Smart Kids

Scientific American Mind -  November 28, 2007

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids

Hint: Don't tell your kids that they are. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life

By Carol S. Dweck
A brilliant student, Jonathan sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Jonathan puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Jonathan suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son’s confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Jonathan (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless.
Our society worships talent, and many people assume that possessing superior intelligence or ability—along with confidence in that ability—is a recipe for success. In fact, however, more than 30 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.
The result plays out in children like Jonathan, who coast through the early grades under the dangerous notion that no-effort academic achievement defines them as smart or gifted. Such children hold an implicit belief that intelligence is innate and fixed, making striving to learn seem far less important than being (or looking) smart. This belief also makes them see challenges, mistakes and even the need to exert effort as threats to their ego rather than as opportunities to improve. And it causes them to lose confidence and motivation when the work is no longer easy for them.
Praising children’s innate abilities, as Jonathan’s parents did, reinforces this mind-set, which can also prevent young athletes or people in the workforce and even marriages from living up to their potential. On the other hand, our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.
The Opportunity of Defeat
I first began to investigate the underpinnings of human motivation—and how people persevere after setbacks—as a psychology graduate student at Yale University in the 1960s. Animal experiments by psychologists Martin Seligman, Steven Maier and Richard Solomon of the University of Pennsylvania had shown that after repeated failures, most animals conclude that a situation is hopeless and beyond their control. After such an experience, the researchers found, an animal often remains passive even when it can affect change—a state they called learned helplessness.
People can learn to be helpless, too, but not everyone reacts to setbacks this way. I wondered: Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people’s beliefs about why they had failed.
In particular, attributing poor performance to a lack of ability depresses motivation more than does the belief that lack of effort is to blame. In 1972, when I taught a group of elementary and middle school children who displayed helpless behavior in school that a lack of effort (rather than lack of ability) led to their mistakes on math problems, the kids learned to keep trying when the problems got tough. They also solved many of the problems even in the face of difficulty. Another group of helpless children who were simply rewarded for their success on easy problems did not improve their ability to solve hard math problems. These experiments were an early indication that a focus on effort can help resolve helplessness and engender success.
Subsequent studies revealed that the most persistent students do not ruminate about their own failure much at all but instead think of mistakes as problems to be solved. At the University of Illinois in the 1970s I, along with my then graduate student Carol Diener, asked 60 fifth graders to think out loud while they solved very difficult pattern-recognition problems. Some students reacted defensively to mistakes, denigrating their skills with comments such as “I never did have a good rememory,” and their problem-solving strategies deteriorated.
Others, meanwhile, focused on fixing errors and honing their skills. One advised himself: “I should slow down and try to figure this out.” Two schoolchildren were particularly inspiring. One, in the wake of difficulty, pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips and said, “I love a challenge!” The other, also confronting the hard problems, looked up at the experimenter and approvingly declared, “I was hoping this would be informative!” Predictably, the students with this attitude outperformed their cohorts in these studies.
Two Views of Intelligence
Several years later I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes of learners—helpless versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different “theories” of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that’s that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so. Like Jonathan, such children shun effort in the belief that having to work hard means they are dumb.
The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they can be remedied by more effort. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.
We validated these expectations in a study published in early 2007. Psychologists Lisa Blackwell of Columbia University and Kali H. Trzes­niewski of Stanford University and I monitored 373 students for two years during the transition to junior high school, when the work gets more difficult and the grading more stringent, to determine how their mind-sets might affect their math grades. At the beginning of seventh grade, we assessed the students’ mind-sets by asking them to agree or disagree with statements such as “Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t really change.” We then assessed their beliefs about other aspects of learning and looked to see what happened to their grades.
As we had predicted, the students with a growth mind-set felt that learning was a more important goal in school than getting good grades. In addition, they held hard work in high regard, believing that the more you labored at something, the better you would become at it. They understood that even geniuses have to work hard for their great accomplishments. Confronted by a setback such as a disappointing test grade, students with a growth mind-set said they would study harder or try a different strategy for mastering the material.
The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were concerned about looking smart with little regard for learning. They had negative views of effort, believing that having to work hard at something was a sign of low ability. They thought that a person with talent or intelligence did not need to work hard to do well. Attributing a bad grade to their own lack of ability, those with a fixed mind-set said that they would study less in the future, try never to take that subject again and consider cheating on future tests.
Such divergent outlooks had a dramatic impact on performance. At the start of junior high, the math achievement test scores of the students with a growth mind-set were comparable to those of students who displayed a fixed mind-set. But as the work became more difficult, the students with a growth mind-set showed greater persistence. As a result, their math grades overtook those of the other students by the end of the first semester—and the gap between the two groups continued to widen during the two years we followed them.
Along with Columbia psychologist Heidi Grant, I found a similar relation between mind-set and achievement in a 2003 study of 128 Columbia freshman premed students who were enrolled in a challenging general chemistry course. Although all the students cared about grades, the ones who earned the best grades were those who placed a high premium on learning rather than on showing that they were smart in chemistry. The focus on learning strategies, effort and persistence paid off for these students.
Confronting Deficiencies
A belief in fixed intelligence also makes people less willing to admit to errors or to confront and remedy their deficiencies in school, at work and in their social relationships. In a study published in 1999 of 168 freshmen entering the University of Hong Kong, where all instruction and coursework are in English, three Hong Kong colleagues and I found that students with a growth mind-set who scored poorly on their English proficiency exam were far more inclined to take a remedial English course than were low-scoring students with a fixed mind-set. The students with a stagnant view of intelligence were presumably unwilling to admit to their deficit and thus passed up the opportunity to correct it.
