Note: this isn’t a traditional physics post. If you want more of that, come back later or read some of my older posts.

Throughout my life, the word “smart” has been hurled at me, by my parents, teachers, and classmates. It feels like I have some sort of “secret sauce” that other people don’t. I don’t think it’s healthy for anyone to call someone smart: let me explain why.

Starting off, whomever you call smart gets a significant ego boost. There’s no point to this beyond sucking up, but for argument’s sake let’s continue down this line of though and consider the implications. The person being called smart is led to overestimate their abilities, attributing them to some sort of “secret ingredient” their mind possesses. This suggests to them that the results they got were simply because of who they were, instead of the work they put in to achieve that result. This results in them trying to replicate a similar result, this time putting in a whole lot less work.

To put this idea into context, let’s look at a more concrete example that I’ll reference later. Suppose a random student named John gets a 100 on his calculus quiz after studying for a significant amount of time the night before. His teacher and classmates all bombard him with compliments: “Oh you’re so smart!”, “Oh you’re so good at calc!”, or “Marry me!” etc. (the last one was a joke) Notice how these comments never address the work John put in the night before the quiz.

Human’s crave positive social feedback: in other words, it’s easy for the “clout” John gets from this performance on the quiz to affect his thinking. John’s thinking is then clouded by the compliments he got, making it much more likely that he tries to wing the next quiz, putting much less time into studying and instead believing that his mind will pull him through the quiz instead of his hard work.

This approach of not studying and relying on test taking strategies may work for high school. It may even work for college for some people. But the fact remains that eventually, one’s intellect simply cannot keep up with the constant bombardment of material. It is only when one makes an active effort to process all this that they actually understand. The practice of giving compliments that don’t address the hard work put into the results gotten logically leads to students overestimated their abilities to not work and achieve a result.

The practice of giving these compliments also has a negative impact on other students. Suppose we have another student named “Bob”. Bob get’s a 75 on the same calculus quiz that John took. Later, Bob overhears both his teacher and classmates compliment John on his abilities without talking about his work. It’s easy for Bob to think that John got his high score because “he’s good at math” and Bob doesn’t share this ability.

Going down this line of thought, Bob is easily able to reflect on his score relative to John’s, and logically go to the inverse of John’s thinking: “he is bad at math.” This continued lack of consideration towards the work John put in leads to Bob thinking that he simply cannot get better at calculus. This is obviously a bad thing: Bob is now stuck in a fixed mindset. His bad performance on a quiz is attributed to his lack of ability in math. It’s easy to infer that he probably won’t put in as much effort studying for his future quizzes and will attribute his bad performance to his perceived lack of “math sauce” that only people like John have.

In general for a given X, it’s usually possible to get better at X to a significant extent. The only exceptions to this rule are things like perfect pitch etc.

The usage of compliments that don’t reflect hard work tend to push people away from a growth mindset. I think it’s beneficial for society to stop using these compliments and instead replace them with “nice work!” or similar things that put the hard work required of a result over the purported innate ability someone has or doesn’t have.