Mindsets, Checked
7 Popular Ideas and What the Research Actually Found

“Mindset” posts promise that changing one belief will change your life. Some of the ideas behind them come from real research, some from self-help books, and some from research that did not hold up. Here are seven, checked against the papers. This page describes findings; it does not give health or money advice.

1. “Scarcity mindset vs abundance mindset”

Partly true, and it is two different ideas sharing a word. The first is a self-help attitude from the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. FranklinCovey, which runs the 7 Habits courses, describes it under “The Principle of Abundance”: when we think in scarcity, “Life becomes a zero-sum game. We start to believe there’s only so much to go around”. That is an attitude to other people, not a research finding.

The second is a research programme by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. Its claim is about attention: “scarcity changes how people allocate attention: It leads them to engage more deeply in some problems while neglecting others” (Shah, Mullainathan and Shafir, Science, 2012). In their book Scarcity (2013) they write: “It is not that the poor have less bandwidth as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces anyone’s bandwidth.” Nothing in the papers and book excerpt we read says that an “abundance mindset” helps.

Disputed is the fair verdict on how robust that research is. A 2013 Science paper by Mani and colleagues found that thinking about finances “reduces cognitive performance among poor but not in well-off participants”. A reanalysis by Wicherts and Scholten “fails to corroborate their findings”, and the authors replied that the effect “remains reliable across our experiments”. A study of low-income US households before and after payday (Carvalho, Meier and Wang, 2016) found no difference in “the performance in cognitive function tasks”. And in 2021 O’Donnell and colleagues re-ran 20 studies on scarcity priming, drawn from papers that cited the 2012 study; the set included some of Mullainathan and Shafir’s own later work. They reported that “replication effect sizes were smaller than the original effect sizes for 80% of the 20 studies”, and “four of our replication efforts yielded significant results”. A 2022 correction fixed errors in several of those replications and noted that 18, not 20, of the original effects had been significant. In 2023 Shah, Zhao, Mullainathan and Shafir replied that the audit “deviates from its own a priori sampling criteria”; O’Donnell and colleagues answered that a broad sample was deliberate, while conceding that three of the studies measured scarcity rather than manipulating it.

2. Locus of control

True as to where it comes from. Published work on the idea goes back at least to E. J. Phares in 1957, and it became famous through Julian B. Rotter’s 1966 monograph, “Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement”. The title says what it measured: a general expectation about whether what happens to you follows from your own actions. We could not read the papers in which Rotter discussed how his idea had been misread, so we say nothing about his verdict on the popular “internal good, external bad” version.

3. Maximizers vs satisficers

True that “satisfice” in this sense is Herbert Simon’s term, and DISPUTED that maximizers are less happy. Simon’s own dictionary entry says the word, which “appears in the Oxford English Dictionary as a Northumbrian synonym for ‘satisfy’, was borrowed for this new use by H.A. Simon (1956)”: one who chooses an option that “meets or exceeds specified criteria, but that is not guaranteed to be either unique or in any sense the best, is said to satisfice.” For Simon it described a way any decision-maker might choose, not a personality type.

The personality version came later. Barry Schwartz and colleagues (2002) built a Maximization Scale and found “negative correlations between maximization and happiness, optimism, self-esteem, and life satisfaction”. In a study of job seekers, “students with high maximizing tendencies secured jobs with 20% higher starting salaries”, yet “maximizers were less satisfied than satisficers with the jobs they obtained” (Iyengar, Wells and Schwartz, 2006). Diab, Gillespie and Highhouse (2008) built a different scale that “did not correlate with life (dis)satisfaction”, and concluded: “the interpretation of maximizers as unhappy may be due to poor measurement of the construct.” These are correlations; none shows that maximizing causes unhappiness.

4. Zero-sum thinking

True that it is a measured belief. Różycka-Tran, Boski and Wojciszke (2015) defined it as the belief “that one person’s gain is possible only at the expense of other persons”, and tested their scale in “a large pancultural project of 37 nations”. A 2026 paper by Chinoy, Nunn, Sequeira and Stantcheva, “using a new survey of 20,400 US residents”, found that “a more zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with more support for government redistribution, race- and gender-based affirmative action, and more restrictive immigration policies.” The authors report that it correlates with stronger alignment with the Democratic Party but is “not primarily a partisan issue”; it helps explain differences within both parties. Those are associations, not causes. Which policies are right is a question of values, and we leave it there.