A fixed mind-set can similarly hamper communication and progress in the workplace by leading managers and employees to discourage or ignore constructive criticism and advice. Research by psychologists Peter Heslin and Don VandeWalle of Southern Methodist University and Gary Latham of the University of Toronto shows that managers who have a fixed mind-set are less likely to seek or welcome feedback from their employees than are managers with a growth mind-set. Presumably, managers with a growth mind-set see themselves as works-in-progress and understand that they need feedback to improve, whereas bosses with a fixed mind-set are more likely to see criticism as reflecting their underlying level of competence. Assuming that other people are not capable of changing either, executives with a fixed mind-set are also less likely to mentor their underlings. But after Heslin, VandeWalle and Latham gave managers a tutorial on the value and principles of the growth mind-set, supervisors became more willing to coach their employees and gave more useful advice.
Mind-set can affect the quality and longevity of personal relationships as well, through people’s willingness—or unwillingness—to deal with difficulties. Those with a fixed mind-set are less likely than those with a growth mind-set to broach problems in their relationships and to try to solve them, according to a 2006 study I conducted with psychologist Lara Kammrath of Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. After all, if you think that human personality traits are more or less fixed, relationship repair seems largely futile. Individuals who believe people can change and grow, however, are more confident that confronting concerns in their relationships will lead to resolutions.
Proper Praise
How do we transmit a growth mind-set to our children? One way is by telling stories about achievements that result from hard work. For instance, talking about math geniuses who were more or less born that way puts students in a fixed mind-set, but descriptions of great mathematicians who fell in love with math and developed amazing skills engenders a growth mind-set, our studies have shown. People also communicate mind-sets through praise. Although many, if not most, parents believe that they should build up a child by telling him  or her how brilliant and talented he or she is, our research suggests that this is misguided.
In studies involving several hundred fifth graders published in 1998, for example, Columbia psychologist Claudia M. Mueller and I gave children questions from a nonverbal IQ test. After the first 10 problems, on which most children did fairly well, we praised them. We praised some of them for their intelligence: “Wow … that’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.” We commended others for their effort: “Wow … that’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.”
We found that intelligence praise encouraged a fixed mind-set more often than did pats on the back for effort. Those congratulated for their intelligence, for example, shied away from a challenging assignment—they wanted an easy one instead—far more often than the kids applauded for their effort. (Most of those lauded for their hard work wanted the difficult problem set from which they would learn.) When we gave everyone hard problems anyway, those praised for being smart became discouraged, doubting their ability. And their scores, even on an easier problem set we gave them afterward, declined as compared with their previous results on equivalent problems. In contrast, students praised for their effort did not lose confidence when faced with the harder questions, and their performance improved markedly on the easier problems that followed.
Making Up Your Mind-set
In addition to encouraging a growth mind-set through praise for effort, parents and teachers can help children by providing explicit instruction regarding the mind as a learning machine. Blackwell, Trzesniewski and I recently designed an eight-session workshop for 91 students whose math grades were declining in their first year of junior high. Forty-eight of the students received instruction in study skills only, whereas the others attended a combination of study skills sessions and classes in which they learned about the growth mind-set and how to apply it to schoolwork.
In the growth mind-set classes, students read and discussed an article entitled “You Can Grow Your Brain.” They were taught that the brain is like a muscle that gets stronger with use and that learning prompts neurons in the brain to grow new connections. From such instruction, many students began to see themselves as agents of their own brain development. Students who had been disruptive or bored sat still and took note. One particularly unruly boy looked up during the discussion and said, “You mean I don’t have to be dumb?”
As the semester progressed, the math grades of the kids who learned only study skills continued to decline, whereas those of the students given the growth-mind-set training stopped falling and began to bounce back to their former levels. Despite being unaware that there were two types of instruction, teachers reported noticing significant motivational changes in 27 percent of the children in the growth mind-set workshop as compared with only 9 percent of students in the control group. One teacher wrote: “Your workshop has already had an effect. L [our unruly male student], who never puts in any extra effort and often doesn’t turn in homework on time, actually stayed up late to finish an assignment early so I could review it and give him a chance to revise it. He earned a B+. (He had been getting Cs and lower.)”
Other researchers have replicated our results. Psychologists Catherine Good, then at Columbia, and Joshua Aronson and Michael Inzlicht of New York University reported in 2003 that a growth mind-set workshop raised the math and English achievement test scores of seventh graders. In a 2002 study Aronson, Good (then a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin) and their colleagues found that college students began to enjoy their schoolwork more, value it more highly and get better grades as a result of training that fostered a growth mind-set.
We have now encapsulated such instruction in an interactive computer program called “Brain­ology,” which should be more widely available by mid-2008. Its six modules teach students about the brain—what it does and how to make it work better. In a virtual brain lab, users can click on brain regions to determine their functions or on nerve endings to see how connections form when people learn. Users can also advise virtual students with problems as a way of practicing how to handle schoolwork difficulties; additionally, users keep an online journal of their study practices.
New York City seventh graders who tested a pilot version of Brainology told us that the program had changed their view of learning and how to promote it. One wrote: “My favorite thing from Brainology is the neurons part where when u [sic] learn something there are connections and they keep growing. I always picture them when I’m in school.” A teacher said of the students who used the program: “They offer to practice, study, take notes, or pay attention to ensure that connections will be made.”
Teaching children such information is not just a ploy to get them to study. People do differ in intelligence, talent and ability. And yet research is converging on the conclusion that great accomplishment, and even what we call genius, is typically the result of years of passion and dedication and not something that flows naturally from a gift. Mozart, Edison, Curie, Darwin and Cézanne were not simply born with talent; they cultivated it through tremendous and sustained effort. Similarly, hard work and discipline contribute much more to school achievement than IQ does.
Such lessons apply to almost every human endeavor. For instance, many young athletes value talent more than hard work and have consequently become unteachable. Similarly, many people accomplish little in their jobs without constant praise and encouragement to maintain their motivation. If we foster a growth mind-set in our homes and schools, however, we will give our children the tools to succeed in their pursuits and to become responsible employees and citizens.

