Growth mindsets of anxiety: Do the benefits to individual flourishing come with societal costs?

ABSTRACT

Believing anxiety can change is a predictor of wellbeing, in part, because such beliefs – known as growth mindsets – predict weaker threat appraisals, which in turn improves psychological functioning. However, feeling a sense of personal threat facilitates social activism, and thus growth mindsets may undermine such action. Across six studies (N = 1761), including cross-sectional and experimental approaches (3 pre-registered), growth mindsets predict flourishing, including wellbeing, resilience, and grit. We find that growth mindsets indirectly predict reduced activism against social threats through reduced threat appraisals, which are critical motivators of activism. The total effect linking growth mindsets to activism was not robust. Overall, Bayesian meta-analytic summary effects reveal that growth mindsets of anxiety are critical components of psychological flourishing, broadly defined. Mindsets are also consistently linked to weakened threat appraisals across a variety of social threats from gun violence to natural disasters. Although helpful for resilience, these dampened threat appraisals impair social action.

KEYWORDS:

• Mindsets
• anxiety
• wellbeing
• flourishing
• activism
• threat appraisal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/xa8ud/.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/xa8ud/.

Notes

1. Analyses with political orientation as the focal point can be found in Supplemental Materials at OSF.

2. N varies slightly across analyses due to missing data.

3. We included an attention check in studies 1–2. Results are similar after excluding those who failed it thus, we retain all participants. Across studies we retained the data from all participants who completed the study.

4. We did not expect the manipulation to impact more trait-level outcomes like grit.

5. Partial correlations and moderation analyses controlling for experimental condition are nearly identical.

6. See online Supplemental Materials for details of these conditional indirect effects.

7. Correlations reveal that both gun violence and global warming were seen as similarly threatening across ideology, but illegal immigration was seen to be more threatening to more conservative participants.

8. In both studies, correlations reveal that both gun violence and global warming were seen as more threatening to relatively more liberal participants whereas illegal immigration was seen to be more threatening to relatively more conservative participants.

9. The recruitment platform asked participants ‘In general, what is your political affiliation?’ with the options of Democrat, Republican, Independent, Other, None.

10. We included exploratory measures including the efficacy measures from Study 3 and an assessment of inclination to act to reduce or prevent threats; exploratory analyses for efficacy measures are in Supplemental Materials.

11. Correlations reveal that gun violence was seen as more threatening to relatively more liberal participants, organized crime more threatening to relatively more conservative participants, and no ideological difference in perceiving threat from natural disasters.