Do Mindsets Shape Students’ Well-Being and Performance?

Abstract

“Mindsets (or implicit theories) are people’s lay beliefs about the nature of human attributes, such as intelligence or personality”. Individuals with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence is an unchangeable trait, whereas those with a growth mindset think of it as a malleable quality that can be increased and developed. This study explored the relationships among growth mindset, wellbeing, and performance in a sample of 1,240 students from a multi-campus private university located in 18 states across Mexico. Our results indicated that individuals who scored high in growth (vs. fixed) mindset showed increased levels of wellbeing and also performed better in school. Furthermore, we found that wellbeing mediated the relationship between growth mindset and performance and that the effect of growth mindset on grades was higher among younger students. These findings have interesting implications for psychology and education.

Keywords:

• Mindset
• growth mindset
• wellbeing
• academic performance

Author Notes

Nancy Berenice Ortiz Alvarado is a Phd Candidate in Business Administration at EGADE Business School, Monterrey, Mexico. She is a lecturer at the Department of Marketing and Business Analytics at Tecnologico de Monterrey, lecturing in courses such as Marketing & Creativity, Marketing B2B, and Internal Marketing and online lectures in Branding, Digital Marketing and Strategic Planning. She collaborates in the Research Group on Consumer Behavior. Her research interest is focused on consumer behavior, well-being, sustainable marketing and digital marketing. She also has worked for large and small organizations in the areas of Marketing, Business and Internet.

Marisol Rodríguez Ontiveros is a Phd Candidate in Business Administration at EGADE Business School, Monterrey, Mexico. She has experience as an online lecturer of courses in Tecnologico de Monterrey and Universidad Metropolitana de Monterrey. Her research interests are in topics related to psychology, well-being, consumer behavior, and marketing.

Edgardo Arturo Ayala Gaytán is an associate professor at the School of Social Sciences and Government of the Tecnologico de Monterrey. His research focused in behavioral economics and economic development. In this regard, he has published articles in indexed journals in marketing and economics about wellbeing, consumer behavior, health economics and the impact of economic reforms in the consumer welfare. Professor Ayala has been recognized as a member of the National System of Researchers, Level II at CONACYT (Mexico).

Notes

1 The estimates for the campus variables are not reported here, but they are available upon request from the authors.

2 Hayes (2013) proposed an index of moderated mediation and a formal test to assess whether the indirect effect indeed varies with the moderator levels. The bootstrapping 95% confidence interval of the index is (0.0003, 0.0118), indicating that the index is significantly different from zero.