AP GOV STUDY GUIDE VOCAB

• Unfunded Mandates: when the federal government requires state and local action but does not provide the funds to pay for the action.
• Democracy: a system of selecting policymakers and of organizing government so that policy represents and responds to the publics’ preferences
• Elastic clause: the final paragraph of article 1 section 8 of the constitution which authorizes congress to pass all laws necessary and proper to carry out the enumerated powers.
• Implied Powers: powers of the federal government that go beyond those enumerated in the constitution.
• Media Events: Events purposely stages for the media that nonetheless look spontaneous.
• Cooperative federalism: a system of government in which powers and plicy assignments are shared between states and the national government.
• Single Issue groups: groups that have a narrow interest, tend to dislike compromise and often draw membership from people new to politics.
• Conservatives: those who advocate conservatism.
• Factions: interest groups arising from the unequal distribution of property or wealth that James Madison attacked in federalist paper number 10.
• Judicial review: the power of the courts to determine whether acts of congress and by implication the executive are in accord with the US constitution.
• Beats: specific locations from which news frequently emanates, such as congress or the white house. Most top reporters work a particular beat, thereby becoming specialist in what goes on at the location.
• Gibbons v. Ogden: a landmark case decided in 1824 in which the supreme court interpreted very broadly the clause in ART 1 SEC 8-giving congress the power to regulate interstate commerce, encompassing virtually every form of commercial activity.
• Bill of Rights: the first 10 amendments to the US constitution, drafted in response to some of the anti federalist concerns. These amendments define such basic liberties as freedom of religion, speech and press and offer protections against arbitrary searches by the police and being held without talking to a lawyer.
• Natural rights: rights inherent in human beings, not dependent on governments which include life, liberty and property. The concept of rights was central to English philosopher John Locke’s theories about government and was widely accepted among American founding fathers.
• Liberals: people who believe in equal rights and liberty
• Writ of habeas corpus:  a court order requiring jailers to explain to a judge why they are holding a prisoner in custody.
• New Jersey Plan: equal representation of each state in congress regardless of the states population.
• Privileges and immunities clause: ART 4 SEC 2 according citizens of each state most of the privileges of citizens of other states.
• Shays’ Rebellion: a series of attacks on courthouses by a small band of farmers led by Daniel Shays to block foreclosure proceedings.
• Simpson Mazzolli: an immigration law named after its legislative sponsors that as of june 1 1987 requires employees to document the citizenship of their employees.
• Articles Of Confederation:  the first constitution of the US in 1777. The articles established a national legislature, the continental congress, but most authority rested with the state legislatures.
• Representation: a basic principle of traditional democratic theory that describes the relationship between the few leaders and the many followers
• Policymaking system: the process by which political problems are communicated by the voters and acted upon by government policymakers. The policymaking system begins with people’s needs and expectations for governmental action. When people confront government officials with problems that they want solved, they are trying to influence the government’s policy agenda.
• Elite: the upper class in a society that utilizes wealth for political power. According to the elite and class theory of government and politics, elites control policies because they control key institutions.
• Full faith and credit clause:  ART 4 SEC 1 of the constitution requiring each state to recognize the official documents and civil judgments rendered by the courts of other states.
• Investigative journalism: the use of detective-like reporting to unearth scandals, scams and schemes, putting reporters in adversarial relationships with political leaders
• Sample: a relatively small proportion of people who are chosen in a survey so as to be representative of the whole.
• Tenth amendment: the powers not delegated to the US by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively or to the people
• Implied powers: powers of the federal government that go beyond those enumerated in the constitution. The constitution stats that congress has the power to make all laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution. many federal
• Individualism: the belief that individuals should be left on their own by their government. One of the primary reasons for the comparatively small scope of American  government is the prominence of this belief in American political thought and practice.
• Liberalism: a political ideology whose advocates prefer a government active in dealing with human needs, support individual rights and liberties, and give higher priority to social needs than military
• Anti-Federalists: opponents of the American Constitution at the time when the states were contemplating its adoption. They argues that the constitution was a class-based document, that it would erode fundamental liberties and that it would weaken the power of the states.
• Policy Agenda: John Kingdon, the list of subjects or problems to which government officials and people outside of the government closely associated with those official are paying some serious attention at any given time.
• Melting pot: the mixture of cultures, ideas and peoples that has changed the American nation. The united states, with its history of immigration, has often been called a melting pot
• Policy Impacts: the effects a policy has on people and problems. Impacts are analyzed to see how well a policy has met its goal and at what cost.
• Political culture: an overall set of values widely shared within society
• Exit Polls: public opinion surveys used by major media pollsters to predict electoral winners with speed and precision.
• McCulloch v Maryland: an 1819 Supreme Court decision that established the supremacy of the nation government over state governments. In deciding this case, chief  justice John Marshall and his colleagues held that congress had certain implied powers in addition to the enumerated powers found in the constitution.
• US Constitution: the document written in 1787 and ratified in 1788 that sets forth the institutional structure of US government and the tasks these institutions perform. It replaced the articles of confederation.
• Public policy: a choice that government makes in response to a political issue. A policy is a course of action taken with regard to some problem.
• Protest: a form of political participation designed to achieve policy change through dramatic and unconventional tactics.
• Connecticut compromise: the compromise reached at the constitutional convention that established two houses of congress: the House of Representatives, in which representation is based on a state’s share of the US population, and the senate, in which each state has two representatives.
• Intergovernmental relations: the workings of the federal system-the entire set of interactions among national, state, and local governments.
• Formula Grants: federal categorical grants distributed according to a formula specified in legislation or in administrative regulations.
• Trial balloons: an intentional news leak for the purpose of assessing the political reaction.
• Random digit dialing: a technique used by pollsters to place telephone calls randomly to both listed and unlisted numbers when conduction a survey.
• Political ideology: a coherent set of beliefs about politics, public policy, and public purpose. It helps give meaning to political events, personalities, and polices.
• Separation of powers: an important part of the Madisonian model that requires each of the three branches of government, executive, legislative and judicial, to be relatively independent of the others so that one cannot control the others.
• Judicial interpretation: a major informal way in which the constitution is changed by the courts as they balance citizens’ rights against those of the government.
• Unwritten constitution: the body of tradition, practice and procedure that is important as the written constitution. Changes in the unwritten constitution can change the spirit of the Constitution. Political parties and national party conventions are a part of the unwritten constitution in the US.
•  Minority majority: the emergence of non-Caucasian majority, as compared with a white, general Anglo-Saxon majority. It is predicted that, by about 2060, Hispanic Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans together will outnumber white Americans.
• Gender Gap: a term that refers to the regular pattern by which women are more likely to support democratic candidates. Women tend to be significantly less conservation than men and are more likely to support spending on social services and to oppose the higher levels of military spending.
• Policy entrepreneurs: people who invest in their political “capital” in an issue. According to john kingdom, a policy entrepreneur “could be in or out of government, in elected or appointed positions, in interest groups or research organizations.
• Project Grants: federal grants given for specific purposes and awarded on the basis of the merits of applications. A type of the categorical grants available to states and localities.
• Extradition: a legal process whereby an alleged criminal offender is surrounded by the officials of one states to officials of the state in which the crime is alleged to have been committed.
• Sampling error: the level of confidence in the findings of a public opinion poll. The more people interviewed the more confident one can be of the results.
• Random sampling: the key technique employed by sophisticated survey researchers, which operates on the principle that everyone should have an equal probability of being selected for the sample.
• Political socialization: according to Richard Dawson, “the process through which an individual acquires his particular political orientations, his knowledge, feelings and evaluations regarding his political world.
• Agents of socialization: families, schools, television, peer groups, and other influences that contribute to political socialization by shaping formal and especially informal learning about politics.
• Sound bites: short video clips of approximately 15 seconds, which are typically all that is shown from a politician’s speech or activities on the nightly television news.
• Block grants: federal grants given more or less automatically to states or communities to support broad programs in areas such as community development and social services.
• Broadcast media: television and radio, as compared with print media.
• Political participation: all the activities used by citizens to influence the selection of political leaders or the policies they pursue. The most common, but not the only, means of political participation in a democracy in voting. Other means include protest and civil disobedience.

