The Mentor Mindset

Psychologist David Yeager on the science of motivating young people

By Daniel Oppenheimer

It’s a constant refrain from parents, teachers, and authority figures everywhere: young people are hard to talk to, let alone motivate. How can we get them to do anything?

Enter David Yeager, a professor of psychology here at The University of Texas at Austin and the author of 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. His argument is straightforward. It’s not that it’s impossible to motivate young people, he says. It’s that we’ve been going about it the wrong way.

A few weeks ago I caught up with Yeager to discuss his new book and the mentor mindset it advocates. Along the way we touched on the pitfalls of self-help writing, a disastrous Disney World attraction, and why everything you know about teenagers’ underdeveloped brains is probably wrong. An edited version of our conversation is below. And if you’d like to read more on Yeager and 10 to 25, I highly recommend his recent Life & Letters profile.

Give me the elevator pitch for what your book is about, and then maybe go a little bit backwards to how the book came to be in existence.

I'm a developmental psychologist, so I think a lot about adolescents and how to influence their behavior. And for years I had been conducting experiments on the best way to motivate and influence them.

One of the puzzles I worked on was about how to help ninth graders not fail their math and science classes and not drop out. We developed a short intervention that had effects in one national study four years later. So I was like, okay, not everything fails when you try to influence adolescents. There's something that works.

Society still thinks, in general, that you can't change teenagers, and everyone feels hopeless. Parents feel like, “What am I going to say to my kid? They don't listen to me.” Teachers are like, “These kids are disengaged.” But we had our experiments that seemed to show this promising result. So how do you square that circle?

I started doing a deep dive into not just our experiments, but into identifying the adults out there who consistently get the most out of young people, that inspire this enthusiastic desire to change the world or to do right and to be healthy. I wanted to characterize what those people do, to tie it in with the rigorous experimental work we've done, and then to write it in a way where the reader is basically getting an intervention that would impact their behavior over time and therefore they would do right by kids more frequently.

So, that's why I wrote it. I also got excited about the challenge of writing narrative nonfiction. I'm obsessed with Robert Caro and authors like that, and I wanted to do that kind of reporting for this book. I had lots of lunatic moments where I was following someone or calling them a million times and doing that kind of journalism to combine with the empirical science.

Not to criticize you or your colleagues, but academics are not always known for writing the most mellifluous prose. This reads like it's written by a journalist, and I mean that in the best way. I wanted to say that because I think sometimes when people see a book like this, they fear it’ll be “Eat your broccoli instead of your hot Cheetos.”

A lot of these books are too didactic. It's like reading the equivalent of a diet book that says the best way to lose weight is to never eat any food that you enjoy. I'm sure that's true, but it's not a helpful thing to tell me.

My advisor is Carol Dweck, who wrote the book Mindset, which sold 8 million copies. A lot of people have read it and it's a perfectly fine book, but its big flaw is it characterized the wrong mindset as a bad thing, like a character flaw, and the good mindset as what everyone should do. You finish the book having convinced yourself that you have the good mindset and looking down on everyone who has the bad one, and you never really confront the fact that most people have both. It's an influential book, but it's not a good intervention. It doesn't actually change your mind.

When I wrote this book, I was like, I can't just have the good guy idea and the bad guy idea, and then everyone is looking down on the bad guy idea, because the reader is ideally in the version that is the non-optimal and I'm trying to get them to the optimal. I can't insult the reader, basically. So, I had to dig inside the mind of not just the exemplary super people I'm writing about but also the average reader who wants to learn something from the super people and use it in their lives. That takes a lot of compassion and understanding.

I think there are enormous assumptions baked into self-help literature that you can tell somebody how to do something right and that will lead to the outcome that you want, but that’s probably false. How hard would it be to test whether a book actually leads to the behavior change that you want it to?

I'm the only person I know who published a randomized trial on the content of my book before I published my book. I randomized over 300 teachers across Texas to get a version of chapter one of my book and answer some questions about it, or else they got a control document on cognitive science of memory and learning, which is interesting but not useful. Nine months later, kids taught by teachers in the first group were more likely to finish a college level course in high school. The boost for low-SES students, which was about half of the students in the sample, was 10 percentage points. So it helped all students, but especially low-SES students, to get the mentor mindset message from my book. A 50-minute online module with no reinforcement that could be done for free reduced socioeconomic disparities across the entire state of Texas, and that's only chapter one.

So, the content of the book was experimentally tested before I published it. Readers won't care. They're just in the airport reading, like, “I wonder about these crazy kids.” But for me as a scientist, I wanted to be confident that this would benefit people. I wanted to be rigorous about it.

Earlier you said people just assume that you can't get teenagers to learn or do anything. It's actually a little worse than that, because on the one hand we think they can't learn and on the other hand we keep throwing interventions at them that are often shockingly ineffective. DARE is an example, and there were a lot of anti-tobacco interventions that didn't work and in some cases made kids more likely to smoke. Can you talk about the kinds of interventions that we tend to throw at people and where yours diverges?

