How to Motivate Young People: The Mentor Mindset Framework by Dr. David Yeager

Dr. David Yeager is the Raymond Dickson Centennial Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University. His groundbreaking research focuses on the processes that shape adolescent development, examining how social cognitive factors interact with structural and physiological elements to influence youth trajectories. Dr. Yeager is also dedicated to uncovering ways to positively impact these psychological processes to enhance developmental and educational outcomes for young people. As co-Principal Investigator of the National Study of Learning Mindsets, the Texas Mindset Initiative, and the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute, Dr. Yeager is at the forefront of efforts to translate cutting-edge psychological research into practical strategies for educators and policymakers.

He is the author of 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, a book that distills the latest insights on how to inspire and empower the next generation.

David is also the lead instructor in a new class on MasterClass: The Power of Mindset. In this class, David and Carol Dweck draw on the science of mindset to show how members can develop new skills, overcome stress and setbacks, and use a mentor mindset to optimize performance and change lives at work, at home, on the sports field, and in the classroom. The class is available now exclusively on MasterClass.

💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:

1. How the adolescent brain drives motivation and potential.
2. The Mentor Mindset: balancing high standards and support.
3. Why belonging, purpose, and respect fuel adolescent success.
4. The power of short interventions on resilience and achievement.
5. EdTech's role in youth motivation and AI's potential pitfalls.

✨ Episode Highlights:

[00:02:51] Dr. Yeager’s path from teaching to research leadership.
[00:04:34] What the Mentor Mindset is and why it works.
[00:08:46] How short interventions create long-term impact.
[00:14:08] Understanding the adolescent brain and motivation.
[00:17:35] The traits of great mentors: tough but supportive.
[00:25:59] The power of role models and near-peer influences.
[00:35:50] Addressing fear and fostering aspiration in youth.
[00:41:40] AI’s role in motivating and supporting students.
[00:45:26] A call for ethical AI in education technology.

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🎉 Presenting Sponsor:

This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.

Chapters

• 3:09 Dr. Yeager’s path from teaching to research leadership.
• 4:52 What the Mentor Mindset is and why it works.
• 9:04 How short interventions create long-term impact.
• 14:26 Understanding the adolescent brain and motivation.
• 18:16 The traits of great mentors: tough but supportive.
• 26:40 The power of role models and near-peer influences.
• 36:31 Addressing fear and fostering aspiration in youth.
• 42:21 AI’s role in motivating and supporting students.
• 46:07 A call for ethical AI in education technology.

Transcript

[00:00:00] David Yeager: Last thing I need is some psychologist telling me to spend a bunch of time mentoring the people that I'm already paying to do their job and they refuse to. So it like, it could come across like health advice. Like I'm telling you, you know, all you have to do is lose weight to lose weight is just not eat any of the food you like.

Like that's not helpful. And so I call it 10 to 25 because I think the predicament young people are in where their, their status is very precarious is resolved when adults take them seriously, but support them to earn a good reputation. And that's what the mentor mindset does.

[00:00:39] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to  Edtech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry, funding rounds to impact AI developments across early childhood, K 12, higher ed, and work. You'll find it all here at ed tech. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar. And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus, where you can get premium content, access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events, and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod!

Dr. David Yeager is the Raymond Dixon Centennial Professor of Psychology, PhD. At the University of Texas at Austin, he earned his PhD from Stanford University. His groundbreaking research focuses on the processes that shape adolescent development, examining how social cognitive factors interact with structural and physiological elements to influence youth trajectories.

Dr. Yeager is also dedicated to uncovering ways to positively impact these psychological processes to enhance developmental and educational outcomes for young people. As co principal investigator of the National Study of Learning Mindsets, the Texas Mindset Initiative, and the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute, Dr.

Yeager is at the forefront of efforts to translate Cutting edge psychological research into practical strategies for educators and policy makers. He is also the author of 10 to 25, the science of motivating young people, a book that distills the latest insights on how to inspire and empower the next generation.

David Yeager, welcome to EdTech Insiders. 

Yeah, thanks for having me. That's David Yeager, PhD. Dr. David Yeager, you are a true legend in the social psychology field. I have followed your work for many years, as have many of us in education, and you have this exciting new book called 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People, and you talk a lot about mentoring in it.

Before we get into the details, can you just give an overview of the book? Your academic career and how it led to this really amazing book. 

[00:02:51] David Yeager: Yeah. Thanks, Alex. I was a teacher straight out of college and taught in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and had wore many different hats. So I was the sixth through eighth English teacher.

I was the K through eight PE coach. I coached sixth and eighth grade basketball and ran the book club, the computer club. And I fixed the internet when it broke also. So I worked a hundred hours a week and learned a ton, did a, did a lot in the community, but ultimately left the classroom because I felt like I wanted to be a part of producing better advice for teachers like me.

And I ended up at Stanford. And about my second or third year, I transitioned over to work with Carol Dweck. Primarily, this is recently after she had gotten there. And then within a few years, we had created the first scalable growth mindset interventions. And so when I started at Stanford, only about 70 people had ever been through a growth mindset intervention.

Conditioned. And it was tens of thousands by the time I left Stanford and that kind of propelled forward in a lot of ways, but I don't just focus on the academic type of growth mindset. I also focus on bullying, stress, health, wellbeing, how to get teenagers to eat healthy in our new work published in science on how to reduce partisan animosity.