• Checks and balances: an important part of the Madisonian model design to limit government’s power by requiring that power be balanced among the different governmental institution. These institutions continually check one another’s activities. This system reflects Madison’s goal of setting power against power.
• Mass media: television, radio, newspapers, magazines and other means of popular communication. They are a key part of high-tech politics.
• 24 traditional democratic theories: a theory about how a democratic government makes its decisions. According to Robert  Dahl, its cornerstones are equality in voting, effective participation, enlightened understanding, final control over the agenda, and inclusion.
• Enumerated powers: powers of the federal government that are specifically addressed in the constitution; for congress these powers are listed in article 1 sec 8, and include the power to coin money, regulate its value, and impose taxes.
• Talking head: a shot of a persons’ face talking directly to the camera. Because this is visually unappealing, the major commercial networks rarely show a politician talking one-on-one for very long.
• Public goods: goods, such as clean air and clean water that everyone must share
• Linkage institutions: the channels or access points through which issues and people’s policy preferences get on the government’s policy agenda. In the US elections, political parties and interest groups are the three main linkage institutions.
• Demography: the science of population changes.
• Virginia Plan: the proposal at the constitutional convention that called for representation of each state in congress in proportion to that state’s share of the US population.
• Government: the institutions and processes through which public policies are made for a society.
• Pluralist theory: A theory of government and politics emphasizing that politics is mainly a competition among groups, each one pressing for its own preferred policies.
• Unitary government: a way of organizing a nation so that all power resides in the central government today, including those of great Britain and Japan are unitary governments.
• Census: a valuable tool for understanding demographic changes. The constitution requires that the government conduct an actual enumeration of the population every ten years.
• Politics: produces authoritative decision about public issues.
• Constitution: a nation’s basic law. It creates political institutions, assigns or divides powers in government and often provides certain guarantees to citizens.
• Reapportionment: the process of relocating seats in the HOR every 10 years on the basis of the results of the census.
• Narrowcasting: as opposed to the tradition broadcasting, the appeal to a narrow, particular audience which focus on a particular interest.
• Categorical grants: federal grants that can be used only for specific purposes of state and local spending. They come with strings attached like nondiscrimination provisions
• Majority rule: a fundamental principle of traditional democratic theory, in a democracy choosing among alternatives requires that the majority’s desire be respected.
• Newspaper chains: newspapers published by massive media conglomerates that account for almost three-quarters of the nation’s daily circulation.
• Policy gridlock: a condition that occurs when no coalition is strong enough to form a majority and establish policy. The result is that nothing may get done.
• Fiscal Federalism: the pattern of spending, taxing and providing grants in the federal system; it is the cornerstone of the national government’s relations with state and local governments.
• Political issue: an issue that arises when people disagree about a problem and a public policy choice
• Print media: newspapers and magazines as compared with broadcast media
• Limited government: the idea that certain things are out of bounds for government because of the natural rights of citizens. Limited government was central to John Locke’s philosophy in the seventeenth century, and it contrasted sharply with the prevailing view of the divine rights of monarchs
• High-tech politics: a politics in which the behavior of citizens and policymakers and the political agenda itself are increasingly shaped by technology.
• Hyperpluralism: a theory of government and politics contending that groups are so strong that government is weakened. Hyperpluralism is an extreme, exaggerated or perverted form of pluralism.
• Federalism: a way of organizing a nation so that two levels of government have formal authority over the same land and people. It is a system of shared power between units of government.
• Gross domestic product: the sum total of the value of all the goods and services produced in a nation
• Civil disobedience: a form of political participation that reflects a conscious decision to break a law believed to be immoral and to suffer the consequences
• Declaration of independence: a document approved by representatives of the American colonies in 1776 that stated their grievances against the British monarch and declared their independence
• Supremacy clause: ART 4 of the constitution, which makes the constitution, national laws and treaties supreme over state laws when the national government is acting within its constitutional limits
• Public opinion: the distribution of the population’s beliefs about politics and policy issues
• Minority rights: a principle of traditional democratic theory that guarantees rights to those who do not belong to majorities and allows that they might join majorities through persuasion and reasoned argument
• Equal rights amendments: amendment failed to acquire the necessary support from three-fourths of the state legislatures
• Dual federalism: a system of government in which both the states and the national government remain supreme with their own spheres, each responsible for some policies.
• Consent of the governed: according to John Locke’s view that governments derive their authority from consent of the governed
• Press conferences: meetings of public officials with reporters

