Calibrating growth mindset about intelligence: Increased blame, effort misperception, and a genes-and-growth solution...

Research on growth mindsets about intelligence-beliefs that cognitive ability can be developed through effort and learning-often highlights benefits such as narrowing achievement gaps. Nonetheless, by emphasizing controllability in the domain of intelligence, growth-mindset messages can also increase blame for intellectual difficulties relative to fixed-mindset frames that portray intelligence as largely innate. Across eight intelligence-focused studies (N = 1,820), we document this cost for judgments of both others and the self: Growth-mindset inductions, compared to fixed-mindset inductions, increased blame and led participants to infer that targets had exerted less effort. The blaming effect diminished when it was clear that the task exceeded what an average person typically achieves. Finally, a coherent "genes-and-growth" message that acknowledged genetic influence while emphasizing epigenetics and neuroplasticity preserved motivation to persist while tempering self-blame. Taken together, these findings argue for more nuanced implementation of growth-mindset messaging about intelligence and motivate field research on the longer term consequences of chronic self-blame and on interventions that pair malleability cues with clear information about task difficulty and genetic constraints. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).