Is Intelligence Fixed?

September 8th, 2015 / By Deborah J. Merritt

This post is part of a series discussing the challenges that minority students face in law school. You can read previous posts here, here, and here. As I noted in my most recent post, our beliefs about intelligence can affect both student performance and the impact of affirmative action programs. I also suggested that many law students and professors believe that intelligence is fixed. Indeed, the law school culture seems to promote that belief. But is intelligence really fixed?

We know that the expression of intelligence is not fixed. Individuals exhibit different degrees of intelligence under different circumstances. The phenomenon of stereotype threat illustrates that fact: individuals exhibit lower levels of intelligence when tested under circumstances suggesting that members of their identity group are expected to perform poorly.

But does intelligence itself vary? Or does it remain fixed, defining an outer limit of each individual’s potential? One answer is that it doesn’t matter much. If context can affect the expression of intelligence, as happens with stereotype threat, we can focus first on developing academic contexts that enhance the expression of intelligence among all students. Perhaps we can secure sufficient gains in the expression of intelligence–for both minority and white students–that we need not worry whether their underlying intelligence is fixed.

There is, however, significant evidence that intelligence is not fixed. There is equally important evidence that our beliefs about intelligence affect academic performance.

Fluid Intelligence

The psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman dismisses the notion of fixed intelligence as a myth. “The bottom line,” he writes, “is that intelligence was never, and will never, be fixed at birth.” Intelligence grows over the lifetime and even over generations. There is little doubt that intelligence is fluid.

Fluid does not mean completely unrestrained. As Kaufman notes in the article linked above, intelligence as measured by IQ tests remains relatively stable over an individual’s lifetime. This means that individuals at the bottom, middle, and top of the IQ scale tend to retain those relative positions–even as the intelligence of all individuals increases with age and experience. Still, there is considerable fluctuation in those relative positions, especially if individuals are exposed to enriching experiences (or removed from constrictive environments).

This has important implications for legal education. If intelligence is not fixed, then some of our traditional practices look educationally suspect. Our lack of feedback, for example, deprives students of opportunities to enhance their legal intelligence. Our assumption that skills like client counseling reflect innate personality traits similarly prevents us from expanding students’ intelligence by coaching them in these abilities.

But there’s more: Our very belief in fixed intelligence can restrain student achievement.

Fixed and Growth Mindsets

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has led a decades-long exploration of the relationship between achievement and beliefs about intelligence. Her work, summarized in the popular book Mindset, shows that people who believe in fluid intelligence (a “growth mindset”) achieve more than those who believe that intelligence is fixed (the “fixed mindset”).

Encouraging students to adopt a growth mindset, therefore, can spur achievement. Dweck and her colleagues have illustrated this effect in numerous studies. Their most recent effort demonstrates the feasibility of low-cost, large-scale interventions to achieve significant gains in student achievement.

This line of scholarship has even more profound implications for legal education. Our grading scales and culture seem to nourish the belief that legal aptitude is fixed. First-year performance constrains employment prospects for many students, signaling that the ability they demonstrated that year is an accurate measure of their long-term potential. Similarly, many students express frustration that they receive middling grades whether they study a little or a lot. Without more individualized feedback, they conclude that their abilities are fixed and that hard work is pointless.

Research by Dweck and other psychologists suggests that, if we could reform our culture to change these mindsets, all of our students would achieve more. That in itself would be a laudable goal.

Back to Affirmative Action

I started these posts, however, by exploring the particular plight of minority students. In my last post, I extended that journey to consider the impact of affirmative action programs. As I noted there, programs rooted in a fixed-intelligence belief may depress the grades of minority students (although those programs may still confer other benefits by opening doors to more elite schools).

In my next and final post of this series, I will describe a different type of affirmative action program–one committed to a belief in fluid intelligence. As we’ll see, that type of program could enhance performance by minority students. A culture endorsing fluid intelligence, furthermore, could improve achievement among all law students.