Can a growth mindset intervention reduce the gender gap in challenge-seeking behavior and competitiveness?

In this project, I use an online growth mindset intervention to foster challenge-seeking and competitive behavior, adapted to Portuguese from Yeager et al. (2016), Yeager et al. (2019), and Bettinger et al. (2018). The growth mindset content was delivered online to participants as part of a study about challenge-seeking and competitive behavior.

2020-10-06

2021-03-15

Choices over the level of challenge and competition of an incentivized task.

This is a small study designed to test the potential of an online growth mindset intervention for changing behavior regarding challenges and competition. This design includes three rounds of online activities, with incentives for completion as well as real-effort tasks.

Participants were recruited for a study about challenges, to be conducted fully online and incentivized. Immediately after signing up, all participants responded to a survey (unincentivized) that included the following types of questions: self-reported growth mindset, situations perceived as challenging, time use, work/studies changes due to the pandemic, beliefs about performance in a task relative to others, views about fairness and merit, and demographic characteristics.

About 2 months later, participants were contacted to participate in a second phase, including a survey portion and games (real effort tasks) that would earn them points to be redeemed for cash or prizes at the end of the study. The survey included supplementary questions about their education experience (preferences for subjects and choice of college major and career) and a social desirability assessment. For the games portion, participants had to make choices that would determine how challenging or competitive the real effort task would be. The task consisted of finding two numbers in a 3x3 or 4x4 matrix that would sum 100, and incentives were determined by the choice for challenge or competition in each game presented and the number of correct answers under 2 minutes. For participants randomized into the treatment group, an introduction to the growth mindset concepts was presented at the end of this phase.

After the second phase, I identified a few issues with the design that lead to a redesign of the third and last phase. The most relevant changes include merging originally planned phases 3 and 4 into one due to attrition between phases (about 1/3 of enrolled participants did not complete the second phase), and changes in the choice of challenge (so all tasks could be directly comparable).
The third phase started 3 months after the second phase to accommodate these and other technical changes, and is currently active for participants. For those assigned to the treatment group, the third phase starts with the growth mindset intervention. All participants answer to a brief survey followed by the incentivized games. This last survey includes self-reported measures of growth mindset (to be compared to the baseline), and beliefs about performance in the real effort tasks. The incentivized choices made in the games portion of this phase constitute the outcomes to be analyzed by this study.

Randomization was done by the survey platform, Qualtrics, as subjects logged in to the second phase of this study.

Randomization was stratified by gender, assigning treatment status randomly to each individual.

No

0

323 participants enrolled in the first phase of this study, 184 women and 139 men.

50% of female participants and 50% of male participants completing phase 2 of the study.

Due to high attrition between phases, this study expects to be underpowered for detecting changes in the self-reported growth mindset measures (typical MDES=0.3). Considering baseline measures of choices for competition pooling both women and men in the study (0.38), this study is expected to be sufficiently powered for an MDES of 0.2p.p. for the treatment group. Considering baseline measures of female choices for competition, this study is sufficiently powered to find an increase of at least 0.25p.p. on competition choices by women in the treatment group, closing a substantial portion of the gender gap found at baseline (0.31p.p.). Since we do not have a baseline measure of the challenge-seeking choice exercise used in phase 3, we can only estimate the ranges of MDES associated with the intervention. For the entire sample, MDES ranges include 15p.p. for a control mean of 0.1, 20p.p. for a control mean of 0.5, and 0.08p.p. for a control mean of 0.9. For the sample of women, in particular, MDES ranges include 22p.p., 27p.p., and 18p.p. for control means of 0.1, 0.5, and 0.8 respectively.