Ever been told to wear a hat because most of your body heat escapes through your head? I think we all have.
Pediatricians Rachel Vreeman and Aaron Carroll looked into that one for the BMJ, along with the old belief that sugar turns kids into tiny maniacs. Your head accounts for about 10% of your body’s heat loss, and sugar doesn’t have the effect on kids that parents have been blaming it for. But these ideas refuse to die. Vanderbilt psychologist Lisa Fazio and her colleagues found that the more often we hear something, the more likely we are to believe it, even when we already know it’s wrong.
University of Central Florida psychologist Bobby Hoffman recently examined five popular achievement myths that have survived despite years of research challenging them. Some have even inspired entire industries.
1. Practice Alone Will Make You an Expert
The 10,000-hour rule became popular because it made success sound like something anyone could achieve with enough practice. Spend the time, put in the work, and eventually you’ll be great at whatever you’re doing. If only it worked that way.
A meta-analysis led by psychologist Brooke Macnamara found that deliberate practice explained about 26% of performance differences in games and 21% in music. In professional occupations, it accounted for less than 1%. Practice helps, of course, but you could spend 10,000 hours doing something and still be mediocre at it.
2. Rewards Ruin the Fun
Some parents worry that paying their kids to read or rewarding them for good grades will destroy their natural motivation. The research is a little more forgiving.
Researchers reviewed 40 years of studies and found that rewards aren’t the motivation killers we’ve been warned about. People who enjoyed their work generally did it better, while those offered incentives usually got more done. Rewards only seemed to hurt motivation under certain conditions.
3. A Mindset Workshop Can Fix Bad Grades
Tons of schools invested in growth mindset workshops that promised better grades by teaching students they could become smarter through effort.
Researchers eventually reviewed 63 studies involving nearly 98,000 participants and found little evidence of meaningful academic improvement. The studies reporting better results were also more likely to come from researchers with financial ties to mindset consulting. Funny how that works.
4. Grit Is the Magic Ingredient
Grit had quite a moment. Schools started teaching it, books about it became bestsellers, and the message was hard to miss: if you wanted to succeed, you’d better learn to stick things out, even when hated everything about it.
But researchers who examined 88 samples involving more than 66,000 people found that grit had only a modest connection to success. Much of it was already covered by conscientiousness, a personality trait psychologists had studied for decades. Perseverance was the strongest aspect, though hardly a new discovery.
5. Your Passion Is Out There Waiting to Be Found
“Follow your passion” sounds lovely until you’re 35 and still wondering when yours is supposed to arrive.
Research co-authored by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck found that people who believe their interests are fixed and waiting to be discovered can lose enthusiasm when things become difficult. They’re also less inclined to explore unfamiliar subjects. Interests usually develop as people gain experience and get better at something.
As Hoffman put it, waiting for passion to strike is “a reliable way to wait a very long time.”
Even scientists aren’t immune to believing things that sound convincing. Hoffman admitted that several claims in an earlier version of his own article needed correcting. If the people studying this stuff can get it wrong, the rest of us probably shouldn’t feel too bad about falling for a few bestselling self-help books.
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