So just in general, we try to pick the hardest behavior change problems, the ones that other people either give up on, or they wave their hands at. And we try to have real interventions that actually work in the real world and we test them in hyper rigorous ways. And then this book is kind of a reflection of a lot of what I've learned in our research plus maybe even more so tons of original reporting on the adults in young people's lives who are awesome at motivating them, engaging them and changing their, their behavior.

[00:04:34] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, and you've studied motivation from so many different standpoints. Some concepts from your work that have meant a lot to me personally in my career are the concept of wise feedback or the idea of, you know, building a sense of purpose. These sort of interventions and you can define this better than I can, you know, Help our listeners understand, when you talk about an intervention or sort of a using a psychology principle in practice in a particular moment for students to try to change future behavior, what types of interventions have you studied and which ones have been sort of the most exciting?

[00:05:07] David Yeager: Yeah, and I just want to also clarify, this is collaborative work with Greg Walton, Jeff Cohen, lots of other people. I would never take credit for everything. 

[00:05:14] Alex Sarlin: Of course, 

[00:05:14] David Yeager: what's been super exciting is this idea that sometimes a short message delivered in the right way at the right time to someone who is vulnerable or precarious in some way, in terms of their long run trajectory that can set in motion, a better process of coping, resilience, etc.

Growth mindset is one example where, you know, the idea that If you're struggling in math doesn't mean you're dumb. It means you're growing. But another is our work on belonging. So the idea that if you're, if you just started at as a freshman in college and you're, you feel like everyone else has more friends than you do, does that mean you're never going to belong or not?

And the way you answer that question to yourself really influences. Whether you, I don't know, go talk to the professor, go to office hours, join a study group, and those micro behaviors can spiral into greater achievement or not over time. So belonging is one purpose is another, you know, it's like our society gives young people this labor market argument that, you know, if only you would factor all these trinomials on a worksheet, then in your mid thirties, you might be able to have a job where you can hardly afford your mortgage.

And it's like this terrible argument that we as a society continue making And I know why it happens. It's because like the silicon chip manufacturers talk to the legislators who then talk to the school boards. And they're like, we need more workers for our factories. And then they're like, we need STEM because of that.

And then like 0 percent of 15 year olds care about that. That's like, I understand why from a macroeconomic perspective, that's the argument, but it's a terrible argument from the perspective of the psychology of the individual. And what we find is a much better argument is the idea that, Hey, every time you learn something new and strengthen your brain, that stronger brain is preparing you to make a difference for something that matters to you.

Some injustice in the world, something that's, you know, not quite right. And then learning goes from something you do as like a lame nerd to listen to grownups in turns into something that's awesome. It's like, this is a step towards changing the world. So the common denominator in a lot of these ideas is first of all, that sometimes when we think that young people are impossible to change, we haven't tapped into the right source of motivation.

We've tried to grown, splain our way. Into them working hard or learning or whatever it is, but that's not an argument that makes sense on their terms. So that's one kind of point. But the second point is if you make a better argument, one that does match adolescent values during a vulnerable period, then they have far more agency than we often give them credit for.

Young people can go out and try hard, be diligent, be resilient, ask for help, be independent, all these other things. When they see a purpose for it. When they see some social value in it. So our interventions are sometimes brief, like 30 minutes. And we sometimes see effects years later. That's because we're unlocking agency in the young person rather than presuming incompetence and presuming that we have to like control them in order to get anything out of them.

[00:08:09] Alex Sarlin: That idea of a 30 minute intervention, a short intervention, like the scale of growth mindset intervention, you're mentioning having that sort of positive spiral effects that can actually change. Their ability to finish high school or finish college or get a job or just sort of see themselves in a totally different light is so powerful.

I mean, these levers have so much impact on the positive futures of these children, of these adolescents. You know, you mentioned some words in there, you know, like lame nerd or grown spleen. And I think you're really channeling this sort of adolescent mindset. This book is really about motivating young people and often adolescents, the ages between 10 and 25.

[00:08:46] David Yeager: Yeah. And also, you know, young adults who are hired by ed tech CEOs and are going to need to work independently without being in an office and without a nanny cam. So it's just as it's as relevant for that early career person as it is for 14 year olds or 10 year olds. 

[00:09:04] Alex Sarlin: That's a fantastic point. So whether this is relevant to your users as an ed tech entrepreneur or your employees as an ed tech entrepreneur, everybody between these these ages sort of has some common potential to be motivated in certain ways.

Tell us about the adolescent brain and how it's different and how some of the neurological developments happening during this time period between 10 and 25 affect how they experience this type of it. Mentoring intervention, you know, psychological input. 

[00:09:32] David Yeager: Yeah. And so I'll tell you in a second, what the, what I think the science represents is the best version of what the adolescent brain is up to.

But first, just to preface it, I would acknowledge there are two big ideas that a lot of people have already encountered about the adolescent brain. So, um, One is research on from cognitive science about how the brain forms memories. So we hear a lot about interleaving and retrieval practice and spacing and all this stuff's totally true that in a lab study, young people or anyone learns better if you.

