In one instance, Jeanie Suk of Harvard University wrote an online article in The New Yorker about how students were “pressur[ing] their professors to avoid teaching [rape law] in order to protect themselves and their classmates from potential distress.” Avoidance is a strong example of a fixed mindset.

In this quote, I added brackets so that its grammar makes sense in the context.

Dweck presents this through two pictures that show electrical activity in the brain: 

“on the left, you see the fixed-mindset students. There’s hardly any activity. They run from the error. They don’t engage with it. But on the right, you have the students with the growth mindset, the idea that abilities can be developed. They engage deeply. Their brain is on fire with yet.” (1:51) 

Because kids and adults alike are refusing to think critically about controversial topics, they strengthen the fear and mistrust instigating this phenomenon, resulting in division among society. 

Although the format of this blog post doesn’t allow, I indented this quote in its own paragraph because of the length to make it more clear.

But how does this connect to Dweck and the idea of a fixed mindset? In one study, Dweck remarks, “after a failure, [students with a fixed mindset] looked for someone who did worse than they did so they could feel really good about themselves.” (1:51) Affective partisan polarization is representative of this principle.

In this quote, I added the brackets to provide more clarity on what the subject in the sentence is.