science has gained influence in policymaking but suffered a crisis of confidence in the replicability of its findings. Here, we describe a nascent heterogeneity revolution that we believe these twin historical trends have triggered. This revolution will be defined by the recognition that most treatment effects are heterogeneous, so the variation in effect estimates across studies that defines the replication crisis is to be expected as long as heterogeneous effects are studied without a systematic approach to sampling and moderation. When studied systematically, heterogeneity can be leveraged to build more complete theories of causal mechanism that could inform nuanced and dependable guidance to policymakers. We recommend investment in shared research infrastructure to make it feasible to study behavioural interventions in heterogeneous and generalizable samples, and suggest low-cost steps researchers can take immediately to avoid being misled by heterogeneity and begin to learn from it instead. Behavioural science increasingly informs policy, but findings are not always replicated. Bryan et al. describe an emerging heterogeneity revolution. They recommend that researchers use heterogeneity in treatment effects to develop more robust theories of causality and strengthen the field.

Educational outcomes remain highly unequal within and across nations. Students’ mindsets—their beliefs about whether intellectual abilities can be developed—have been identified as a potential lever for making adolescents’ academic outcomes more equitable. Recent research, however, suggests that intervention programs aimed at changing students’ mindsets should be supplemented by programs aimed at the changing the mindset culture, which is defined as the shared set of beliefs about learning in a school or classroom. This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical origin of the mindset culture and examines its potential to reduce group-based inequalities in education. In particular, experiments have identified two broad ways the mindset culture is communicated by teachers: via informal messages about growth (e.g., that all students will be helped to learn and succeed), and formal opportunities to improve (e.g., learning-focused grading policies and opportunities to revise and earn credit). New field experiments, applying techniques from behavioral science, have also revealed effective ways to influence teachers’ culture-creating behaviors. This paper describes recent breakthroughs in the U.S. educational context and discusses how lessons from these studies might be applied in future, global collaborations with researchers and practitioners.