The Science of Motivating Your Kids (And Any Young Adult)
Episode Stats
Summary
David Yeager is a developmental psychologist and the author of 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, a groundbreaking approach to leading the next generation and making your own life easier. In this episode, he explains the importance of understanding what really drives young adults, what approaches cause them to disengage, and the best practices that parents, teachers, and other mentors can take to leave young adults feeling inspired, enthusiastic, and ready to contribute.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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If you're a parent, teacher, coach, or manager who lives, loves, and works with tweens, teens,
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and 20-somethings, you know that young people sometimes act in seemingly head-scratching ways
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that you don't always feel like you're being listened to and that it can be frustrating to
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try to guide them in acting towards positive ends. The source of these challenges is often
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chalked up to the underdeveloped brains and hormones that tweens through young 20-somethings
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possess, and my guests would say that what's more to blame is the ineffective way mentors
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often approach young adults. David Yeager is a developmental psychologist and the author
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of 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People, a groundbreaking approach to leading
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the next generation and making your own life easier. Today on the show, Dave and I discuss
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the mentor's dilemma, the idea you either have to be a tough authoritarian who holds young adults
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to high standards or a softy pushover who doesn't crush a kid's spirit, and how to navigate through
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this unnecessary dichotomy. David explains the critical importance of understanding what
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really drives young adults, what approaches cause them to shut down and disengage, and the
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best practices that parents, teachers, and other mentors can take to leave young adults feeling
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inspired, enthusiastic, and ready to contribute. After the show's over, check out our show notes
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at awim.is slash yeager. All right, David Yeager, welcome to the show.
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Thanks for having me. So you are a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin,
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and you've spent your career researching what motivates young people. How did you get into
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that? Yeah, so I was a middle school teacher initially out of college, and I loved like
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motivating kids, getting them fired up, getting them excited to learn, and I at the time also
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coached basketball, and I ran the book club, and so on. So my main job at the time was to
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try to engage the next generation, you know, and I ultimately felt like a lot of the advice
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that I got wasn't cutting it. I distinctly remember watching the science teacher next door,
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Ms. Guilfoyle, and wondering, how in the world does she get her kids to line up and go to the
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assembly without punching each other? Like that was, that's the level at which I felt unprepared.
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And I did have a couple moments where things went well in my class, and they were all moments where I
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created a project that caused young people to be in charge of their learning and do something
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creative. So for instance, we read the book, The Outsiders from S.E. Hinton. I taught in Tulsa.
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Where I taught was down the street from the actual movie theater, the drive-in where the fateful
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climax of the book happens. And so we did a project where they had to come up with a conflict resolution
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set of workshops to give to the younger kids. And that really worked well with my seventh graders.
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They felt like they had to really know their stuff in order to do a good job and to train up the
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younger kids in the school. And I just, I felt like most of the time I felt pretty incompetent as a
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teacher, but those moments where they were learning for a purpose and it was making them feel like they
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were valuable in the school. Those are the moments where I really captured their attention.
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And so I left the classroom to go to graduate school at Stanford and study child and adolescent
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psychology to figure out how to do more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff and hopefully
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give better advice to adults who really need it. So one thing you've found when doing the research
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and talking to people who mentor young people in your own experience is that one of the problems that
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these people face, like whether you're a parent or teacher, a coach, when you're trying to help young
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people become the best they can be, it's this thing called the mentor's dilemma. What's the mentor's
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dilemma? Yeah, the mentor's dilemma is very simply the idea that anytime a young person is getting critical
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feedback or advice from an adult about how to change, it could come across in a way where the young
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person is offended or it just doesn't feel good for them to be critiqued. And that creates a dilemma for the
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adult. And the dilemma for the adult is either I tell them the truth, but like crush their spirit and maybe
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sacrifice their motivation, or I withhold the truth and I'm nice to them, but then they don't improve. And so
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that's a, it's a, it's a hard choice because it feels like to help a young person along in their
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lives, you need to be a tough, almost authoritarian dictator, but be okay with their feelings being
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hurt or you need to be a pushover. And neither of those options are very good. And so it leaves a lot
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of adults feeling like they don't know what to do and feeling ineffective. Yeah. And this shows up in
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all sorts of places at school. Obviously, when you want to give kids feedback on their essay,
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you don't want to discourage them by saying, yeah, you're just terrible. You need to do better.
