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Do You Think You’ve Got What It Takes to Meet an Upcoming Challenge?
Neuroscientist Chantel Prat talks about how the beliefs you hold about yourself and your capabilities shape your learning and ultimately your success.
Individual Differences in Learning and Performance
Over the past twenty-five years, my research has used the principles of psychology and neuroscience to better understand why some people perform better in a given context than others do. I’m particularly interested in differences in brain functioning and how they interact with what an individual learns over their lifetime to shape the way they perform complex, desirable skills. In fact, I wrote a book about this: The Neuroscience of You: How Every Brain is Different and How to Understand Yours.
When Self-efficacy becomes a Self-fulfilling Prophecy
As it turns out, what I’ve learned about how your brain works, and what that might suggest about the kinds of jobs it could be good at, is only part of the puzzle. In this article, we’re going to dive into what you believe you’re good at—a concept called self-efficacy that was first described by psychologist Albert Bandura in the 70s.
Recently I’ve become fascinated by the fact that, even in a day and age where I can directly measure the aspects of your brain functioning that predict how well you learn, your personal, subjective estimate of whether you’ll be any good at something remains one of the strongest predictors of how well you’ll actually do.
Now why might that be?
Why Stories in the Brain
The most obvious explanation for the relationship between self-efficacy and performance is that your brain uses memories of your previous successes to estimate how good you’ll be at a similar thing in the future. But things get more interesting when it comes to estimating your ability to learn something you don’t have direct experience with, like a second language or even computer programming. And this is where my expertise in neuroscience and my new interest in self-efficacy come into play. You see, while it’s true that some people’s brains are wired in a way that makes it easier for them to learn these skills, almost everyone underestimates how hard it is to do either of them.
So, you might try, and struggle, and then your brain does one of the things it does best—it makes up a “why story” to explain your difficulty. Maybe it tells you that learning a language is hard and you need more practice (this has also been called a having a growth mindset). But maybe it looks around at the other people in your Duolingo league and decides “You’re not good at learning languages.” In fact, such social comparisons are another big factor known to drive our self-efficacy.
As you might imagine, these different “why stories” will have profound impacts on the choices you make next—high self-efficacy leads to greater persistence in the face of difficulty. And persistence and practice are necessary for learning most desirable skills. On the other hand, most of us avoid doing things that we aren’t good at.
The Neuroscience of Self-Efficacy
But what you might not realize is that believing you are capable of something also improves performance more directly. This is because when your brain anticipates being successful in the future, it releases dopamine now! And dopamine is a neurochemical that both makes you feel good, motivating you to do more of the activities that lead to its release, and increases plasticity in the brain to help it rewire and learn more quickly!
So, let’s revisit the title of this blog post. Do you think you’ve got what it takes to meet an upcoming challenge? Self-efficacy research shows that those of you who answered yes are more likely to meet the challenge than those who answered no.
But if you’ve answered “no” to something you’d like to achieve, it’s worth exploring where your “why story” came from. Are you comparing yourself to the performance of others, without considering the effort it may have taken them to get where they are?
I hope that what you’ve learned here empowers you to examine your beliefs about yourself, and how they might be limiting or supporting your future achievements.
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