You do that kind of stuff, but the challenge is like, how do you get anyone to actually do that stuff to your own brain? No, 15 year old is sitting there getting a worksheet of math problems saying, um, excuse me, ma'am. This is mass practice. And I would like you to interleave this, like, and even if they do, that's like 1 percent of kids that would ever do that.

And so just knowing about how the brain works. Doesn't really cause a lot of kind of real world learning, although it is important if you're creating high quality instructional materials to have that stuff be informed by cognitive science. So it's really useful, but it's not useful from the perspective of creating agentic learning on behalf of young people.

At least the result, the evidence is not yet. Support that, but another thing that people have learned about the brain is that teenagers lack self regulation, that their prefrontal courtesies are not yet developed. They're kind of like in the lay popular imagination, like short sighted, selfish, impulsive idiots.

And the kind of science ish version is that the limbic system that involves the repetitive desires of the brain is highly sensitized due to puberty and hormones and so on. And that that appetitive desire for, I don't know, rewarding stimuli outstrips the prefrontal cortex's ability to constrain that appetite.

And that's called sometimes the all gas, no brakes model of the adolescent brain. And if that's what you believe, then what edtech should do is Is like, get rid of human agency. Like you should control a young person's life and kind of make all their decisions for them and, you know, nudge the hell out of them because the basic insight of nudge, of course, is that you're the deliberate part of your brain is missing and that it's all like fast acting, intuitive reactivity, you know?

And so that's what you believe. Then the ed tech really becomes a tool. A way of like controlling and constraining choice, not a way of like empowering agency, but that view, the all gas, no brakes, the limbic system is too powerful. The prefrontal is an idiot. That view is because come under scrutiny in the last 10 or 15 years.

And what neuroscientists now think is that the prefrontal cortex is just for. Goal directed behavior and adolescents are great at goal directed behaviors. It's just not the goals that most adults want them to be attending to. So young people aren't sitting there asking for another worksheet of trinomials, but if you ask them to like sneak out of the house, they're like, all right, well, who do I have to lie to?

Like, let's, I'm planning three weeks ahead. Like, where's the map of the sewers? Like they're, they're ready to go. And, you know, just this summer was the Olympics and our most disciplined athletes that are just dominating the world. They're all 17 years old, you know, and they've been waking up at 4am for 10 years to learn how to do backflips or whatever they do.

And so this idea that the brain is incapable of self regulation isn't quite true. Now, of course, teenagers do dumb stuff. They do throw rocks off bridges and like getting car crashes and so on. But they also like learn calculus and like how many 30 year olds would sit down and do that. And so what I try to emphasize is that the adolescent brain, yes, is sensitized due to hormones, to different kinds of experiences, but those experiences are not just pure hedonic pleasure and short term reward.

At the cost of long term reward. They're really for a sense of status and respect, a kind of earned reputation that you are viewed as a valuable person who brings something to the table in your group. And that young people are willing to sacrifice a great deal for that experience of status and respect.

And if you fail to tap into that, that's where it's like, well, teenagers like, well, that's lame. I'm not going to do that. Because I'm going to have to forfeit my reputation to go along with this dumb thing. But if you reframe the good behavior, the one that's in their long term best interest and in society's long term best interest as something that confers a prestigious reputation, then like, yeah, that sounds awesome.

I'm willing to do whatever it takes to go be a part of that. 

[00:14:08] Alex Sarlin: Some of the interventions that you looked into and proven out really have a lot to do with, as you've mentioned, sort of relevance. It's like, how do you make what is what the adults want you to do relevant? Why does it matter to you? In what part of your life does it matter to you?

And sort of making those connections. And it feels like that's a really natural segue from the type of motivation you're talking about. 

[00:14:31] David Yeager: Yeah, I'd love to hear you talk about it. I think relevance is a super interesting concept for the ed tech community. So just as like an anecdote, and I doubt Bill Gates will ever listen to this.

So I'll just tell the story the way I remember it. About 15 years ago, I briefed Bill Gates with Angela Duckworth and Diane Tavener, who I admire. The hell out of both of these people. And it was like four or five hours of us. And then just a peanut gallery of program officers, like listening in. And I said a lot of stuff I just told you, and I thought it was profound.

And he gets it, we get to the end. He's like, yeah, I don't need a psychologist to tell me the curriculum should be relevant. And like, that's, you just dismissed the four or five hours of conversation. And I was like, I don't think you understand what relevance is. It like curriculum is not objectively relevant.

It's relevant to a person and their goal, given their life circumstance, their amazing welding curricula, it's not relevant to me. Like it could be like, I changed my goals, but like, it's not relevant to me at all. Just like there's like amazing JavaScript curricula. And I'm like, that's not where you're going to do.

It's not relevant. And so you have to pay attention to the subjective psychology of the individual in a context. How are they thinking about themselves? In their futures, what are they, how are they imagining the kind of person they want to be and the contribution they want to make? That's how you discern relevance.

I'll tell another anecdote. I was at a ed tech, ASU GSV. So this conference and somebody came up and was so excited. It was like, David, we just did this great experiment. We changed all the word problems to have like the same birthday as the participant. And I was like, Okay. He's like, now they're relevant.

I don't think you understand relevance. And I feel like I wrote about this in the book too, but it's like, it's, that's the most super reducing someone to their trivial interests. And that's sure that might grab their attention. Like, well, that's a weird coincidence, but that's not going to make them choose to learn physics rather than hang out with their friends on call of duty.