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But at the same time, you want to tell them what they need to do to get better. You talk about this
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happens at work. This was a lot of conflict between younger generations and older generations
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where the older generations like, well, these young people that are snowflakes, they don't know how to
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handle tough feedback, but you're saying it's, it's not that they want to get better. It's just that
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we don't know how to talk to these young people so that we can give them the critical feedback they
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need, but in a way that motivates them. Yeah. A big punchline in the book is the idea that
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you don't really have to make that forced choice between being a jerk that crushes feelings or a
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pushover softy. You can uphold very high standards and be tough, but also be supportive so that the young
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person isn't losing all their motivation and feeling offended. And the way to do that, it turns
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out it has a lot to do with communication, as you were saying, that all too often, if we're upholding
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high standards and giving critical feedback and saying, you need to fix this or that, whether it's
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at a performance review at work, or like you were saying, an essay at school, we think it's obvious
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that we're trying to help the person. And so we don't say anything about it. We're just like,
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okay, here's all this stuff to change. But it's not obvious to the young person that we're on their
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side and trying to help them because what they're thinking is, does this person with power over me
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think I'm incompetent? And if the answer is yes, they think you're incompetent, then almost everything
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that leader does to you is going to be offensive. So we've conducted research where we just clarify
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the intentions of the leader. So in one experiment we conducted with seventh graders, we had teachers
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provide a bunch of critical feedback on students' essays, and then the students got them back. And
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then there were one of two notes handwritten by the teacher that were appended to the essays.
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One of the notes conveyed something we call wise feedback. And wise feedback is just simply
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better communication. It's where you say, I'm giving you these comments because I have very high
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standards and I know that you can meet them. So it's still very high standards. You're not being
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a pushover, but you're explaining that the reason why you're doing it is because you care about the
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young person and think that they have the potential to do it well. In a control condition, the other half
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of students got a note that conveyed no information. And what we found was that that very short note
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doubled the rate at which students were willing to revise their essays. And that was great because it
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means that, you know, you can still give critical feedback and have it turn into revised work and
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listening to adults if you're just a little bit better at communication.
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One of the big takeaways I got from this book, and I think really changed how I think about how I'm going
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to approach when I'm interacting with my own kids and also the young people I interact with at church or in
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sports, is that during this time period, you say it's between the ages of 10 to 25, there are changes
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going on in a person's brain where it makes them more sensitive to status and respect. Can you walk
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us through that change and then talk about how understanding this change can help us connect
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with young people better? Yeah, I think that the main point is that when we see behavior of a young
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person, like, that they get too offended when we give them feedback, or I don't know, if they just can't be
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independent and autonomous in the way we want them to be. It's easy to look at that and say they're being
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too sensitive, and there's something wrong with them, and they're immature, and their brains aren't fully
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developed. Their hormones are in charge. You know, we have a lot of cultural insults, really, to talk about
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young people. And what we've found is that it really helps to think not about the adolescent brain and hormones
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as deficient in some way, but rather as just sensitive to different stuff than adults' brains are sensitive
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to. So it's not like young people have a hormonally induced frontal lobotomy that makes it impossible for them
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to make wise decisions. It's more like they've got a different set of priorities. Now, what are those
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priorities? What the neuroscience is saying, and I'm summarizing work by some great people, Adriana Galvan,
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Rondahl, many others, is that young people are really attuned to social experiences. So on the one hand, positive
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social experiences, like pride and admiration, anything that signals that you have gained a measure of social
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status and respect in the eyes of people whose opinions you care about, but also negative social
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experiences, on the other hand, like shame and humiliation. And the way I like to describe this
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is that the feeling of doing something really well and having other people notice that, that pride
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basically never feels as good as it does when you're a teenager. And many people can think back and
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remember almost in the pit of their stomachs what it felt like to be taken seriously by a mentor or an
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adult or even an older, cooler kid, to have people legitimately acknowledge your accomplishments.
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You know, a lot of those things, they feel awesome. You can remember them. Many people can also think
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back and remember a time where they were humiliated or falsely accused or unjustly talked down to
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by some adult or an older kid. And the idea is that one of the things that testosterone and
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estradiol and other gonadal hormones do is they sensitize your brain to those experiences and make
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them kind of like a flashbulb memory. Something that the neuroscientists often call it one trial
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learning. That just one experience of humiliation teaches you, wow, I'm not going to do that again.
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And one experience of pride that's intense is like, I want to feel that way again as soon as possible.