We had these findings that certain of our interventions seemed to change behavior in a lasting way. And conventional public health approaches, like school-based social and emotional learning approaches, on average show no effects above seventh grade. I did a meta-analysis 10 years ago of bullying interventions, and the average result when a school got an anti-bullying program was that there was more bullying. The interventions actually made the problem worse.

The conventional approach is to make a pragmatic appeal. You define the bad behavior. You say why it's bad and a poor choice, and then the adult authority tells you, “You should listen to me because I'm the adult authority.” I call that grown-splaining. It’s saying, “If only I could transmit the contents of my smart adult brain into your dumb teenage brain, then you would make a wise choice. And if you, after that communication, continue to make a poor choice, it's because you're irresponsible. You're recalcitrant, you're rebellious, you're too immature.” That's what I observed. And then I thought there must be an ideology that leads us to keep doing this again and again.

One insight for me came from a project we did at Disney. Disney Epcot Center had an attraction called Habit Heroes, and I encourage people to Google image search it. They brought in a bunch of public health and epidemiology experts, supposed behavior change experts, and they created an attraction where the bad guys were overweight people. There was a guy named Lead Bottom who was really fat and broke a couch every time he sat on it, and there was the Snacker, a fairy lady who was plump and had cupcakes and flew around. And you, the protagonist, would go through the attraction and stop the bad guys, and the way you'd stop them would be by shooting them in the face with a broccoli cannon so that they would drop their cupcakes.

This is a great setting for a horror movie.

Right? I didn't make this up. This actually happened, and it was a scandal. They shut down the attraction during soft open, and a group of us were brought in to work with the imagineers and redesign the attraction.

The big problem was the basic presumption that kids don’t eat healthy because they don't know what junk food is. That's entirely the wrong psychology. The better psychology is that kids eat junk food because it's delicious, and the reason it tastes amazing is because it was engineered to be addictive. The reality is that humans would love to have non-ultraprocessed foods that were healthy, but there are forces out there that are influencing and controlling us.

So, we changed the whole attraction to be about mildly overweight kids who nevertheless made healthy choices. It decouples weight from choices and it's not about shame. It's about growing your power. We depict an overweight kid diving toward healthy food, but evil ghouls are stopping him and preventing him from drinking water or eating healthy food. Then we say, “It's okay if you mess up, because every time you make a healthy choice, you're growing your power,” so there's a growth mindset message.

We then randomized kids in the attraction — we had imagineers walking around with clipboards as you walked into the park, and you either went to our attraction or took a survey — and then afterwards we gave them a coupon that they could spend on either junk food or healthy food in the park. And we found that, especially for overweight boys, we tripled the rate at which they bought healthy food rather than junk food.

That's an example of two alternative approaches. The version in which kids don't know the healthy thing, they're slaves to their impulses and they are tempted by everything left and right, they're short sighted — that's a version of what I call the neurobiological incompetence model. It's the idea that teenagers lack a prefrontal cortex and their brain’s reward sensitivity region is hyperactive, so they're all gas, no brakes. They can't control their impulses or urges, they can't think rationally, and so the adults need to do it for them, and maybe they need to enforce the rules with threats and so on.

The kind of grown-splaining approach, the conventional public health approach, comes in part from this belief that teenagers’ brains are poor-functioning. I get where that comes from; lots of people did dumb stuff when they were teenagers. But at the same time, we now know the prefrontal cortex is just designed to guide goal-directed behavior. It's not like in Plato where you've got the rational acting mind that has to control the irrational impulses. That model of mind has been around for thousands of years and it's kind of codified in modern neuroscience, but it’s not correct. It actually goes the other way. The goal-directed planning part of the brain is the servant of the appetitive desires, because what is the human being planning? They're planning stuff that helps them survive or feel happy or not feel bad.

So, emotions and goals are the cause of prefrontal development. The prefrontal is developing in order to accomplish your goals. Once we know that, it's like, well, are teenagers incapable of goal-directed behavior? Absolutely not. They just don't have the goals that adults want them to. Adults want them to do factor worksheets of trinomials and balance stoichiometric equations, but teenagers just want to look awesome.

We want them to behave and think like adults, and to have the goals that adults have, right? We want them to prioritize their retirement savings and not getting diabetes, but they are immensely motivated to be cool, to look right, to succeed romantically. There are all these goals that they’re very driven to attain.

Yeah, but I think there's something a little more noble than a lot of that. It's the idea you are a person of worth in the eyes of other people in your community, that you have some contribution. You bring something to the table that could help the survival or success of your group. And it's this concept of earned prestige, that in the eyes of other people whose opinions you care about, and who are consequential with respect to your future and your well-being, you are a person of worth and value that has something to contribute.