But that's ultimately what you have to do. But like the idea that I'm going to present. This physics problem to a board of like, I don't know, NASA interns, and then it's going to determine whether or not I get picked for that internship. Well, that's a good reason to learn the physics and the great teachers I write about are much more on the ladder and they're not doing the trivial nonsense like, Oh, you have the same hair color as the kid in the word problem.

[00:16:57] Alex Sarlin: They're not doing that. Same name is a big one in AI. You can change the problems that have the names of the kids in it. Who cares? I knew you were going to say that. So in terms of this connecting to what people actually care about, their sense of belonging, their reputation, as you're saying that they have something to contribute.

You have this concept in the book, and it's really a through line of the book of what you call the mentor mindset, how somebody can sort of inculcate themselves with this understanding of how 10 to 25 year olds. See the world and what motivates them and then sort of meet them where they are. What does the mentor mindset mean and how is it different than what you may have heard 10 years ago about how to mentor somebody?

[00:17:35] David Yeager: Yeah. So the, the mentor mindset for me, as I define it in the book is very simply the idea that you're upholding very high standards for learning performance and growth. You're not a pushover. So you're really tough, but the supports that you provide are high enough to help the young person meet that standard.

So it's like, I'm going to ask a lot of you, but I wouldn't ask it of you if I wasn't willing to walk the walk with you and walk this journey. And it turns out that that is a profound way of motivating young people because in part it comes across as a very respectful thing to say. So if I'm like, this is a high standard that not everyone can meet.

But I actually think you can meet it. And you matter enough to me for me to spend my time and my energy working with you until you get there. That's a way of me saying you're a worthwhile person. It's an, it's an implicit compliment and young people love the idea that they have worth in the eyes of someone whose opinion they care about.

So that like impossible to please mentor who is tough and maybe makes you cry sometimes cause it's so hard, but you never doubt their care for you. That person is the person that you'd run through a brick wall for. And what's interesting is that I described that in part by finding great mentor mindset leaders, great teachers, the NBA's best shooting coach, the best manager at Microsoft, the best grocery store manager at grocery stores in Norway, and on and on and on.

It's super interesting people. They all do mentor mindset, every one of them. And. At the same time, I went back to the research literature and it turns out that 80 years of research in almost every discipline, anthropology, sociology, education, psychology, management, it turns out they all said the exactly the same thing.

So I'm not the first person to draw a two by two and say, high standards, high support is where you should be. I would never claim to do that. What is novel is saying, actually, it's a leadership style that goes across roles, parenting, teaching, mentoring. Managing sports, but also it is not just a style.

It's not just set of habits. It's a mindset. It's a belief about young people and their competence. And it rejects what I call the neurobiological incompetence belief. It rejects the classical view of teenagers. Brains are out of control and instead says, no, it's, it's our job to harness that energy. Now, to answer your question about how it's different from conventional mentoring, I think that I, I didn't call the book, the mentor mindset, cause I think people would read that and be like, ah, great.

Now there's another job I have to do. Last thing I need is some psychologist telling me to spend a bunch of time mentoring the people that I'm already paying to do their job. And they refuse to. So it like, it could come across like health advice. Like I'm telling you, you know, all you have to do is lose weight to lose weight is just not eat any of the food you like.

Like that's not helpful. And so I call it 10 to 25 because I think the predicament young people are in where their, their status is very precarious is resolved when adults take them seriously, but support them to earn a good reputation. And that's what the mentor mindset does. 

[00:20:41] Alex Sarlin: And that mindset. So for people who may have placed their bets on some of that, the sort of pop research you've heard in the past, you know, the brain is not fully developed until somebody is 26 or whatever it is like, there have been all these sort of factoids.

They go around that sort of exacerbate that understanding of, Hey, teenagers don't know what they're doing. They make mistakes. They make bad decisions. They think they have bad judgment. They can't help it. Their brains aren't developed. If you've sort of been in that in the past, if that's something that's sort of crossed your mind once or twice, What is the pathway to getting to this mentor mindset?

How do you sort of change your own mind as a teacher, as an ed tech entrepreneur, as an investor, as anybody who deals with young people to say, wait, I got to change my understanding and think of them as agentic wanting respect, being able to get what they want, but just wanting maybe different things.

How do you recommend somebody go down that change path? 

[00:21:31] David Yeager: Yeah, I mean, I think that the idea that young people are not good at planning ahead and lack self control might lead people to create products that are very easy to use and where you don't have to remember a bunch of stuff and you don't have to use self control and like, that's fine with me.

I mean, I just think, I don't think you need to assume people are incompetent to reach the conclusion that. You should make the good choice more convenient than the bad choice. So whatever it is about your product, I think it's really important to make it easier for people to challenge themselves, the frontiers of their abilities.

They shouldn't get stuck in a logistical morass, but just because it's in general, everything good should be easier doesn't mean that we need to do everything for them. So I make a distinction between logistical. Ease and intellectual ease that it should be logistically very, very easy to do the conceptually most demanding and hardest work that changes your thinking and what I often see is people say, Oh, well, teenagers are disengaged.