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And so the young person's brain is really paying attention to that information so they can avoid
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the negative experiences and find the positive ones again and again. And so that sensitivity to
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social status and respect drives learning, but learning about how to be a socially successful
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person in your culture. So to summarize all this stuff, when I say the adolescent brain is
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sensitive to status and respect, I don't mean that they're wandering around trying to get more
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likes on Instagram. But what I mean is that they're not really just in search of frivolous social
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status, but that deeper, more meaningful feeling that I've done something of value in the social
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group that I care about. And they have acknowledged that. And I want to do more of that. And I think
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when we see a lot of frustrating behaviors in young people, the mental reframe we can do as adults
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is to say, all right, what's the most generous possible explanation for their behavior in the
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sense that they're somehow trying to meet their need for status and respect from their perspective.
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So what is that? And I think that's a really useful frame to think about young people and how to
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Yeah. I thought that was incredibly useful. Talk about here, quote, Eric Erickson,
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the central task of adolescence is to gradually become an independent social actor who can contribute to
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the community. So that's what you're trying to do when you're in adolescence. And so whenever you see your kid
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do something kind of like, what are you doing there? Trying to look at it through the framework,
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how is this helping him gain status or a feeling of competency as an independent actor and being able
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to do something in his peer group? I think that's really useful because I think the typical way,
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like you said earlier, we approach adolescence, these young people, is like they're deficient
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somehow. Like, oh, they do this stupid stuff because their prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed and
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their hormones are just causing them to be crazy.
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Yeah. I think that the default narrative we have in our culture now is something I call the
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neurobiological incompetence model. And I'm not trying to be unnecessarily complicated. All I mean
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is that societally we think they're idiots, right? And you see this anytime a parent talks to a kid and
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they say, what were you thinking? Right? That's not an authentic question. That's just me saying
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that I think you weren't thinking. Yeah. And when you say, what were you thinking? We don't wait for
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a real answer, right? Whether it's a kid who snuck out of the house and the parents berating them in
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the hallway or a teacher who's yelling at a kid for skipping class or whatever it was. The main problem
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is we tend to not figure out what the status and respect need was driving a young person's behavior.
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Like why did they think that this behavior was going to help them with that need? Because we don't ask.
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And the reason why we don't ask is because we think there's nothing to learn. If you start with
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the assumption that their brains are deficient and therefore they're idiots, then it doesn't make
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any sense to try to understand the world from their perspective because it's just fundamentally flawed.
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And then what the main thing the young person should do in that world is listen to me,
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the adult who's worked it all out, right? My logic is sound and good because my brain works and yours
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doesn't. Therefore, you should listen to whatever the contents of my brain are. That's the kind of
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logic that you see quite a bit. And then that leads to a really harmful practice that in the book I call
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grown-splaining, kind of like the grown-up version of mansplaining, where you just imply this massive
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status difference between you, the grown-up, and them, the young person, and also assume that if only
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they listened to everything you said, then they would make wise decisions. But that ignores the fact
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that young people often have reasons that make sense from their perspectives to feel like socially
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successful people in the groups that they care about. And so the trick is to get out of grown-splaining
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and into better practices. And when we do that, then we stop offending this need for status and
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respect, and we start working with it and using it as an asset and a resource.
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And then you also have a study that was done to see what happens when parents grown-splain
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to their kids or when they nag at their kids. What did that research show? Because I thought that
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was really interesting. I love this. This is not my work, summarizing other people's. It's
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Jennifer Silk. I was at Pittsburgh, and then I learned about it through my collaborator, Ron Dahl,
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who's amazing, been a mentor of mine. And it's a great study. It's the kind of study where you're like,
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how did they not do this 20 years earlier? So what they did is they asked the question,
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what happens in the teenage brain when your parent is nagging you? And to do that, they did moms and
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daughters because that's the sample that they had. They could have done dads and sons or dads and
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daughters, et cetera. But so they had moms record themselves finishing the sentence, it bothers me
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when you. Okay. And then they had the daughters listen to that recording while they were in the
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fMRI scanner. So they've got a huge magnet circling their brain, looking at blood flow in different
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regions of the brain. And that allowed the researchers to infer what's happening in the
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brain as the daughter's listening to the nagging. And the nagging in the papers, it's kind of awesome.
