“Teenagers (AND HUMANS OF ALL AGES) are great at goal-directed behavior when it’s a goal that they care about.” – David Yeager, professor of psychology, University of Texas at Austin (added by yours truly;)
In an interview on People I Mostly Admire, David Yeager says that his research shows that viewing difficult tasks as challenges rather than threats has a profound impact on performance and growth. As leaders, we help others find this challenge perspective by leading them as mentors rather than as protectors or enforcers.
Yeager finds ways to help teenagers notice and direct their AGENCY toward PURPOSES that make them feel good, which makes them more likely to find ways to GROW toward those PURPOSES. Since teenagers tend to stay CONNECTED to their peers, this creates waves of change that run through their social groups and society, enabling them to CONTRIBUTE to large-scale changes that fill the teenagers (and researchers) with a sense of MEANING.
From the interview:
“In the 1990s, 30 percent of all teenagers smoked. For a long time, people tried to solve that problem in the conventional way that you solve teenage poor-decision-making problems. And it’s by telling teenagers that their decisions are dumb, and that we, as a smart adults, have a better understanding. And then being shocked when teenagers don’t listen to us and then blaming teenagers for having such a shortsighted view of the world or for being so impulsive or for lacking self-control…
The “Truth” campaign was in response to these kind of terrible, conventional public health approaches that get adolescent psychology wrong….
And those ads try to basically contaminate the behavior to make it seem inconsistent with adolescent values…
So the takeaway there for a teenager is, If I want to be on the team of old man creeps that are, like, killing people and laughing to the bank, then I would smoke. But if I want to say screw them, then I would not smoke. And that had this promising impact, reduced teen smoking pretty dramatically. And then Bogusky’s firm won the bid to create a national campaign. And in the national campaign, the famous commercial is a bunch of teenagers streaming into the streets. And they, on cue, while lined up outside of the high-rise building of a tobacco company — they all fall down, dead, pretend to be dead.
And then one teenager holds up a sign that says how many thousands of people per day tobacco kills. And then the sign says, “Would you take a day off?” It shows teenagers with their peers flooding the streets, standing up for what’s right, and getting social approval as a part of it. They’re taking a stand against people controlling them, which are all really consistent with adolescent values. The “Truth” campaign has led teen smoking to go from around 30 percent in the late ‘90s to in some cases under 5 percent, 6 percent.”
Yeagar says that most strategies for motivating young people don’t work because they don’t take into account the degree to which young people (and people in general?) thrive on status and respect – both of which reflect how sensitive we are to how we believe we are seen by our peer groups. From Yeager:
‘I call this the “adolescent predicament.” I don’t want to characterize adolescents as like a broken period where we need to hide ’em in a closet for 15 years. Instead, it’s hormonal and neural and socially heightened sensitivity to status and respect. But then a society that often works to either deprive them of it or to threaten that status and respect, and when that’s done poorly, we see a lot of the acting out behavior that infuriates us as adults who care for young people. But when you harness it, then you see amazing energy. The teenagers who learn how to code in order to fight injustice around the world, or the teenagers who master social media to contribute to some social movement.’
Yeager says that when dealing with young people, adults tend to default to one of two mindsets: enforcer or protector. Enforcers come across as “having exceptionally high standards and “being really, really demanding,” but they are also perceived as “being generally unsupportive.” When dealing with enforcers young people experience a lack of status and respect, and many see resistance as the way to assert that they deserve status and respect. In contrast, protectors come across as “someone who has low standards, but they’re very caring and kind and supportive.” When dealing with protectors many young people start to doubt their own ability to cope with challenges, leading them to become more passive and less willing to take on the challengers that produce growth.
He recommends that adults instead strive to be mentors. The mentor mindset combines high standards with caring and support. His research shows that approaching young people with the mentor mindset helps them shift into a mindset conducive to taking on challenges that enable them to gain status and respect, without resorting to resistance. The experience seems to trigger a virtuous upward spiral of enhanced short-term success and long-term growth. Yeager’s description of the mentor mindset reminded me of Kim Scott’s radical candor.
Based on his research exploring the interactions of how we respond to stress (both mentally and physically) with strategies for maintaining a growth mindset, Yeager came up with what he calls “synergistic mindset interventions.”
In a synergistic mindset intervention, the subjects are placed in a situation in which they face a challenge that they are worried may exceed their current abilities, then they are provided with a cue(s) that help them see this challenge as an opportunity that will be stressful but feasible and likely to produce personal growth.
His research shows that subjects who have received these growth mindset-inducing cues tend to internalize beliefs that make them more willing to take on new challenges – even months or years after the initial intervention.
Lab research implied that the growth mindset-inducing cues actually correlated with physiological changes that enhanced the subjects’ ability to deal effectively with stressful challenges:
‘The measure of stress in that one is called total peripheral resistance. It’s basically the constriction of the vasculature in your body. And the reason why that matters is because if you’re under a physical threat, like you’re going to be killed by a bear, then you want to bleed as little as possible so your body stores more blood in your chest cavity and not in your extremities. But if you think you can beat the bear, then you need as much oxygenated blood in your muscles so your legs can run fast and your arms can fight strong. And so the dilation is a measure of your body storing more blood peripherally, and the constriction is it storing it centrally.
And so what we find is that under control, you just walk in, you do this task, your blood vessels constrict a lot, especially during the speech. And then your cardiovascular system hasn’t recovered even minutes after the math test. But, interestingly, if you got the synergistic mindset and you were told right before you gave that speech and did the math, “Hey, if you notice yourself feeling really stressed, that’s your body mobilizing energy. And if you make a mistake, that’s a chance to learn, etc., etc.” Then we actually see a difference in your blood vasculature. More of a challenge-type response where they’re more dilated, less constricted, and less of a threat-type response.’
Agency (主体性) + Purpose (志) + Growth (成長) + Connection (繋がり) + Contribution (貢献) = Meaning (意義)
© Dana Cogan, 2025, all rights reserved.