• Policy making institutions: the branches of government charges with taking action on political issues. The US constitution established three policy making institutions-the congress, the presidency, and the courts. Today, the power of the bureaucracy consider it a fourth policy making institution
• Republic: a form of government that derives its power directly or indirectly from the people. Those chosen to govern are accountable to those whom they govern. In contrast to a direct democracy, in which people themselves make laws, in a republic the people select representatives who make the laws
• Federalists: supporters of the US constitution at the time the states were contemplating its adoption.
• Federalist papers: a collection of 85 articles written by Alexander Hamilton
• Conservatism: a political ideology whose advocates fear the growth of government, deplore government’s drag on private-sector initiative, dislike permissiveness in society, and place a priority on military needs over social needs.
• Elite an class theory: a theory of government and politics contending that societies are divided along class lines and that an upper-class elite will rule, regardless of the formal niceties of governmental organization.

Scientific American Mind -  May 19, 2005

True Crimes, False Confessions

Why do innocent people confess to crimes they did not commit?

By Saul M. Kassin and Gisli H. Gudjonsson

In 1989 a female jogger was beaten senseless, raped and left for dead in New York City's Central Park. Her skull had multiple fractures, her eye socket was crushed, and she lost three quarters of her blood. She survived, but she cannot remember anything about the incident. Within 48 hours of the attack, solely on the basis of confessions obtained by police, five African- and Hispanic-American boys, 14 to 16 years old, were arrested. The crime scene had shown a horrific act but carried no physical traces at all of the defendants. Yet it was easy to understand why detectives, under the glare of a national media spotlight, aggressively interrogated the teenagers, at least some of whom were "wilding" in the park that night.

Four of the confessions were videotaped and later presented at trial. The tapes were compelling, with each of the defendants describing in vivid--though, in many ways, erroneous--detail how the jogger was attacked and what role he had played. One boy reenacted the way he pulled off her running pants. Another said he felt pressured by the others to participate in his "first rape"; he expressed remorse and promised that it would not happen again. After their arrest, the youths recanted these confessions, because they had believed that making a confession would have enabled them to go home. Regardless of the denials, the tapes collectively persuaded police, prosecutors, two trial juries, a city and a nation; the teenagers were convicted and sentenced to prison.

Thirteen years later Matias Reyes, who was in jail for three rapes and a murder committed after the jogger attack, stepped forward of his own initiative. He volunteered that he was the Central Park assailant and that he had acted alone. The Manhattan district attorney's office questioned Reyes and discovered that he had accurate, privileged and independently corroborated knowledge of the crime and crime scene. DNA testing further revealed that the semen samples recovered from the victim--which had conclusively excluded the boys as donors--belonged to Reyes. (Prosecutors had argued at trial that just because police did not capture all the alleged perpetrators did not mean they did not get some of them.) In December 2002 the five teenagers' convictions were vacated.

Despite its notoriety, the case illustrates a phenomenon that is not new or unique. The pages of legal history reveal many tragic miscarriages of justice involving innocent men and women who were prosecuted, wrongfully convicted, and sentenced to prison or to death. Opinions differ on prevalence rates, but it is clear that a disturbing number of cases have involved defendants who were convicted based only on false confessions that, at least in retrospect, could not have been true. Indeed, as in the case of the Central Park incident, disputed false confessions have convicted some people notwithstanding physical evidence to the contrary. As a result of technological advances in forensic DNA typing--which enables the review of past cases in which blood, hair, semen, skin, saliva or other biological material has been preserved--many new, high-profile wrongful convictions have surfaced in recent years, up to 157 in the U.S. alone at the time of this writing. Typically 20 to 25 percent of DNA exonerations had false confessions in evidence.

Why would an innocent person confess to a crime? A scan of the scientific literature reveals how a complex set of psychological factors comes into play. First, techniques commonly used by investigators during interviews make them prone to see deceit in suspects, a perception that tends to bias the outcome of the questioning. When the accused waive their constitutional rights to silence and to counsel during questioning by the police, they may also unwittingly lose procedural safeguards and put themselves at greater risk of making a false confession. Other contributors include a given person's tendencies toward compliance or suggestibility in the face of two common interrogation tactics--the presentation of false incriminating evidence and the impression that giving a confession might bring leniency. In short, sometimes people confess because it seems like the only way out of a terrible situation.

More troubling, confession evidence is inherently prejudicial, influencing juries even when they are shown evidence of coercion and even when there is no corroboration. Ultimately, we believe, society should discuss the urgent need to reform practices that contribute to false confessions and to require mandatory videotaping of all interviews and interrogations.

Discerning the Truth
A 2004 conference on police interviewing attended by the two of us illustrates the problem of bias during questioning. Joseph Buckley--president of John E. Reid and Associates (which has trained tens of thousands of law-enforcement professionals) and co-author of the manual Criminal Interrogation and Confessions (Aspen Publishers, 2001)--presented the influential Reid technique of interviewing and interrogation. Afterward, an audience member asked if the persuasive methods did not at times cause innocent people to confess. Buckley replied that they did not interrogate innocent people.

To understand the basis of this remark, it is important to know that the highly confrontational, accusatory process of interrogation is preceded by an information-gathering interview intended to determine whether the suspect is guilty or innocent. Sometimes this initial judgment is reasonably based on witnesses, informants or other extrinsic evidence. At other times, however, such judgments may be based on nothing more than a hunch, a clinical impression that investigators form during a preinterrogation interview.