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I can't believe they got this into a real academic paper, but it's like, you get mad when I tell you to
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grab your shoes and come down the stairs and you get mad when I say your room is dirty and needs a little
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cleaning and yada, yada, yada. You just need to calm that down. And so what do you see? What you see
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first is an increase in the anger regions of the brain. So the affective regions. So the daughters
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are pissed basically. Then next you see a decrease in two important regions. So one region of the brain
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that decreased is the prefrontal regions, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is a region
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associated with planning and so on. So I like to summarize that as the brains are not thinking
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about how to change their behavior. So it's not like the teenage girls are listening to the nagging
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and saying, you know, you have a point, mom. Everything I'm doing is like not right. And
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because you've pointed this out, I'm going to now change everything. That's not happening.
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Right. So yeah, I thought that was really interesting because basically a teenager's brain shuts down when
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you show them a lack of respect. I mean, they're just done with you. And the opposite is true. When
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they get respect, they're surprisingly open to listening and changing and being influenced.
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And there was another study, the Vegemite study, where you're trying to figure out
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how to get kids to take their medicine. Because apparently it's a big problem,
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particularly with kids who've gotten organ transplants. They got to take their immunosuppressants.
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A lot of them don't take it. And so what you did, you brought in some young adults
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and you gave them a taste of Vegemite, which is this like really gross brewer's yeast food that
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they eat in Australia. They got a taste of it and like, oh, this is gross. And then you guys told
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them, now you got to take a big spoonful of it. And you said, you got to do it because it's good for
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you. And then by eating it, you're going to help advance science. But you gave those instructions in
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two different ways to get them to take that second serving of it. So tell us about that study.
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Yeah. So that study, it's one of my favorite studies we've ever done.
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And I spent a year at Stanford on sabbatical and we came up with this model of status and
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respect when I visited with Rondahl. And we're like, we need a study to test these ideas that
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the hormones like testosterone and status and respect are all related in the teenage brain to
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behavior. And the challenge is it would be great to study a behavior like, does a young person take
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their medicine? But you can't really do that study because you don't want to have your control group
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being a bunch of children with cancer who then die because they didn't take their chemo.
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You know, so like it can't be a real medicine for ethical reasons and obvious reasons. So you need
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something that feels enough, like it's unpleasant, like you're forced to take your medicine and could
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plausibly be good for you, but can't have any real health consequences for the participants.
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So that's why we picked Vegemite. And Vegemite is like the yeast at the bottom of the barrel after
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brewing a huge batch of beer. Imagine you then put that on toast. And there's a great YouTube video
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that is called Americans Eating Australian Foods. And the absolute best part of that video is just
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watching people's disgust as they eat a spoonful of Vegemite. And it cracks me up every time I see it.
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So we saw that video. We're like, oh my God, we got to do a Vegemite experiment. This is what
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we're doing. And the way the experiment is set up is we have 18 to 24 year olds come into the lab.
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They sample Vegemite because most people, most people don't know how gross it is. In fact,
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there's a philosophical principle called the Vegemite principle, which is that some things are
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so unpleasant and impossible to describe that you have to experience in yourself. And so we have people
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sample Vegemite. And then they see two types of instructions from a medical professional.
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On the one hand, the person asks you to take the medicine, which again is Vegemite,
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in a respectful tone and respectful words. In another condition, it's disrespectful.
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And we wrote the disrespectful condition with doctors to try to match how they normally educate
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patients about taking their medicine. And it's very much talking down to you. It's like, based on my
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experience, what I know about medicine and disease, you should listen to me. If there's a bad taste,
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try to ignore that, et cetera, et cetera. In the respectful condition though, it's like, look,
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you know, you're a college student and I'm going to tell you the real reason why you
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might want to take this. And then they explain the logic. They use words that imply autonomy.
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So they say things like, you might consider rather than saying you should. Instead of saying,
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ignore that unpleasant taste, they say, think of that unpleasant taste as you doing your part to
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help others. And then at the end, they say, thank you for considering this rather than in the
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disrespectful condition, thank you in advance for your cooperation. And then we leave the room and we
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have a camera that's a hidden camera that's recording whether people take the second spoonful
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of Vegemite. And we found that in general, young people were about twice as likely to take the second
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spoonful of Vegemite if they were asked respectfully.
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Yeah, that's really interesting. And then you also experimented like what happens if you increase
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sex hormones like testosterone, which makes you more sensitive to status and respect. And what you found
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when you gave testosterone to low testosterone young people, and they got a nasal shot of testosterone,
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the respectful instructions had a whopping effect. I mean, just increased the amount of
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compliance when they were shown respect. Yeah. And, and the disrespectful instructions became even
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worse for behavior whenever they got the nasal shot of testosterone. Yeah, it was really interesting.
