Research Impact is a series that pulls back the curtain of IU Research, showcasing the faculty creating, innovating and advancing knowledge that improves communities and changes lives.
As a graduate student at Stanford University, Mary Murphy had an important realization about mindset, which many believed to be a quality inside our heads. She wondered if it actually existed outside of us in the cultures we create in our teams, organizations, classes and more. In the two decades since, she has collaborated with her mentor Carol Dweck and dozens of Indiana University students to flip the idea of mindset on its head.
Murphy, the Class of 1948 Herman B Wells Endowed Professor of psychological and brain sciences in the IU College of Arts and Sciences, examines how social and behavioral science can be used to create more equitable environments where everyone can thrive. Her new book, “Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations” shares the science and offers evidence-based tools and resources to help all people create and sustain inclusive cultures of growth.
Question: What is your area of research?
Answer: I study how we can harness social and behavioral science to create more equitable learning and working environments. I apply a lot of what we know about people’s vigilance to cues in their environment and how culture creators shape those cues to signal to people whether they are valued and respected or devalued and disrespected within a setting.
I have done a lot of work in higher education and workplace settings, and particularly with women and people of color in STEM classes, majors, fields. I look at how reshaping the cues within these settings can help increase people’s sense of belonging and inclusion within classrooms, organizations and more.
Q: What are cultures of growth?
A: Mindset is a continuum, where we move between our fixed mindset – a belief that people are born with certain skills and abilities – and a growth mindset – a belief that everyone has the potential to develop skills and abilities with continuous learning. But focusing solely on mindset at the individual level is not enough because we are also influenced by the mindset cultures we find ourselves in.
In cultures of genius, the belief is that you’re either smart or you’re not and so we are looking at the smartest people in the room and putting all of our resources around them. In cultures of growth, the belief is that talent and ability are things we develop and build together and so people in these environments– both as individuals and groups – work together to help each other thrive and achieve their potential. This mindset culture results in more positive outcomes for everyone.
I work with CEOs of organizations to determine how this can be applied from the top down—making it real in policies and practices. I’m working with teachers in different school districts to apply this in school systems. I work with faculty around the country to provide them with tools and resources, helping them put growth mindset culture practices in place and measure their impact on students’ outcomes, and then we give faculty their data back so they can see the impact of their changes on students’ motivation and performance.
Creating equitable, evidence-based environments that stoke people’s growth and development over time is applicable to everyone, regardless of their role or position. It relates so much to how we think about ourselves and how we think about the individuals we support, mentor and care for the most.
Q: Who influences a specific environment’s mindset culture?
A: Every time two or more people are together, that interaction has its own mindset microculture, which influences which mindset we inhabit. So in that sense, we are all culture creators. Even if we’re not in a role of positional power, we are still able to create cultures of growth interactions and pods around us. We are challenged at all levels of development to create environments that motivate us to thrive and help everyone at the same time be equitably motivated and committed.
Q: How is your research impacting STEM environments across the world?
A: Because a fixed-minded culture of genius is especially common in different industries, like technology and other STEM-based environments, it is important to know the consequences of that for everyone’s experiences, motivation and performance – particularly for individuals who are numerically underrepresented or historically excluded from these contexts.
We work with culture creators – whether they be administrators, managers, faculty members, etc. – to create more equitable and inclusive learning and working environments. This is especially important in STEM right now because America needs to increase and broaden participation in our STEM workforce to remain globally competitive.
We see that social and behavioral science can tell us what cues people attend to and examine how when we shift those cues, how these changes shift people’s experiences and outcomes. Our research shows that by changing cues in these environments and working with culture creators on more equitable teaching, managing and interaction practices, we can causally impact people’s experiences, their sense of belonging, their sense of being valued, their trust, their likelihood of staying in these environments and their performance.
Q: How have students contributed to this research?
A: I love working with students who bring new perspectives and ideas and who ask questions you may take for granted. In taking those questions seriously, you can discover new lenses through which to look at your research. For students, they are developing a toolkit of practical skills and abilities they can use while furthering their education or in their future jobs.
I have had anywhere from 15 to 35 undergraduate students engaged in this experimental and field research at any given time, who engage in the full research process from thinking about and designing the studies, to creating the materials, to running participants from the community through the actual studies themselves, helping with the analysis and then presenting this work in other venues, whether that be to community partners or in scientific research meetings and conferences. Most of my graduate students have done Ph.D. dissertations on some of the ideas related to this and are working with undergraduate teams to enact this research, helping them write it up so they can get jobs in academia but also in industry in really important culture development roles outside of academia.
Q: What is some of the best advice you have received during your career?
A: Science takes a village. You don’t have to have the best ideas, know all the cutting-edge techniques or bring all of the skills to a research project. You just have to know your strengths and weaknesses and then build your team around you. Together, you create an environment where everyone can contribute their skills and knowledge, and everyone can grow into their next level of skills and abilities.
I don’t know that I would be in science if I had to do it alone. I am very grateful that my field of social psychology is an extremely collaborative one, and those collaborations exist for me both at Indiana University and around the world. Collaboration ensures the research and science we are doing is applicable, relevant and helpful in changing the world.
