Mindset : The New Psychology of Success pdfdrive com

Victims and Revenge
The  fixed  mindset  may  also  play  a  role  in  how  the  victim  reacts  to  bullying.
When people feel deeply judged by a rejection, their impulse is to feel bad about
themselves  and  to  lash  out  in  bitterness.  They  have  been  cruelly  reduced  and
they  wish  to  reduce  in  return.  In  our  studies,  we  have  seen  perfectly  normal
people—children  and  adults—respond  to  rejection  with  violent  fantasies  of
revenge.
Highly  educated,  well-functioning  adults,  after  telling  us  about  a  serious
rejection or betrayal, say and mean “I wanted him dead” or “I could easily have
strangled her.”
When  we  hear  about  acts  of  school  violence,  we  usually  think  it’s  only  bad
kids from bad homes who could ever take matters into their own hands. But it’s
startling  how  quickly  average,  everyday  kids  with  a  fixed  mindset  think  about
violent revenge.
We gave eighth-grade students in one of our favorite schools a scenario about
bullying to read. We asked them to imagine it was happening to them.
It  is  a  new  school  year  and  things  seem  to  be  going  pretty  well.

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Suddenly  some  popular  kids  start  teasing  you  and  calling  you
names.  At  first  you  brush  it  off—these  things  happen.  But  it
continues.  Every  day  they  follow  you,  they  taunt  you,  they  make
fun of  what you’re  wearing, they  make fun  of what  you look  like,
they tell you you’re a loser—in front of everybody. Every day.
We  then  asked  them  to  write  about  what  they  would  think  and  what  they
would do or want to do.
First,  the  students  with  the  fixed  mindset  took  the  incident  more  personally.
They  said,  “I  would  think  I  was  a  nobody  and  that  nobody  likes  me.”  Or  “I
would think I was stupid and weird and a misfit.”
Then  they  wanted  violent  revenge,  saying  that  they’d  explode  with  rage  at
them,  punch  their  faces  in,  or  run  them  over.  They  strongly  agreed  with  the
statement: “My number one goal would be to get revenge.”
They had been judged and they wanted to judge back. That’s what Eric Harris
and  Dylan  Klebold,  the  Columbine  shooters,  did.  They  judged  back.  For  a  few
long, terrible hours, they decided who would live and who would die.
In our study, the students with the growth mindset were not as prone to see the
bullying as a reflection of who they were. Instead, they saw it as a psychological
problem  of  the  bullies,  a  way  for  the  bullies  to  gain  status  or  charge  their  self-
esteem:  “I’d  think  that  the  reason  he  is  bothering  me  is  probably  that  he  has
problems at home or at school with his grades.” Or “They need to get a life—not
just feel good if they make me feel bad.”
Their plan was often designed to educate the bullies: “I would really actually
talk to them. I would ask them questions (why are they saying all of these things
and why are they doing all of this to me).” Or “Confront the person and discuss
the issue; I would feel like trying to help them see they are not funny.”
The students with the growth mindset also strongly agreed that: “I would want
to  forgive  them  eventually”  and  “My  number  one  goal  would  be  to  help  them
become better people.”
Whether  they’d  succeed  in  personally  reforming  or  educating  determined
bullies  is  doubtful.  However,  these  are  certainly  more  constructive  first  steps
than running them over.
Brooks  Brown,  a  classmate  of  Eric  Harris  and  Dylan  Klebold,  was  bullied
from  third  grade  on.  He  suffered  tremendously,  yet  he  didn’t  look  for  revenge.

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He rejected the fixed mindset and the right of people to judge others, as in “I am
a  football  player,  and  therefore  I’m  better  than  you.”  Or  “I  am  a  basketball
player…pathetic geeks like you are not on my level.”
More  than  that,  he  actively  embraced  a  growth  mindset.  In  his  own  words,
“People  do  have  the  potential  to  change.”  Even  maybe  Eric  Harris,  the  more
depressed, hostile leader of the shootings. Brown had had a very serious run-in
with  Eric  Harris  several  years  before,  but  in  their  senior  year  of  high  school,
Brown offered a truce. “I told him that I had changed a lot since that year…and
that I hoped he felt the same way about himself.” Brooks went on to say that if
he found that Eric hadn’t changed, he could always pull back. “However, if he
had grown up, then why not give him the chance to prove it.”
Brooks hasn’t given up. He still wants to change people. He wants to wake up
the  world  to  the  problem  of  bullying,  and  he  wants  to  reach  victims  and  turn
them  off  their  violent  fantasies.  So  he’s  worked  for  the  filmmaker  Michael
Moore on Bowling for Columbine and he’s set up an innovative website where
bullied kids can communicate with each other and learn that the answer isn’t to
kill. “ It’s to use your mind and make things better.”
Brooks,  like  me,  does  not  see  the  shooters  as  people  who  are  a  world  apart
from  everyone  else.  His  friend  Dylan  Klebold,  he  says,  was  once  a  regular  kid
from a fine home with loving, involved parents. In fact, he warns, “ We can just
sit back and call the shooters ‘sick monsters, completely different from us.’…Or
we  can  accept  that  there  are  more  Erics  and  Dylans  out  there,  who  are  slowly
being driven…down the same path.”
Even  if  a  victim  doesn’t  have  a  fixed  mindset  to  begin  with,  prolonged
bullying can instill it. Especially if others stand by and do nothing, or even join
in.  Victims  say  that  when  they’re  taunted  and  demeaned  and  no  one  comes  to
their defense, they start to believe they deserve it. They start to judge themselves
and to think that they are inferior.
Bullies judge. Victims take it in. Sometimes it remains inside and can lead to
depression and suicide. Sometimes it explodes into violence.