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And that's what we were trying to test is basically if we can temporarily make you kind of 13 year
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old that's experiencing insane levels of testosterone for the first time, if we can temporarily put you in
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that state, can we make you even more sensitive to subtle differences in communication? And the answer
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was, yes, we can. And what that suggests is that testosterone isn't something that universally makes
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your brain idiotic, just doing dumb stuff. It's more like it's sensitizing you to the social rewards and
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punishments in your environment. And therefore, in the real world, what we need to think about is
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how are we creating social environments that are either supporting a young person's drive for status
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and respect or not. And it's not like their brains are universally and permanently broken.
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It's like they're just more sensitive to the context. And so we, the adults need to be more
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sensitive to how we're communicating in that context. Right. Make it more explicit. You're trying to
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help them while maintaining their status and respect. Yeah. I think it's an interesting point about
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testosterone. People have this idea that testosterone just makes people, makes particularly young men
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aggressive, hyper-aggressive, and they just want to dominate. Its effect is context dependent. I think
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I read about, if you give testosterone to a bunch of like Buddhist monks, they're all going to see who
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can like out-zen each other because that's how you gain status amongst Buddhist monks. But if you give
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testosterone to like a bunch of prison inmates, you might get something else. Yeah. There's a famous
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study I didn't write about in the book, but they looked at testosterone in high schoolers and then
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tracked a relationship with deviant behavior versus leadership. And what they found was that if you
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had friends that already got in trouble a lot, then the more testosterone you had, the more you
00:23:39.000
were getting in trouble and like going to juvenile detention, et cetera. But if you had friends that
00:23:44.840
were very pro-social and like in sports and leadership and stuff, then the more testosterone you had,
00:23:51.380
the more you were out volunteering in the community, the more you became a president of a club.
00:23:55.780
So it was like more of a positive leadership. So you can think of testosterone as just one
00:24:01.620
indicator of a huge cascade of what's happening in puberty in both boys and girls. And it's about
00:24:07.600
sensitivity to what counts for high social regard in your community. And so we as the adults should
00:24:14.880
try to structure environments where we're going to capture those positive leadership pro-social type
00:24:19.600
qualities rather than kind of more deviant ways to get a good reputation.
00:24:24.480
And your book's called 10 to 25 because these changes start happening around age 10. That's when
00:24:28.880
a lot of kids start, you know, girls start puberty and it goes until 25. We're going to take a quick
00:24:34.940
break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. I want to talk about this,
00:24:44.660
going back to that neurological incompetence model you talk about in the book, when you have that
00:24:49.880
view of young people that are sort of these broken, not fully formed adults, the way you approach them
00:24:55.700
is you can either take that very authoritarian approach. We just nag them to like, Hey, you're just
00:25:01.060
a dummy. Here's what you need to be doing. Or you can take a more like a softy approach. Like, well,
00:25:06.240
you know, kids are just kids. They're dumb. So we can't really hold them to high standards.
00:25:10.560
And as you said earlier, that's not a good approach. You're not going to help the young
00:25:14.020
person if you take that approach. Instead, you recommend with this knowledge that young people,
00:25:19.120
what they're looking for right now in this ages of 10 to 25, they're looking for status and respect.
00:25:24.240
You recommend taking a mentor mindset. What does a mentor mindset look like?
00:25:29.160
Yeah. So that is a great summary. I think that if you think, go back to the mentor's dilemma,
00:25:35.820
it felt like there were only two choices. Either you are a tough, demanding leader that enforces all
00:25:44.520
the rules. We call that an enforcer mindset. Or you're a kind of soft, but caring and affectionate,
00:25:53.340
more or less pushover. And I call that a protector mindset. And it's important to
00:25:58.840
point out that you can be a good person and have either of those approaches. And in fact,
00:26:03.920
I think most people, even if, even when they get it right, sometimes fall into one or the other of
00:26:08.940
those two approaches. So an enforcer, you know, you could feel like, look, society's going to hell
00:26:14.180
in a handbasket and someone's got to protect everyone from the insanity that's happening. And
00:26:19.000
that's why I have to maintain standards. And I can't, can't let your feelings get in the way of me
00:26:24.740
doing the right thing. I think a lot of people in the enforcer bucket think that way. And it makes
00:26:29.500
sense. And the protector side, they say, well, look, society is so hard right now. Kids are
00:26:35.380
just waiting and stressed. You know, young adults, they went to college through COVID and they missed
00:26:40.680
so much and they're kind of feeble and there's a mental health crisis. And I just need to protect
00:26:45.360
them because I care about them. I can't possibly load them up with more stuff that they can't
00:26:50.140
accomplish because that would be cruel. So I think you can go to bed each night and put your head on
00:26:55.620
your pillow and feel good about yourself in either the enforcer or the protector mindset.
