Jayson Blair’s Mindset (UPDATED)

You can listen to the speech here. The Roanoke Times covers it here. It will be televised by C-SPAN. I am persuaded my hope has been realized; this was not the typical celebrity journalist comeback it might have been. Instead, it sounds like Blair was a wise choice for the Journalism Ethics Institute keynote lecture.

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Jayson Blair, who resigned from the New York Times in 2003 after he was caught plagiarizing and fabricating elements of his stories, was the featured speaker at Washington and Lee University’s 48th Journalism Ethics Institute this afternoon. That got him on NPR this morning, and Fox News Sunday this weekend.

I’ve not found what he said in the speech but, from the story on NPR, his could be construed to be a typical celebrity comeback. One difference… it’s a redo:

Blair hasn’t talked much in public about his own wrongdoing — not since he did a media tour in early 2004 for his memoir, Burning Down My Masters’ House [link]. The book started with an admission of deceit but spent much energy pointing fingers at his colleagues for their own behavior.

This go-round, the apology may be more sincere. But it also comes with the confessional illness and rehab:

Blair says he is responsible for his decisions. But he also says his behavior was influenced by depression and by bipolar disorder. And he says drug use and alcohol didn’t help.

“At every moment of potential weakness, or where I felt I couldn’t do something … it was so much easier to jump back over the ethical line,” he says.

Blair says he’s now clean and sober. He says he’s receiving successful treatment for his mental illnesses. Blair started free support groups for others with similar struggles. He now works at a psychiatric outpatient clinic in Virginia. Its director, Michael Oberschneider, told me Blair has been utterly reliable and a true boon for many clients there.

I’m reminded of the work of Carol Dweck, a Stanford Psychology Professor and author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. She has identified and defined two fundamental mindsets people use — a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.

People with a fixed mindset believe their talents and abilities are static; you’re born with them and they’re not able to be improved through practice. People with a fixed mindset are afraid challenges may expose innate shortcomings.

Those with a growth mindset believe intelligence, talents, and abilities can be developed over time. They believe their abilities develop through hard work and persistence. Obstacles are an opportunity to rise to the challenge. Failure is a chance to learn and grow.

I came upon Dweck’s work through a 2006 podcast interview she did with Dr. Moira Gunn on Tech Nation. I was particularly struck by their discussion of self-esteem. Says Dweck:

Self-esteem per se is just fine, but I think we have a misguided model of what it is and how to promote it. We think it’s something that you can just pump into a child the way you inflate a tire. And we think we can do that by telling them how great they are. That’s the misguided part.

In our work we’ve shown that telling children how great they are… makes them very happy for a few minutes, but it makes them completely unable to cope with setbacks. How does it do that? … Well it puts them into a fixed mindset. It tells them, “Hey, you did well on this test. That lets me read your underlying fixed ability and I think it’s pretty good.”

But it also tells children the name of the game is to look smart. So that when we then offer these students a chance to do something that stretches them and would help them learn, they say, “No thank you. I’d rather keep on looking smart.”

We also showed that when they then got something that was more difficult, they crashed. They said, “I guess I’m not smart after all.” They lost their enthusiasm for the task and their performance went way down. Incidentally this was an IQ test, so praising their intelligence made them less smart.

What’s the alternative? For other students we praised their efforts or their strategies.

You can guess that the outcome was dramatically different. “When we offered them a chance to keep on looking smart or learn something new, 90% of them wanted to learn something new, even if they would make mistakes and not look very good.”

The first time I quoted Dweck’s work was in the context of a NYTimes story on studies exposing how the dire life patterns of the huge pool of poorly educated black men means they become ever more disconnected from mainstream society.

I quote her here, now, in the context of Blair, whose age and race make it a possibility that he was subject to that misguided model of self-esteem. Dweck made that connection herself, in the context of some other notable fabricators:

There are these famous cases of Janet Cook and Stephen Glass, famous young reporters who made up stuff. Had to give back a Pulitzer Prize. Had to leave the New Republic in shame. What was that about? Were they just cheaters with deep down bad qualities? I think they were like the children in my studies who received lavish praise for their intelligence or talent and then didn’t feel that they had the luxury of learning. Maybe Janet Cook and Stephen Glass felt they had to be brilliant right away. They couldn’t take the time to learn the ropes and do the legwork and yes, they came out with these great stories right away, but they weren’t true.

Dweck’s work shows that a fixed mindset can be changed; a growth mindset learned. I am informed by her work in my own dealings with students. I’ll be watching Blair on Fox on Sunday. He is clearly an intelligent guy. I hope he’s learned.