Why we should favor process-based praise

© 2000- 2024 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved

If we tell kids they’re smart and capable, won’t that inspire them to strive and learn? Studies suggest otherwise. If kids sense that we’re exaggerating or insincere, our efforts will backfire. And if we make them feel they have a reputation to defend, they may end up shrinking from challenges — holding back because they don’t want to risk failure and the loss of that reputation.

Can we avoid these pitfalls by focusing on “process-based” praise? It’s likely the better approach, but even here we need to be sensitive to the context and the developmental status of our children: As kids get older, they become more savvy to praise that’s designed to boost their egos or manipulate. Here is an overview of the research on praise and intelligence.

A cross-cultural wariness towards the use of praise

In cultures around the world, people have tended to take a cautious view of praising children for their talents and abilities. It seems that just about everybody – from hunter-gatherers, to agriculturalists, to folks living in industrial societies – have had the same idea: If we pump up individuals with praise, they might become conceited, entitled, bossy, or narcissistic (Lancy 2022).

But then something happened – the rise of the Self-Esteem movement in the late 20^th century. In places like the United States, some people became convinced that children needed ego-boosting praise to achieve (Baumeister et al 2003; 2018).

Want your kids to succeed? Tell them they are bright and talented – over and over again. Then maybe they will feel motivated to perform well.

The trend rippled throughout the educational system and major media. The classic preschool program, Blue’s Clues, ended each episode with a cheerleading session for its young viewers: “Hey, you know what? You’re really smart!”

Well-intentioned? Certainly. But probably not the best approach. Research suggests that certain types of praise can backfire. In particular, telling kids that they are smart can make them avoid challenges. It may even put them at risk for thinking they are stupid or pathetic. What works better? Sincere praise that is focused on specific behaviors, including the processes that kids undergo when they learn and master new skills. Let’s take a look at the evidence.

When you praise kids for their ability, it makes them focus on looking good—not on learning.

In a landmark series of experiments on American 5th graders, researchers Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck (1998) found that kids behaved differently depending on the type of praise they received after working on a test of abstract reasoning (“Raven’s Progressive Matrices”).

Kids who had been praised for their intelligence tended to avoid subsequent challenges. Instead, they preferred easy tasks. They were also more interested in their competitive standing–how they measured up relative to others–than they were in learning how to improve their future performance.

By contrast, kids who had been praised for their effort showed the opposite trend. They preferred tasks that were challenging. They were more interested in self-improvement than they were in finding out how other children had performed.

Kids differed in other respects, too. Compared to kids praised for their effort, kids praised for their ability were

• more likely to give up after a failure
• more likely to perform poorly after a failure, and
• more likely to misrepresent how well they did on a task.

Twenty years later, Shufen Xing had her colleagues conducted similar experiments on 5^th graders in China (Xing 2018). Once again, kids were less likely to improve their performance after failure if they had previously received praise for their ability (e.g., “Wow! You did a good job…I can see you must be really clever!”), rather than praise for their effort (“Wow! You did a good job…I can see you must have worked very hard…”).

In addition, Xing’s team uncovered evidence that praising ability led kids to sabotage their performance on difficult tasks by rushing through them or taking less time.

It’s as if the kids were thinking, “Hmm. I’m afraid this challenge is going to mess up my reputation. Maybe I can spare myself embarrassment by doing rushed, careless work. Then I can use this as a face-saving explanation for why I didn’t perform well.”

It might be a conscious thought, or an unconscious one, but the effect is the same: The student self-handicaps in order to protect his or her self-worth.

Praising kids for their abilities may backfire in other ways, too.

When we praise kids for their intelligence, they may learn to view their failures as evidence that we were wrong. They aren’t intelligent after all.

In the Mueller and Dweck study, kids were given moderately difficult problems to solve, and when each kid was finished, he or she was told “Wow, you did really well on these problems. You got….a really high score” (Mueller and Dweck 1998).

In addition, there were three different experimental conditions. Each kid was either

• praised for his or her intelligence (“You must be smart at these problems”)
• praised for his or her effort (“You must have worked hard at these problems”), or
• given no additional feedback (the control condition)

Next, children were given a second set of problems—this time, very difficult ones—and they were asked to explain why they performed poorly.

The kids who had praised for their effort on previous tasks responded the same way as controls did—attributing their failure to a lack of effort. But the kids who had been praised for their intelligence attributed more of their failure to a lack of intelligence.

There is also evidence that praising kids can set up children for experiencing feelings of shame

In an experiment conducted on children in the Netherlands, Eddie Brummelmann and his colleagues asked more than 300 elementary school kids (ages 8-13) to fill out a questionnaire measuring their self-esteem.

Then — a few days later – each child played two rounds of an online game: a practice round, and a competitive round.

Although the kids didn’t know it, they were each randomly assigned to receive different kinds of feedback, regardless of their actual performance. For instance, after the first (practice) round, each child received either:

• person-based praise (“Wow, you’re great!”), which comments on a child’s personal traits;
• process-based praise (“Wow, you did a great job!”), which directs attention to a child’s behavior; or
• a control condition, in which the child wasn’t given any praise, but merely informed that the next round of the game was about to begin.

After the second (competitive) round, each child received good news (“You won!”) or bad news (“You lost!”).

The researchers measured how kids were feeling immediately before and after the competitive round of the game. And what did they find?

As you might expect, kids felt worse after learning that they had lost the competitive game. In particular, they reported an increase in feelings of shame. But this change of mood depended, in part, on what kind of feedback they had received earlier. As the study authors explain,

“…children experienced a sharp increase in shame following failure after they received person praise… but not after they received process praise… or no praise” (Brummelmann et al 2014).

In other words, person-based praise (“You’re great!”) seems to have set kids up for a particularly big spike in shame after they experienced a failure.

Moreover, the effect was especially strong for children with low self-esteem. These kids reacted to failure much more negatively if they had previously received person-based praise (Brummelmann et al 2014).

So are we safe if we focus on praising children’s efforts and accomplishments, rather than praising their ability?

Not necessarily! Because kids might interpret our praise as insincere — or as evidence that we are patronizing them.

When researchers have tested adolescents, studies confirm it: Older kids are savvy to the ways of the world. They understand that adults sometimes offer insincere praise to be polite, nice, or manipulative.

Kids may also interpret praise for effort as a kind of consolation prize. (“She’s praising how hard I worked…which suggests she doesn’t have anything good to say about my performance….” ) Or they might view our praise as evidence that we have low expectations of their ability (Ameniya and Wong 2018).

Does this mean that it’s impossible to offer older kids effective, motivating praise? No. But we need to be thoughtful, and choose praise that feels sincere, meaningful, and respectful. As an alternative to praising kids for their effort, we can acknowledge the choices they made in trying to complete a task, and share our positive reactions to strategies that worked.

What about praising younger children, like preschoolers and toddlers? Are they affected the same way?

Is it ever too early to start emphasizing process-based praise over person-based praise? Maybe not.

Research supports the idea that young children thrive on praise.

For example, in a study tracking the development of 4-year-olds, researchers found that parental praise was a substantial predictor of a child’s vocabulary growth. Kids who received lots of parental praise tended to have larger expressive vocabularies. They also showed more growth in their mathematics skills by the age of 5 (Carver et al 2022).

But research also suggests that the type of praise matters. Praising kids for specific behavior – rather than generic traits – has been linked with better outcomes.

Related Topics:favorpraiseprocessbased

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