00:27:00.480
And what I want to say to people is, look, if you're super high standards, high demanding,
00:27:05.300
great. Keep that. Just add the support, make it so that everyone that you're mentoring or working
00:27:11.000
with, whether you're a parent or a manager or a teacher, make it so that they can meet your high
00:27:15.460
standards. If you're on the protector side, if you, you know, mainly prioritize removing stressful
00:27:22.520
experiences so that young people aren't crushed by them, well, maintain that concern and that support.
00:27:28.340
Great. But then add the standards. And what you get when you have the high standards and the high
00:27:33.720
support, the best of the enforcer and the best of the protector, that's what I call the mentor mindset.
00:27:38.540
And what I've found is that when I've gone out to look for the best managers at Microsoft, the best
00:27:47.320
K-12 teachers, the best college professors, the NBA's best shooting coach, when I go look at what
00:27:54.420
they do, these are people who don't have the problem of kind of wimpy, helpless, non-independent
00:28:03.480
young people. They have young people doing amazing stuff year after year again and again, and they do
00:28:09.440
it without crushing the young person's spirit and making them feel overwhelmed. And what all of them
00:28:15.580
are doing is they're maintaining very high standards, like legitimate standards, not a fake standard just
00:28:21.700
to make someone feel good, but they make sure that the young person can meet it, that they have enough
00:28:26.280
support to meet it. And so they're all doing mentor mindset, I found.
00:28:29.820
And then you talk about practices that you can do to develop this mentor mindset. And one of the
00:28:35.160
practices you offer is be more transparent when you're interacting with young people. What does
00:28:41.100
that look like? Yeah. So the simplest and easiest thing you can do, if in your mind you're saying,
00:28:48.680
yeah, I want to have high standards, I want to be supportive, and that's going to work with young
00:28:52.800
person's desire for status and respect rather than against it. The simplest thing you can do is just be
00:28:58.780
clearer about what you're doing and why. And what I found is that the reason why we need to do that
00:29:05.680
is because young people come to interactions with us with a little bit of suspicion. They start out
00:29:11.360
thinking, you know, most adults have talked down to me and not treated me with respect. And so I'm going
00:29:18.240
to assume that that's what's happening until further notice. And that's fine, but it causes lots of
00:29:24.960
frustration for adults because they'll do things like, you know, be a surgeon and giving medical
00:29:30.140
residents critical feedback to help them be better doctors. And the junior doctors will say,
00:29:37.600
this person thinks I'm a terrible doctor and they hate me rather than they're caring for me and they're
00:29:42.700
trying to help me to be a better doctor. So we're over young people, whether it's a parent or a teacher
00:29:49.220
or a boss, and they could reasonably feel threatened by what we're doing. If you just explain your
00:29:55.600
intentions about two to three times more than you think you need to, then that can go a long way.
00:30:01.980
If you just explain yourself, here's what I'm doing and why, here's why I thought it's in your best
00:30:07.960
interest. And also here's how I'm going to support you to do the following. Just that little explanation
00:30:12.500
can cause them to view our behaviors in a more positive light.
00:30:15.740
And that goes back to that wise feedback you talked about earlier, right? So instead of just
00:30:21.580
giving the critical feedback, like, Hey, here's what's wrong with your essay, or here's what you
00:30:26.320
did wrong during the operation. Before you do that, you'd say, look, I have really high standards of
00:30:31.740
what I expect and, but I think you're capable of doing it. So I'm giving you this feedback so that
00:30:37.620
you can get better. Like you're being incredibly transparent about why you're doing this because it's
00:30:42.280
not obvious to the young person. Right. And I write about a manager at a supermarket named Ole
00:30:48.400
in Norway, and I interviewed him and all of his employees and is just amazing what he does.