It needs to be fun and games or else they won't learn. And, you know, there's interesting studies where if you actually randomize it. Yeah. Kids to a new fangled, shiny, new textbook with a million graphics or an old school textbook that has no graphics. A lot of times they learn more from the old school textbook and it's because they actually have to think harder now in those studies, they don't let the kids quit.

And the big problem that ed tech apps have is you can just stop using that. So I think the problem to solve for often is not how do we make it so easy that we get them hooked and they build slow confidence. It's more like how do we help them have a sense of meaning and significance and purpose for engaging with the hardest and most challenging and most personally transformative aspects of our curriculum.

There's one startup I like, I spoke recently for reach capitals portfolio. There's a million that I like in that group, but one that I like, I just know through. Stanford connections is poly gents. And the idea there is you do a project with a real graduate student, and it's an actual research project that you don't know the answer to.

And that's a great fit with adolescent psychology because you're impressing this actual MIT physics student or whoever the grad student is. And when you talk about it outside of. Using the app, teenagers are like, Oh yeah, I'm like folding proteins or I'm running a new research project on dropout from STEM, or it just sounds awesome.

And then they work super hard. And so, you know, as a parent of four kids, I've got a 14, 12, eight and four year old. And so I'm. We're constantly trying to use ed tech and the things I want them to use where I don't care about them having lots of screen time is when they're using their brains to grow and make a difference.

And you know, it's not like every single app has to have an intervention in the middle of it. But if the copywriting is written in a way that's consistent with the presumption that you are going to be a changed person, you are going to grow. And then you're going to use your stronger brain to change the world.

That kind of presumption could be built into every single product. 

[00:24:34] Alex Sarlin: That's, that's really interesting. I mean, you've mentioned the having high standards and holding people to them, which is sort of the core of the wise feedback model. And this concept that I remember hearing from you many years ago about sort of having a role model or somebody who can sort of guide you, but is within reach.

It's one thing to be a teenager and have a 70 year old professor who won the Nobel prize, trying to tell you something from in a video, but it's versus having a grad student that's a few years older that sort of potentially looks like you. Can you talk about that a little? I think it's really, really interesting.

[00:25:04] David Yeager: Yeah, I think that there's a simple point and like the more like profound point. I think the simple point is that whenever I'm crafting an intervention where my job is to change a young person's attitudes or beliefs, I very rarely say, I, the grownup with all the knowledge, No, everything. And you should just listen to me.

That's the grown splaining idea. And like, I could appeal to my expertise. Here's my degrees. And here's my, here's how many people think I'm smart, but like, they don't care. So like, why do that? And I think a lot of academics, and I think a lot of probably a tech founders are like, People who went to super elite institutions and they've always been told you're the smartest and the best.

And they kind of presume, well, if only I could just explain to these other people, all my smart and elite stuff, then their lives would be better. And like, this probably is something like I, I reviewed a paper one time where it was like this Nobel prize winning economist and his whole intervention was just him on video telling you to wear a mask.

[00:25:59] Alex Sarlin: Exactly. 

[00:26:00] David Yeager: He's like, if only they could hear it from a Nobel prize winner, then everyone would be healthy. It's like, this is the worst theory of change I've ever heard. And so I think that like, it's important to think about who's delivering the message. So in our interventions. It's instead usually like if you're a freshman in our interventions, you hear from 11th graders.

And I think sophomores, I don't really look up to cause they think these kids are idiots. 12th graders are too old. And, but 11th graders, like they've kind of got it figured out their high status and I'm going to listen to them. I think eighth graders really listen to ninth graders. I don't think seventh graders listen to ninth graders.

That feels too far away. It's like a whole other school. What is your audience? And this is classic Bob Cialdini work on descriptive norms. You know, they're kind of the godfather of influence. And I highly recommend Cialdini's books. If people haven't read it, I teach it in all my classes. But the focus theory of normative conduct is that you tend to look at relevant norms.

Descriptive norms, specifically, like what do people like me tend to do in an aspirational way? And so once you're paying attention to that person and you then learn simply what they do, that itself is an argument for you to change your attitudes and your behavior. So like testimonials from people. And that are near peers are like super powerful.

A lot of companies I reviewed a company's portfolio recently, they get this wrong. They'll just go pick, I don't know, LeBron James and then be like, see, he had to work hard. We did experiments when our first national mindset study, we tested LeBron James and he's great for a lot of reasons, but the main takeaway for urban kids when they saw him as a role model, it was that they don't have to work hard in school because he didn't go to college.

And now he's a millionaire. Like that was the punchline for them. So you have to be really careful when you think about the norms that you're using and who the role model is. We obsess over this kind of thing. And that's one reason why we can get short interventions to have effects that last months or years later.

[00:27:52] Alex Sarlin: Fantastic. One of my favorite things from Sheldon, it always sticks with me is one of his teaching methods is to introduce a mystery at the beginning of a lecture or a class and sort of have this situation and then just not answer it. Yeah. And not answer it until the end of the class. And the answer comes from what you've learned in the class.

I always thought that is just the most brilliant way to sort of motivate, just use people's natural curiosity to motivate. 

[00:28:16] David Yeager: Totally. That's how Malcolm Gladwell writes. If you listen to his masterclass, he describes. And like, he uses it in a borderline unethical way, even says this in his masterclass, Gladwell's like, yeah, sometimes I set up a puzzle and I don't even answer it, but I don't care.