The risk of error at this stage is clear, as in the 1986 Florida case involving Tom Sawyer, whom investigators accused of sexual assault and murder and interrogated for 16 hours, extracting a confession. His statement was later suppressed by the judge, and the charges were dropped. Sawyer had become a prime suspect because his face flushed and he appeared embarrassed during an initial interview, a reaction interpreted as a sign of deception. Investigators did not know that Sawyer was a recovering alcoholic with a social anxiety disorder that caused him to sweat profusely and blush in evaluative social situations. Many of the characteristics associated with acting "guilty" are also signs of a person under high stress.

Separating truths from lies is tricky. In fact, most experiments have shown that people perform at no better than chance levels and that training programs produce, at best, small and inconsistent improvements compared with naive control groups. In general, professional lie catchers, such as police detectives, psychiatrists, customs inspectors and polygraph examiners, exhibit accuracy rates in the 45 to 60 percent range, with a mean of 54 percent.

Even with those statistics, trained investigators believe they are more accurate in determining guilt or innocence. In 2002 Christian Meissner of Florida International University and one of us (Kassin) conducted a meta-analysis to examine their performance. Across studies, investigators and educated participants, relative to naive controls, exhibited a proclivity to judge targets as deceptive--and to do so with confidence. Expressing a particularly cynical but telling point of view, one detective is quoted as saying in a 1996 article by Richard A. Leo of the University of California at Irvine, "You can tell if a suspect is lying by whether he is moving his lips."

Protections Averted
With suspects judged deceptive from their interview behavior, the police shift into a highly confrontational process of interrogation. There is, however, an important procedural safeguard in place to protect the accused. In the landmark Miranda v. Arizona in 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police must inform all suspects of their constitutional rights to silence ("You have the right to remain silent; anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law") and to counsel ("You are entitled to consult with an attorney; if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you"). Only if suspects waive these rights "voluntarily, knowingly and intelligently" as determined in law by consideration of "a totality of the circumstances" can the statements they produce be admitted into evidence.

Miranda may not yield the protective effect for which it was designed for two reasons. First, a number of suspects--because of their youth, level of intelligence, lack of education or mental health status--do not have the capacity to understand and apply the rights they are given. Second, police use methods of presentation that elicit waivers. After observing live and videotaped police interrogations, Leo found that roughly four out of five suspects waive their rights and submit to questioning. He also observed that individuals who have no prior felony record are more likely to waive their rights than are those with a history of criminal justice "experience." In a 2004 study by one of us (Kassin) and Rebecca Norwick of Harvard University, subjects guilty or innocent of a mock crime (stealing $100) were confronted by a neutral, sympathetic, or hostile "Detective McCarthy" who asked if they would waive their rights and talk. Only 36 percent of guilty subjects agreed, but 81 percent of innocents waived these rights, saying later they had nothing to hide or fear.

Interrogation Tactics
In the past, American police routinely practiced "third degree" methods of custodial interrogation--inflicting physical or mental pain and suffering to extract confessions and other types of information from crime suspects. Such tactics have mostly faded into the annals of criminal justice history, but modern police interrogations remain powerful enough to elicit confessions. At the most general level, it is clear that the two-step approach employed by Reid-trained investigators and others--in which an interview generates a judgment of truth or deception, which in turn determines whether or not to proceed to interrogation--is inherently biased.

For innocents who are initially misjudged, one would hope that interrogators would remain open-minded and reevaluate their beliefs over the course of questioning. A warehouse of psychology research suggests, however, that once people form a belief, they selectively seek, collect and interpret new data in ways that verify their opinion. This distorting cognitive confirmation bias makes such personal convictions resistant to change, even in the face of contradictory evidence. It also contributes to the errors committed by forensic examiners whose judgments of handwriting samples, bite marks, tire marks, ballistics, fingerprints and other "scientific" observations are often corrupted by a priori expectations, a problem uncovered in many DNA exoneration cases.

In one instance in 2002, Bruce Godschalk was exonerated of two rape convictions after 15 years in prison when laboratories for both the state and the defendant found from his DNA that he was not the rapist. Yet the district attorney whose office had convicted Godschalk--even though Godschalk disavowed his initial confession--argued that the DNA tests were flawed and refused at first to release him from prison. When the district attorney was asked what foundation he had for his decision, he asserted, "I have no scientific basis. I know because I trust my detective and his tape-recorded confession. Therefore, the results must be flawed until someone proves to me otherwise."

The presumption of guilt also influences the way police conduct interrogations, perhaps leading them to adopt an aggressive and confrontational questioning style. Demonstrating that interrogators can condition the behavior of suspects through an automatic process of social mimicry, Lucy Akehurst and Aldert Vrij of the University of Portsmouth in England found in 1999 that increased gestures and physical activity among police officers triggered movement among interviewees--fidgeting behavior that is then seen by others as suspicious.

It is important to scrutinize the specific practices of social influence that get people to confess. Proponents of the Reid technique advise interrogators to conduct the questioning in a small, barely furnished, soundproof room. The purpose is to isolate the suspect, increasing his or her anxiety and desire to escape. To further heighten discomfort, the interrogator may seat the suspect in a hard, armless, straight-backed chair; keep light switches, thermostats and other control devices out of reach; and encroach on the suspect's personal space over the course of interrogation.

Against this physical backdrop, the Reid operational nine-step process begins when an interrogator confronts the suspect with unwavering assertions of guilt (1); develops "themes" that psychologically justify or excuse the crime (2); interrupts all efforts at denial and defense (3); overcomes the suspect's factual, moral and emotional objections (4); ensures that the passive suspect does not withdraw (5); shows sympathy and understanding and urges the suspect to cooperate (6); offers a face-saving alternative construal of the alleged guilty act (7); gets the suspect to recount the details of his or her crime (8); and converts the latter statement into a full written or oral confession (9). Conceptually, this system is designed to get suspects to incriminate themselves by increasing the anxiety associated with denial, plunging the suspect into a state of despair and then minimizing the perceived consequences of confession.