00:30:54.400
He says stuff like, I care about you too much to hold you to low standards. I want you to be the
00:31:00.640
best version of yourself at this job. And I then want to brag about you to my boss so that you're in
00:31:06.180
line for promotions so that you're getting training, et cetera. So he makes it about them
00:31:12.520
earning a high status reputation, a prestigious reputation for having done a good job. And that's
00:31:18.800
motivating to people. And so I talked to this one woman who she was like, yeah, I got called into the
00:31:24.760
manager's office for goofing off in the back room. And he really laid into me. And I was like,
00:31:30.240
oh man, were you offended? Were you going to quit? And did you yell at him? Did you complain to your
00:31:35.740
colleagues? She was like, no, he was looking out for me. Like he, he more or less yelled at her,
00:31:41.800
but she was like, that's because he thinks I could be better at this job. And she didn't have a college
00:31:46.640
education. She wasn't going to do anything else besides retail. She didn't have ambitions for
00:31:51.960
anything else, but her boss took her seriously. And now five years later, she's still with the company
00:31:57.320
and she's in a leadership track. So yeah, I think that just clarifying what we're doing sometimes
00:32:04.040
takes the sting out of the negative experience of being critiqued and it can turn it from something
00:32:10.300
that young people hate to something that is a turning point in their lives. You also talk about
00:32:15.680
asking better questions. What are some mentor mindset questions we can start asking to help young
00:32:20.880
people work through their, their own problems? Yeah. I think asking questions is one of those things
00:32:26.080
where I studied all these exemplary mentor mindset leaders. And I was surprised that they're almost
00:32:32.780
always asking what the young person was thinking and where they were headed and so on, rather than
00:32:38.920
telling them what to do. I mean, I think in my own kind of mediocre life as a teacher, if I saw a kid
00:32:45.740
make a mistake, I'd be like, Oh, you just missed this part. This part is easy. You got it. Go do this.
00:32:52.260
And I would just kind of tell them what to do and think I was doing a great job because I told them
00:32:57.860
that they should be confident. And the great teachers I watched never did that. Like at all,
00:33:04.420
like they would just be like, huh, what? That's your answer. That's interesting. Where did that come
00:33:09.580
from? And then they explained their logic and they're like, huh, well, what would happen if you did this?
00:33:14.800
And then they would change something and then they'd be like, Oh my God, I get it. And there
00:33:19.480
would be these moments where the kids piecing it together in their head rather than the teacher
00:33:25.100
troubleshooting it in their head and then telling the kid what the problem is. And so questioning
00:33:30.580
is this way of kind of building autonomy and agency and expertise in the young person so that they have
00:33:37.700
to do the thinking. The NBA coach that I followed, his name is Chip England. He was the Spurs
00:33:43.000
shooting coach for 17 years when they, the San Antonio Spurs, when they won a series of championships
00:33:48.880
for the NBA. And he's always kind of asking questions. And I asked him why, and he said,
00:33:55.380
my goal is to give them a coach in the head that maybe they shoot with me for an hour, but they've got
00:34:00.280
dozens of other hours in the day. I want them to be applying the same thinking, even when they're not
00:34:05.620
with me. And I think that questioning is a way to give that to young person while also implying that
00:34:13.480
they have it in them to think for themselves. So the secondary purpose of a question, of course,
00:34:18.020
is that it's just more respectful than telling someone what to do.
00:34:22.060
How do you ask questions? So it's not patronizing. Cause you know,
00:34:25.560
okay, I'm gonna ask my kid a question. Like when they mess up, what were you thinking? The kids is
00:34:30.200
like, okay, I'm shutting down. So how do you ask these questions? So it shows respect?
00:34:33.960
Well, there's a lot of interesting science on this. The linguists distinguish between different
00:34:39.600
types of questions and the style that seems to be most effective in this kind of case is what
00:34:45.940
is called an authentic question with uptake. So an authentic question just means that the asker
00:34:53.080
is legitimately curious about the person's response. So like, what were you thinking is not an authentic
00:34:59.580
question because you don't actually want to know the answer, what they were thinking, but you could
00:35:03.940
ask something very similar. You could be like, huh, what was your logic here? Like, you know,
00:35:09.520
walk me through it. And there's a way of doing that where it feels like an accusation, but there's also
00:35:14.080
a way of doing it where the young person's like, oh, okay, well, they're kind of curious about what
00:35:18.880
my, what my thinking was. So authentic is the first part. And the second is uptake. Uptake just means
00:35:24.920
that your line of questioning builds in some way on what the young person has said. So again,
00:35:30.220
if you say, what were you thinking? And then you already know that you're just going to prosecute
00:35:36.260
a case. Like you've got a series of questions you're going to ask no matter what they said.