Cause you got to the end of the piece. And that was my job. And his job is to just give you a puzzle. And then he doesn't care if it's satisfying in the end. I was like, wow, you're very Machiavellian, but if you just read outliers and David and Goliath in reverse outline those chapters. And I did that when I was writing my, my book, cause he's the master and he makes you read the next sentence.

And it's because of these open puzzles and the human mind craves closure. And often that works better than so and so expert says, you need to know this stuff. 

[00:29:01] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And when you mentioned with polygons, the logistical ease of matching people with graduate students, but then the intellectual rigor, but also the idea that you're working on a problem that's unsolved, you're not just following through someone's footsteps.

[00:29:13] David Yeager: Exactly. It's authentic. It's not an exercise where you need to memorize what a grownup told you. 

[00:29:17] Alex Sarlin: Which makes a huge difference. I'm sure that's just wildly. Uh, let's talk about a little bit. I think EdTech founders or product managers or people who are listening to this are saying, okay, I'm mapping what my company or the companies that I invest in or the companies that I work at do to try to be relevant, quote, unquote, or to try to motivate or to try to sort of keep people going and keep them clicking or keep them learning and keep them sort of moving.

And it feels like. Some of the core ideas of what you're proposing here is to keep them moving, you kind of have to understand them and what what they want and who they are and what they want to happen. So I guess my question is in a technical environment where you might have 100, 000 users using your app.

What does it mean to get to know them or get, get to know enough about them to try to match what they want? 

[00:30:02] David Yeager: Yeah. So, you know, obviously everybody knows Stanford design school and, you know, IDEO and, and I've done all those trainings. I've led a lot of those trainings. I extrapolated a process from that. I don't think I was directly taught.

I mean, I don't think you can sticky note your way to it. I think you'd have to, it'd be like, honestly curious, but what I'm always looking for with the tool, I always find that most helpful is the journey map. Like, what is your life as a user looking like? And where's the sticking point where, if only you get unstuck, we're going to start a different recursive process and an example of a product where we looked at that.

And then we thought, all right, what is the main existential fear in your deep core in that moment in that trajectory? Like, what is what is driving you? What would give you Nightmares or what would be like your wildest dreams. And if you know that, then you, then you know how to write the copy around the product.

So to give you an example, I worked for a while on a project called interview warmup. So interview warmup is developed by Google. And the idea is after you do certifications on Google, like you learn to be a project manager or whatever, if you're switching fields, you don't know how to interview for a project manager.

And often these are people who are not coming through traditional Highly elite educational settings. And so there's a whole social class difference between the like Stanford grad. Who's the hiring manager and you was coming from, you know, Santa Monica community college to doing the credential. And so they're in the journey.

That's a big problem. You've got, you've got technical skills and you've got a need in the work in the labor market, but there's a lack of a match. And a lot of it can come down to the hiring process. And the interview is a big part of it. So, what Google did, I wasn't, I didn't make the decision, they did it, was to basically train language models to ask you common interview questions and then you would speak your interview question and then you would, you get feedback on your answer relative to some standard.

Now, sounds great. I love the idea and it's reached hundreds of thousands of people as far as I know, but what's the existential fear of that? Let's call it a Santa Monica community college student who's now gotten the credential and project management and now a robot created by Google that supposedly train on the best hiring managers and therefore in your mind is perfectly accurate about it.

You're fit for this job. And now it tells you that half of your speech is wrong. The natural thing that you came up with. And it's like, this is not convincing. You say, um, too much. You repeated yourself. It feels like the most diagnostic tests you've ever taken in your life, that all you've done is confirm that you don't belong in this new field.

Now that's the opposite intent of the designer. The designer is like, I'm going to give you feedback and I'm going to unlock the glass ceiling or whatever I'm going to do, but that's not the experience for the user. And so we rewrote the copy to have a mentor slash growth mindset and you read it and it, and it looks like Carol Dweck wrote it.

And that's because like we, Carol was involved in that project, but like we were applying growth mindset. So it's like, give it a try, get some feedback in a judgment free zone, then revise and see what happens. So it's, the language is what I call collaborative troubleshooting. And I write about it a lot in the book.

And it's like any given effort is a moment in time. It's not a diagnosis of who you are. You are more than your number on some, you know, assessment and it's any mistakes. Those are starting points. So that's an example where if you're not attuned to the existential fear, then you just solve the technical problem of, can I get an LLM to be fine tuned or prompt on expert.

Interviews. And if I only could have the teams transcript from all the good interviews, then I could fine tune the model and I could give you automated feedback and score it with your LLM. But like, who's the person who's going to go to that? And what are their fears? And I think it's the same issue in Conmigo, right?

It's like, well, the reason I'm asking this question is because I kind of feel dumb. I can't find the answer. Well, how good is it at making you not feel dumb? Or is it just kind of like, Polite and the elements are a lot better at being polite than they are being like authentically psychologically wise.

So I think anything that is designed to educate has to be prepared for the reality that education fundamentally is a painful process when you're learning something you don't already know. That's the whole point of education is not to repeat stuff you already know, but to learn new stuff that feels hard and can feel bad.