That's really what I mean by status and respect and social standing. It's not just “cool” in a frivolous sense, although obviously that's a key motivation. I think the bigger thing is like, “Am I a nobody that can be ignored and forgotten? That's truly meaningless to my group? Or do I have meaning and value and purpose?”

This gets to the mentor mindset, which is at the heart of your book. It’s your recommended strategy for hitching those goals to the ends that we, as wise adults, want to hitch them to. So, what is the mentor mindset? What do you mean by that?

The mentor mindset is a leadership approach. It could be for a manager of 20-year-olds, a parent of a teenager, a professor in college, or a K-12 teacher. It's an approach in which you have very high standards and you're very supportive so that everyone can meet that standard.

It turns out that when I paused a lot of my conventional academic research and started finding these exemplary bright spots, they all were doing that. Every single one. There's no exceptions among the people who don't have the problem of teenagers rebelling against them, not listening to them, being surly. They all were super high standards, super high support.

But there are then two possible errors in that. You could be super high standards, very low support, or you could be very high support, very low standards. The first of those — high standards, low support — is what I call the enforcer mindset. I kind of alluded to it already: this idea that if you believe that young people are unruly, surly, dangerous to themselves and society, prone to impulse, incapable of thinking independently, and so on, then the leadership approach that makes sense is to enforce very high standards through strict discipline and to have strong threats for misbehavior. It’s basically coercing young people to adopt our version of what behavior is good and should be followed. You're enforcing standards, but a lot of young people then don't meet that standard when there's no support, so only the kind of kid who has all the resources already ends up meeting that high standard. The enforcer approach tends to just exacerbate inequalities and unfairness, and it then causes young people to feel like the world is unjust and accusatory.

The protector mindset is flawed in a different way. It's high support, low standards. That comes from the belief that young people have had toxic stress. They've had childhood trauma. They've gone through so much. They're so feeble, and therefore we can't expect them to do anything impressive. We can't expect a lot of them, so in a protector way, you give people very small goals and lots of praise to boost self-esteem. In a crisis, if someone is stressed or overwhelmed or anxious, then we're like, “Don't worry about it. It's fine. Do it later, or don't.” We saw a lot of this in the first two years of the pandemic, where professors were like, “Don't do any assignments. Everyone gets an A.”

I think both of those mindsets are flawed, and they both come from this neurobiological incompetence model. They start from a presumption of flaws and limitations in young people's brains, whereas the mentor comes from a presumption that young people are capable of important accomplishments under the right conditions and when they get the right support.

The principle that this mentor mindset — this kind of sweet spot of high standards, high expectations — is the right one seems persuasive to me. But if it requires high resources, does that limit how it can scale? And, if not, why not?

Time is a big resource. So if I'm a manager at Walmart and I'm 35 and I have a bunch of 19-year-olds, how much time do I have for mentoring when I'm on the clock? If I'm a manager at Microsoft that's leading a product launch and our competitors are trying to kill us, do I really have time to sit down and mentor? And if I'm a parent and the three kids are at home and the macaroni is burning on the stove and the repair man's at the door and someone's late for soccer practice, is that the time to have a five minute Socratic dialogue about why you pushed your sister?

That's the kind of thing I hear a lot. I don't hear the complaint that in resource-constrained settings the mentor mindset wouldn't work, because a lot of the research comes from leaders in high poverty contacts who nevertheless get amazing results, and they're always the high standards, high support people. They're never the enforcers or the protectors. In general the finding is that the mentor mindset's good for everyone, but it’s especially good for populations of people that are facing discrimination or othering or stigma or stereotyping or poor resources.

But time is a real resource and as a leader, you don't have an infinite time. What I always say is that there's a startup cost to a mentor mindset. One of the things you have to do is be hyper-transparent about what you're doing and why. You can't just rush through and presume that the young person in front of you will interpret your actions in the best possible light. You have to be transparent about what you were doing in those critical moments, but that's 15 seconds, 30 seconds. You have to think about it, it's a mental effort, but it's not that much time.

So I would characterize it as a mentor startup cost, but I'm not saying you have to be a formal mentor. It’s not about having coffee with you on Tuesdays and telling you career advice. There's research that shows there's no long-term impact on a person's life of a formal mentoring relationship. But there's tons of research on the informal mentoring relationships that naturally happen, and those happen when the leader has the mentor mindset anytime they enter an interaction. Whether I talk to you once or I talk to you every week, I enter it with the perspective of “I'm aligning my resources with your long-term growth and development and well-being.” You have high standards and high support. When you do that, you save yourself a ton of time, and then you leave behind this trail of people whose lives you've changed.

And that's the most fun thing ever, right? To be at a retirement party and people are like, “This guy changed my life in one conversation.” That's the offer of the mentor mindset, and that’s why I think that trade-off makes sense.