Rates of confession vary in different countries, indicating the underlying role that institutional and cultural influences play. For example, suspects detained for questioning in the U.S. confess at a rate around 42 percent, whereas in England the figure is closer to 60 percent. In Japan, where few restraints are placed on police interrogations and where social norms favor confession as a response to the shame brought by transgression, more than 90 percent of suspects confess.

In so-called self-report studies, researchers ask why people confessed. In 1991 one of us (Gudjonsson) and Hannes Petursson of University Hospital in Reykjavik, Iceland, published the first work in this area carried out on Icelandic prison inmates, which was replicated in Northern Ireland and in a larger Icelandic prison population with an extended version of a 54-item self-report instrument, the Gudjonsson Confession Questionnaire.

Although most suspects confess for a combination of reasons, the most critical is their belief about the strength of the evidence against them. That is why the tactic of presenting false evidence--as when police lie to suspects about an eyewitness that does not exist; fingerprints, hair or blood that has not been found; or lie detector tests they did not really fail--can lead innocent people to confess. In a 1996 laboratory experiment that illustrates the point, Kassin and Katherine L. Kiechel of Williams College falsely accused college students of crashing a desktop computer by hitting a key that they were told was off-limits. When a fellow student who was present said she had witnessed the students hit the forbidden key, the number induced to sign a confession increased by 45 percent. Also increased were the numbers who internalized a belief in their own guilt and fabricated false memories to support that belief.

False Confessions
In 2004 Steven A. Drizin of Northwestern University School of Law and Leo analyzed 125 cases of proved false confessions in the U.S. from between 1971 and 2002, the largest sample ever studied. Approximately two thirds were exonerated before the trial, and the rest came after conviction. Ninety-three percent of the false confessors were men. Overall, 81 percent occurred in murder cases, followed by rape (8 percent) and arson (3 percent). The most common bases for exoneration were that the real perpetrator was identified (74 percent) and that new scientific evidence was discovered (46 percent). The sample was disproportionately represented by persons who were young (63 percent were younger than 25; 32 percent were under 18), mentally retarded (22 percent) and diagnosed with mental illness (10 percent). Astonishingly, 30 percent of the cases contained more than one false confession to the same crime, as in the Central Park jogger case, typically indicating that one false confession was used to get others.

Recognizing that people confess in different ways and for different reasons, psychologists categorize false confessions into three groups:

Voluntary false confessions. When aviator Charles Lindbergh's baby was kidnapped in 1932, some 200 people stepped forward to confess. In the 1980s Henry Lee Lucas falsely admitted to hundreds of unsolved murders, making him the most prolific serial confessor in history. People might voluntarily give a false confession for reasons including a pathological desire for notoriety; a conscious or unconscious need to expiate feelings of guilt over prior transgressions; an inability to distinguish fact from fantasy; and a desire to aid and protect the real criminal.

Compliant false confessions. In these cases, the suspect confesses to achieve some end: to escape an aversive situation, to avoid an explicit or implied threat, or to gain a promised or implied reward. In Brown v. Mississippi in 1936, for example, three black tenant farmers admitted to murder after they were whipped with a steel-studded leather belt. And in the Central Park jogger case, each boy said he had confessed despite innocence because he was stressed and expected to go home if he cooperated.

Internalized false confessions. During interrogation, some suspects--particularly those who are young, tired, confused, suggestible and exposed to false information--come to believe that they committed the crime in question, even though they did not. In a classic case, 18-year-old Peter Reilly of Falls Village, Conn., returned home one night to find that his mother had been murdered. Reilly immediately called the police but was suspected of matricide. After gaining Reilly's trust, the police told him that he failed a lie detector test (which was not true), and which indicated that he was guilty even though he had no conscious memory of the event.

After hours of interrogation, the audiotape reveals that Reilly underwent a chilling transformation from denial to confusion, self-doubt, conversion ("Well, it really looks like I did it") and finally a full confession ("I remember slashing once at my mother's throat with a straight razor I used for model airplanes.... I also remember jumping on my mother's legs"). Two years later independent evidence revealed that Reilly could not have possibly committed the murder.

Trial jurors, like others in the criminal justice system who precede them, can be overly influenced by confessions. Archival analyses of actual cases containing confessions later proved false tell a disturbing tale. In these cases, the jury conviction rates ranged from 73 percent (as found by Richard Ofshe of the University of California at Berkeley and Leo in 1998) to 81 percent (as found by Drizin and Leo in 2004)--about the same as cases in which the defendants had made true confessions.

In light of such findings, the time is ripe for law-enforcement professionals, policymakers and the courts to reevaluate current methods of interrogation. Although more research is needed, certain practices clearly pose a risk to the innocent. One such factor concerns time in custody and interrogation. The 2004 study by Drizin and Leo found that in proved false confession cases, the interrogations lasted for an average of 16.3 hours. In the Central Park case, the five boys were in custody for 14 to 30 hours by the time they confessed. Following the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1986 (PACE) guidelines implemented in England and Wales, policy discussions should begin with a proposal for the imposition of time limits for detention and interrogation or at least flexible guidelines, as well as periodic breaks for rest and meals.

A second problem concerns the tactic of lying to suspects about the evidence. Research shows that people capitulate when they believe that the authorities have strong evidence against them. The practice of confronting suspects with real evidence, or even their own inconsistent statements, should increase the reliability of the confessions ultimately elicited. When police misrepresent the evidence, however, innocent suspects come to feel as trapped as the perpetrators--which increases the risk of false confession.

A third matter revolves around the use of minimization, as when police suggest to a suspect that the conduct in question was provoked, an accident or otherwise morally justified. Such tactics lead people to infer leniency in sentencing on confession, as if explicit promises had been made. In a study that is now in press, Melissa Russano of Roger Williams University and her colleagues found that such covert assurances can contribute to false confessions.