Are we attuned to the fundamental worries about competence, belonging, purpose, stress, anxiety, all these things as people are engaging with the product. And that's where I think every product in their copywriting all the way down to conceptualize could benefit from the mentor mindset framework in my book.

[00:34:33] Alex Sarlin: It's fascinating. It's interesting because you're. Painting a picture of sort of the adolescent, the sort of quote unquote, you know, average, there's no average here, adolescent, and early on in the conversation, I feel like there's this feeling of, hey, adolescents are, are motivated, they are capable, they're competent, they're agentic, they don't want to be told what to do, they care about what they're doing, which makes sense, Yeah.

And then here you're adding sort of the flip side of they're fearful. They're learning it's learning. Something new is, is scary sort of by definition. They don't want to lose status. They don't want to lose respect. They don't want to be proven wrong or judged. And it feels like these are two sides of the same coin.

I, you know, I remember feeling both of those things as a teenager. I'm sure others as well. So if you're creating products for. This volatile, maybe you could call it a psychological profile that is aspirational, really wants to do things, cares, and also has this sort of deep set fears. And especially if you're working with underserved populations or an equity product, people who have been systematically disenfranchised or have sort of had things working against them.

And this could include LLMs or just the copy in an ed tech product. Yeah. Just any product. How do you balance those? How do you sort of be positive and motivational, but also recognize how scary and hard and painful that some of these moments actually are? 

[00:35:50] David Yeager: Yeah, that's a great question. So the way I think about it, at least is that there are two alternatives to this mentor mindset.

Again, in the mentor mindset, you maintain challenge. It's like rigorous. They're going to be stressed. It's going to be hard, but you're supportive. So they could meet that challenge. Right? So you're doing both. One alternative is just to have the standards, but not be supportive. That's what I call an enforcer mindset.

And that's like, my product is going to be super hard. A lot of people might fail. It doesn't matter to me. You're either going to benefit from it or you're not. And if you do that, I'm, I've basically, I've, I've selected you. I've sorted you to find the top people, right? It's a behavioral version of an SAT and alternative version is what I call a protector mindset.

That's all support low standards. And that starts from the perspective of young people have gone through so much. They're the anxious generation, they're stressed COVID, whatever screens turn their brains to mush. So we can't possibly expect them to do anything because they're, they can't deal with distress.

They can't have honest conversations. They're too woke, whatever it is. And I think that's wrong too. I understand why people think tiny steps, build confidence bit by bit. But like, if you look at the history of what actually has created equity, there are almost no examples where remediation created equity.

And there are lots of examples where acceleration created equity. And this goes back to Uri Treisman in the seventies, in the post civil rights movement, as universities started integrating, a lot of universities response to admitting students of color was let's remediate them. And Berkeley did that. And then no students got an A, no students of color got an A in Berkeley at Berkeley for like decades.

Uri Treisman solution who developed the Dana center, agile mind, a lot of these products was make it harder and faster. And you're going to prove the theorems that the regular class is learning. And by the early 90s, 40 percent of all black Americans with PhDs in mathematics were graduates of Uri's program.

And so, I just think this idea, and I write about him in chapter 11 in the book, he's a mentor of mine. This idea is that being attuned to the possibility that young people could be pushed away if we screw it up doesn't mean you lower the intellectual standards. It means you maintain the standard, but you find a way to support them.

And you have to be, like, sometimes relentless and a little bit crazy to anticipate all the supports you people need. But ultimately they need to do the intellectual work just to finish the answer. There's this distinction in higher ed that I think is important. And it's between logistical standards and intellectual standards.

A lot of people think, Oh, I'm going to be a tough professor, for instance, in higher ed. And so you can't redo your work. You know, group work your, your first grade is your final grade. Every midterm counts. You can't take a final to make up. So they think being a hard ass on the logistics is going to force you to be serious about the intellectual part and learn the content.

But all you've done is disincentivize people from ever relearning stuff that they got wrong the first time and everyone's going to hate you, but an alternative is high intellectual standards. Like we're going to do awesome work, kind of like the polygenic example, the stuff that no one's ever done before.

And it's because I view you as a future leader in your field and you're preparing in many ways to change the future of mathematics or computer science or whatever it is. And I'm going to be. A lunatic about the supports so that every single one of you meets a standard that's so high that my colleagues as professors won't even believe that I got undergraduates to perform at this level.

That's the mentor mindset idea, but it doesn't come from a position of young people are weak and need to be coddled. Right. It's intellectually very, very hard, but it's logistically far more supportive than people think is reasonable. 

[00:39:26] Alex Sarlin: That's so interesting. And I love the combination of the high standards and the high support and really putting it together.

It actually, for whatever reason, what it reminds me of is things like the Mighty Ducks or the Bad News Bears, right? This idea of, Taking a group of students, uh, you know, young people have sort of learned to look down on themselves or major league or whatever and saying, not only are we going to win, we're going to beat everybody.

And you probably can't even imagine that right now. So let's figure out how to get, do it together and sort of. 

[00:39:51] David Yeager: Yeah. I rewatched mighty ducks recently. Gordon Bombay is a garbage coach for most of that movie. Like you, you watch the first half. You're like, Jesus, this guy, Should be arrested. I'm amazed that he turned it around, you know, for time for the playoffs.

