The importance of belonging This week I blogged about a new study that suggests one reason why there are so few women in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math): they are vulnerable to feeling that they have to put in more effort than others to achieve the same results, and that therefore they must not "belong" in that sphere. There's a lesson here about the importance of a "growth mindset"—researcher Carol Dweck's term for the belief that success is all about effort, and that "even geniuses work hard"—but what I want to focus on today is this notion of belonging, and how crucial it is for effective learning.
       Learning is social, as I wrote in this New York Times piece about social factors that affect intelligence. The level of comfort we feel in another person's presence can powerfully influence how intelligent we feel, and in some sense, how intelligent we actually are, at least in that moment. Now multiply that one-on-one interaction by tens or hundreds, and you start to get a sense of how important a sense of belonging to a learning community can be.
       Early on in school, some children get the sense that, academically speaking, they don't belong—that they're not one of the "smart kids." The same thing can happen when young people start middle school, or high school, or college: they take a look around and think, "I don't belong here." In our work lives, too, we may form an assumption that we're not quick or sharp enough, not sufficiently creative or innovative, to belong at the top of our fields.
       Social psychologists have documented how corrosive this self-doubt can be: sapping our motivation, lowering our expectations, even using up mental resources that we could otherwise apply to absorbing knowledge or solving problems. The feeling of not belonging becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By contrast, a solid sense that we're among our peers, that we're where we ought to be, can elevate our aspirations and buoy us in the face of setbacks.
       So: how do we bolster a sense of intellectual belonging—in ourselves, our children, our students and employees? Here are three ideas.

Create your own community. In the late 1970s, Uri Treisman was a researcher at UC-Berkeley interested in why African-American students often struggled in the university's math courses, even as Asian-Americans in the same classes flourished. With some probing, he discovered part of the answer: Asian students studied together in groups, while black students tended to work alone. Treisman's insight became the basis of his Emerging Scholars program, in which students organized into study groups tackle challenging problems together. The lesson: even if you don't feel a kinship with the school or company you're a part of, you can find a smaller community within it that will foster the feelings of belonging and identification that allow learning to blossom.
 
Take care with transitions. When we're starting at a new school or a new job, our sense of ourselves is especially fragile; we carefully inspect our new environment, looking for cues that this is a place we belong. Some researchers, in fact, have tied the slide in many students' grades that happens in middle school to the transition from elementary school itself: during this fraught passage, some students decide school isn't for them. Studies by Stanford professor Gregory Walton and others have shown that interventions delivered at such key moments—like a video shown to college freshmen in which upperclassmen explain that everyone feels unsure of themselves early on, but that these feelings go away—can increase feelings of belonging and improve performance.   

Avoid impossible role models. Although we're supposed to feel inspired by successful figures, comparing ourselves to these superstars can make us feel that we'll never belong in their stratosphere. A recent study of middle-school girls exposed to eminent women in STEM fields, for example, found that the experience actually made them less interested in math, and led them to lower their their judgment of their own ability and their odds of success. The achievements of these role models, investigators concluded, seemed "unattainable." What's the alternative? Find flawed role models—people who succeed but also fail. In one study, for example, students who were taught about the failures and setbacks of well-known scientists became more interested in science, remembered the material from their science lesson better, and did better at complex open-ended problem-solving tasks related to the lesson. Reminding ourselves that those we look up to struggle, too, can make us feel that we belong in their company.

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this week's brilliant forum  Based on the idea that making an argument is a great way to learn, the Brilliant Forum presents commentaries from leading thinkers on an important and interesting question related to learning. Once you’ve read the expert commentaries, I invite you to make your own case in the comments section. This week in the Brilliant Forum: Selections from writer Brink Lindsey, psychologist Alison Gopnik, and writer Hara Estroff Marano on whether today's parents are over-involved and over-invested in their children's learning and development—or whether this intense engagement is simply what it takes to prepare young people for a complex and fast-changing world. Click here to read and to share your thoughts.

If you have comments or questions, I'd love to hear from you by email: annie@anniemurphypaul.com. And if you'd like to read even more about learning, you can visit my website, follow me on Twitter, and join the conversation on Facebook. Be brilliant!

All my best, Annie

This Week's Brilliant Quote "Studies have shown that the brains of musicians respond more sensitively to slight deviations in musically relevant parameters such as pitch, rhythm, and timbre (the sonic properties distinguishing one instrument from the next, such as the sound of a violin versus the sound of a flute). The differences between musicians and nonmusicians depend in part on a musician's instrument of choice; the brains of violinists are especially sensitive to the sounds of violins, and the brains of trumpeters appear to be specialized for trumpet. Opera singers show specializations in the part of the primary somatosensory cortex that represents vocal articulators and the larynx. These studies all raise an important question: Are musicians' brains different because they are born that way or because of all the hours they put into practicing? With respect to initial differences (which could represent a physiological basis for what it colloquially known as talent), nobody yet knows for sure, but one recent study made it very clear that practice does at least contribute to neural differences. A team lead by the Harvard neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug tracked two groups of children for two years, starting at the age of five, half of whom were taking lessons in a musical instrument (piano or violin) and half of whom weren't. At the outset, there were no apparent differences between the kids who took lessons and those who didn't. Just fifteen months later, there were already clear neural changes: children who took lessons—especially those who had practiced extensively—showed greater growth in the brain regions that control hand movements, in the corpus callosum, and in a right primary auditory area known as Heschl's gyrus. Practice might not make perfect, but it definitely has an effect on the brain."—Gary Marcus, Guitar Zero: The New Musician And The Science Of Learning