The Need for Reforms
To assess any given confession accurately, police, judges, lawyers and juries should have access to a videotaped record of the interrogation that produced it. In Great Britain, PACE mandated that all sessions be taped. In the U.S., four states--Minnesota, Alaska, Illinois and Maine--have mandatory videotaping, although the practice is often found elsewhere on a voluntary basis. Videotaping deters interrogators from using the most aggressive, psychologically coercive methods. It also will block frivolous defense claims of coercion where none existed. And it provides an objective and accurate record of all that transpired, avoiding disputes about how the confession came about.

A 1993 National Institute of Justice study revealed that many U.S. police departments already have videotaped interrogations--and the vast majority found the practice useful. More recently, in 2004, Thomas P. Sullivan of the law firm Jenner & Block interviewed officials from 238 police and sheriff's departments in 38 states who made such recordings voluntarily and found that they enthusiastically favored the practice, which increases accountability, provides an instant replay of the suspect's statement that reveals information initially overlooked and reduces the amount of time spent in court defending their interrogation conduct. As a counter to the most common criticisms, those interviewed found that videotaping is not costly and does not inhibit suspects from talking to police.

Such reforms are sorely needed. Only then can society trust the process of interrogation and the confessions that it produces--and help to promote justice for all.

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

Horacio Salinas for The New York Times

By GUY DEUTSCHER

Published: August 26, 2010

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Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.

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• Letters: You Are What You Speak(September 12, 2010)

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Horacio Salinas for The New York Times

In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new?

SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine;Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.

On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?

Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twainfamously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.

In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.

In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.

Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex — a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to. Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didn’t.

The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the language of space — how we describe the orientation of the world around us. Suppose you want to give someone directions for getting to your house. You might say: “After the traffic lights, take the first left, then the second right, and then you’ll see a white house in front of you. Our door is on the right.” But in theory, you could also say: “After the traffic lights, drive north, and then on the second crossing drive east, and you’ll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door.” These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn.

We find it useful to use geographic directions when hiking in the open countryside, for example, but the egocentric coordinates completely dominate our speech when we describe small-scale spaces. We don’t say: “When you get out of the elevator, walk south, and then take the second door to the east.” The reason the egocentric system is so dominant in our language is that it feels so much easier and more natural. After all, we always know where “behind” or “in front of” us is. We don’t need a map or a compass to work it out, we just feel it, because the egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own bodies and our immediate visual fields.

But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.” In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”

When these peculiarities of Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered, they inspired a large-scale research project into the language of space. And as it happens, Guugu Yimithirr is not a freak occurrence; languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali. For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say, “Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.” But the joke would be lost on some: the Canadian-American musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, recalls a young boy who showed great talent for dancing. As there was no instructor in the child’s village, McPhee arranged for him to stay with a teacher in a different village. But when he came to check on the boy’s progress after a few days, he found the boy dejected and the teacher exasperated. It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but because the landscape in the new village was entirely unfamiliar, he became disoriented and confused. Why didn’t the teacher use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying “take three steps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity.

So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways. But does this necessarily mean that we have to think about space differently? By now red lights should be flashing, because even if a language doesn’t have a word for “behind,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that its speakers wouldn’t be able to understand this concept. Instead, we should look for the possible consequences of what geographic languages obligetheir speakers to convey. In particular, we should be on the lookout for what habits of mind might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographic directions all the time.

In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions.

How does this work? The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment (the position of the sun, wind and so on) every second of their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing orientations at any given moment. So everyday communication in a geographic language provides the most intense imaginable drilling in geographic orientation (it has been estimated that as much as 1 word in 10 in a normal Guugu Yimithirr conversation is “north,” “south,” “west” or “east,” often accompanied by precise hand gestures). This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8. With such an early and intense drilling, the habit soon becomes second nature, effortless and unconscious. When Guugu Yimithirr speakers were asked how they knew where north is, they couldn’t explain it any more than you can explain how you know where “behind” is.

But there is more to the effects of a geographic language, for the sense of orientation has to extend further in time than the immediate present. If you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal directions as part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and an older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, regardless of the direction the speaker was facing in the two films.

Psychological experiments have also shown that under certain circumstances, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr-style languages even remember “the same reality” differently from us. There has been heated debate about the interpretation of some of these experiments, but one conclusion that seems compelling is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit information to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so. One way of understanding this is to imagine that you are traveling with a speaker of such a language and staying in a large chain-style hotel, with corridor upon corridor of identical-looking doors. Your friend is staying in the room opposite yours, and when you go into his room, you’ll see an exact replica of yours: the same bathroom door on the left, the same mirrored wardrobe on the right, the same main room with the same bed on the left, the same curtains drawn behind it, the same desk next to the wall on the right, the same television set on the left corner of the desk and the same telephone on the right. In short, you have seen the same room twice. But when your friend comes into your room, he will see something quite different from this, because everything is reversed north-side-south. In his room the bed was in the north, while in yours it is in the south; the telephone that in his room was in the west is now in the east, and so on. So while you will see and remember the same room twice, a speaker of a geographic language will see and remember two different rooms.

It is not easy for us to conceive how Guugu Yimithirr speakers experience the world, with a crisscrossing of cardinal directions imposed on any mental picture and any piece of graphic memory. Nor is it easy to speculate about how geographic languages affect areas of experience other than spatial orientation — whether they influence the speaker’s sense of identity, for instance, or bring about a less-egocentric outlook on life. But one piece of evidence is telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the center of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant.

IN WHAT OTHER WAYS might the language we speak influence our experience of the world? Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages. And it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.

In coming years, researchers may also be able to shed light on the impact of language on more subtle areas of perception. For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense. Does the need to think constantly about epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers’ outlook on life or their sense of truth and causation? When our experimental tools are less blunt, such questions will be amenable to empirical study.

For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

Guy Deutscher is an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. His new book, from which this article is adapted, is “Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages,” to be published this month by Metropolitan Books.