There's actually a profound point. And I read about this a lot in the book. You do get a do over a lot that you often think, Oh, I screwed up the relationship with this kid. I yelled at them or I didn't support them. Or I was a jerk. Whether it's a parent or a mentor or a manager or whatever, you can get do overs.

You can go to be like, all right, I didn't live up to our values. And that's the climax of the movie. It's the turning point, but that's actually true to true to life that I think the great mentors realize that they can get do overs and then try to relive the values of mentor mindset, even if they screw up in the beginning.

[00:40:38] Alex Sarlin: And that has to do with having a growth mindset for yourself, right? Not saying, Hey, I'm bad at this. I'm not a very good coach. I better stop. You say. Hey, I made a mistake and I, I'm going to figure out how to do better. I love that. So I have one more question for you. I know we're, we're coming on time here, but this is, I mean, it's incredibly interesting.

You've mentioned, you know, LLMs, AI, some of the Google tech interview stuff. We're just coming off this event at Google and they are basically taking their learn LM, their, their learning focused large language model and trying to sort of open it up, make it available for other ed tech vendors and ed tech providers.

It's a really interesting moment. And you mentioned the idea of. LLMs are polite, right? They sometimes they call them like sycophantic. They want to please you. They're kind of, but good mentors hold you to very high standards and they, they don't act like that at all. If you sort of had a magic wand or if you, you know, you probably do have the stage to go to some of these companies and say, Hey, this is not how you should talk to young people.

Like what should LLMs do? What, what would be a better way for them to respond to student questions that would actually encourage learning? 

[00:41:40] David Yeager: Yeah, we did a project with Blaise Aguero Yarcus at Google for about a year on this, but we did about three years ago before it was on Lambda, before GPT was released.

This is with Daniel Kretik, who I want to give credit to, who ran Empathy Lab, and Chris Bryan and others. And we were testing how good GPT LLMs were at providing empathy and support, and I was looking at the context of really rigorous intellectual work, either in the workplace or in a classroom. So, the context for it is, as you know, of course people do Google.

Like for information, like where it was directions to the met, but a lot of times they're like, am I good enough? Right. Or will anyone ever love me? Like a ridiculously high portion of the time. And if LLMs are generating answers to that, and they're trained on a training data set of all the advice columns and everything on Reddit and nonsense books from Joel on scene or whatever it is, that's, what's trained.

The data. And so it gives you advice. That's the average of the training dataset and the average of what machine readable language tends to say is stuff like, if it's really hard for you, you should move on, you should try something different, or you should go for a walk in nature or take a bubble bath or drink chamomile tea or whatever it is.

And it's called a stress is debilitating mindset. And that's what the LLMs have learned from our culture. And it very rarely is. Having us what Allie crumb calls a stress can be enhancing mindset. This idea that stress is fuel for performance. The fact that you're stressed about this presentation for your boss's boss means you care about your reputation and that's going to make you amped up and it's going to fuel you to improve.

And so you're racing heart and your blood or whatever. It's getting oxygen to your muscles, into your brain. That's going to help you do better. No one's never says that kind of stuff. So I really worry about ed tech products that have fully let LLMs off the chain. Conmigo and other ones like that, where not only does nobody know how often LLMs are getting the psychology wrong when it comes to the advice, there aren't even algorithms to score it.

So there's no certifying board, right? That can be like, your product is safe for children to use in their most vulnerable moments. Like, that doesn't exist. What we have is like, if we can filter for inflammatory language, we can filter for, you know, partisan language, self harm. Like, you can make it polite and non self harming, but like, you can't, there isn't currently a way to shift it away from just bad advice.

That's really common. And. That's a growth area for ed tech. And what I've been saying for years is that there needs to be a consortium of psychologists who understand the constructs that are most likely to be potentially harmful and ed tech platforms that have the raw datasets that need to be annotated.

And there needs to be some central like repository of annotated datasets that would allow you to score everything from the output of the language in real time To potentially what the human mentors are saying. A lot of companies are pairing you with a tutor or mentor to even the textbook. So the high quality instructional materials, like who's scoring the support texts and the teacher's guide.

And that's a totally solvable problem, but it would take collective action. And I've been saying this for years, but, and I think the reason it hasn't happened is because. The product designers can't get caught currently being bad at this because there's not a scoring algorithm. But once that exists, then like, who knows what kind of class action lawsuits could be happening?

Like, are you giving teenagers or children bad advice? That's going to harm their mental health. And I think it's a real possibility. So I would love to see that there be action on this front. 

[00:45:26] Alex Sarlin: A powerful call to action. And I know there are philanthropists and funders who listen to this podcast, you know, who often are looking for ways to fund infrastructure that would help education or help AI.

Sounds like that kind of tag data set and that kind of consortium, bringing people together to understand the psychological effects. Very powerful idea. I love it. So I hope there are sparks going off in some of our listeners heads about how we can make that a reality, because I think you're right. And it's only a matter of time.

We already saw the first suicide attributed to replica or to an AI. It's only a matter of time before the results of this bad advice start coming out in the world, whether or not we know where it came from. I couldn't agree more. I think it's a really important thing to get right. Fascinating conversation.

Thank you so much. This is David Yeager, PhD, author of 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People. He's also the Raymond Dixon Centennial Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Thanks so much for being here with us. On EdTech Insiders. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders.

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