5. Beginner’s mind

Partly true as Shunryu Suzuki’s sentence. The famous line, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few”, comes from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970). David Chadwick, writing about the book in 2008, reports that a transcript of a lecture dated 10 November 1965 has Suzuki saying: “In beginner’s mind we have many possibilities, but in expert mind there is not much possibility.” “Only when Trudy polished it did it become” the famous version, Chadwick writes, meaning Trudy Dixon, who edited the book. Suzuki’s comment on the finished book, as Chadwick reports: “Good book. I didn’t write it, but it looks like a good book.” Chadwick describes a book of “Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice”, drawn from lectures Suzuki gave in Los Altos that Marian Derby recorded.

6. Growth mindset

Disputed in how much it helps. The idea is associated with Carol Dweck, a co-author of the 2019 study below. Large reviews of interventions disagree: a 2018 pair of meta-analyses found “Overall effects were weak for both meta-analyses”; a 2019 national experiment found an intervention “improved grades among lower-achieving students”; and in 2023 one meta-analysis found an effect that “was nonsignificant after correcting for potential publication bias” while another found a small effect on academic achievement for targeted groups in high-fidelity interventions. We cover the evidence in more detail in Growth Mindset.

7. Learned helplessness

Partly true as “you learn to stop trying”. The original experiments were real: Martin Seligman and Steven Maier’s 1967 paper, “Failure to escape traumatic shock”, used dogs and electric shock, and compared animals that could stop the shocks with animals given matched shocks (in 1967, the escape group’s average shock duration) that they could not control. Their theory was that the animals “learned that outcomes were independent of their responses”. In 2016 the same two researchers wrote that “the original theory got it backward”, that “Passivity in response to shock is not learned. It is the default, unlearned response to prolonged aversive events”, and that what animals learn is that “they can control aversive events”. Most of this is animal research; the authors label its use for human depression as speculation.

Our reading

The mindset ideas that last are usually narrower than the posters: a belief about control, a limit on attention, a word for “good enough”. The clearest correction here came from the researchers themselves, and that is a good model. If a mindset claim comes without a study, or with one that was never re-run, it is closer to a story than a finding.

Sources

• FranklinCovey, “Habit 4: Think Win-Win”.
• S. Mullainathan and E. Shafir, Scarcity (2013), publisher’s excerpt; A. K. Shah, S. Mullainathan and E. Shafir, Science 338 (2012); A. Mani et al., Science 341 (2013); J. M. Wicherts and A. Z. Scholten, and the authors’ reply, Science 342 (2013); L. S. Carvalho, S. Meier and S. W. Wang, American Economic Review 106 (2016); M. O’Donnell et al., PNAS 118 (2021), and correction, PNAS 119 (2022); A. K. Shah, J. Zhao, S. Mullainathan and E. Shafir, and M. O’Donnell, L. D. Nelson and D. A. Moore, PNAS 120 (2023).
• E. J. Phares, “Expectancy changes in skill and chance situations”, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (1957); J. B. Rotter, Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 80 (1966).
• H. A. Simon, “Satisficing”, The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (2008 ed.); B. Schwartz et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83 (2002); S. S. Iyengar, R. E. Wells and B. Schwartz, Psychological Science 17 (2006); D. L. Diab, M. A. Gillespie and S. Highhouse, Judgment and Decision Making 3 (2008).
• J. Różycka-Tran, P. Boski and B. Wojciszke, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 46 (2015); S. Chinoy, N. Nunn, S. Sequeira and S. Stantcheva, American Economic Review 116 (2026).
• D. Chadwick, review of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Inquiring Mind (Fall 2008).
• V. F. Sisk et al., Psychological Science 29 (2018); D. S. Yeager et al., Nature 573 (2019); B. N. Macnamara and A. P. Burgoyne, and J. L. Burnette et al., Psychological Bulletin 149 (2023).
• M. E. Seligman and S. F. Maier, Journal of Experimental Psychology 74 (1967); S. F. Maier and M. E. Seligman, “Learned helplessness at fifty”, Psychological Review 123 (2016).

Checked September 2026.

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