00:35:40.300
That's not uptake. The young person isn't contributing to that conversation. It's a one
00:35:44.840
way conversation, but uptake in its very simplest form is it, I mean, you can even do it with,
00:35:51.560
with the old negotiation tactic of mirroring to say, you just, you can just repeat back to the young
00:35:57.420
person what they said, but with an inquisitive tone. There's great research on this. It's called
00:36:02.220
a repeat sometimes in the literature. Like if a kid is says, you know, one, two, three, five, nine,
00:36:08.880
10. And then, you know, you could say that's been correct. It should be one, two, three, four,
00:36:13.880
five, six, seven, but you could also say five, nine, 10. And then the young person would immediately
00:36:19.020
know that you're questioning their logic there. And then they would correct it. They'd be like,
00:36:22.720
oh yeah, you're right. It's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. You can do the same kind
00:36:26.440
of thing and dialogue with the young person by just mirroring back to them, what they said in
00:36:31.380
inquisitive tone. And then that starts the conversation. We also talk about the importance
00:36:35.840
of belonging and helping kids get motivated. Talk to us about that research. Yeah. So we now know
00:36:42.680
there's a fundamental need to belong, right? To be connected to others. The more that that idea has
00:36:47.380
become popular, the more that ideas about belonging have become a caricature. So you see on college
00:36:53.920
campuses, they'll hand out, you belong laptop sticker as though that's going to make students
00:36:59.520
feel like they belong because the sticker told them, or you see anti-bullying campaigns where
00:37:05.080
it'll say you belong. And it's like a kid in like a jumpy house who's alone and they're jumping for joy.
00:37:11.800
And you look at the poster, the you belong poster and you're like, well, why is that kid alone? And
00:37:17.460
also that kid's way too old to be in a jumpy house. And so maybe that's why they don't have any
00:37:21.160
friends or whatever it is. Those kind of glib belonging by fiat messages don't really convince
00:37:29.440
a young person that they can be accepted by a group that they care about. And that's fundamentally
00:37:34.960
the issue is that to be accepted, you have to feel like you've added something of value to what the
00:37:42.340
group cares about. And you can't declare that by fiat. Young people have to show it. They have to
00:37:48.580
get what the anthropologists call earned prestige. So in like our evolutionary history, you couldn't
00:37:54.920
just talk a big game about tracking down a deer and feeding it to everyone else. Or you couldn't
00:38:00.820
just because you're tall say, all right, that person's going to get us lots of food or whatever it is
00:38:05.540
they need to do to contribute. Like you actually have to go out and kill the deer, help them kill
00:38:09.740
the deer and bring it back. You have to show the group that you have something of value. And so the feeling
00:38:15.340
of belonging and being accepted is intimately tied to feelings of competence. Where all this is going
00:38:21.180
is that what we found is that a much better way to help young people with a sense of belonging,
00:38:26.360
whether it's high schoolers getting bullied or college students wondering whether they're in the
00:38:31.020
right place or new employees in their twenties, wondering if they've picked the right job is to
00:38:36.420
help them deal with. And by deal with, I mean, tell themselves a better story about any worries about
00:38:43.600
competence early on in their career or their role. So imagine a college student who starts out
00:38:50.740
in a calculus class and then bombs the first test. They're like, well, I'm an idiot. I don't know
00:38:55.240
calculus and therefore I don't belong in this class or maybe even at this university or an employee where
00:39:00.440
they do their first major project. They give a presentation to senior management and it kind of
00:39:04.960
bombs. And they're like, do they think I'm an idiot? Like, am I an idiot? Should I not be here?
00:39:09.440
So you're like competence worries are tied to your belonging. So what we have found in our
00:39:15.260
experiments is you can give people a different story about their competence early on in some
00:39:21.360
role or career, and then they can reach a different set of conclusions about belonging.
00:39:25.560
So what's the different story? The different story is basically that early difficulties are normal,
00:39:31.300
that they're struggling in a first presentation or in a first exam is a normal part of doing something
00:39:38.300
ambitious and hard that is legitimately challenging and that not everyone is doing.
00:39:43.920
And so you should expect some level of difficulty and it's not a sign you don't belong. It's a sign
00:39:48.740
that actually you're coming to belong because you're starting to face the new, higher, more difficult
00:39:53.660
standards. And then the next step is to help them understand how that normal experience of
00:39:58.920
difficulty improves. You can't just say, hey, everybody goes through difficulty and it sucks for
00:40:03.580
everybody. You have to also help them understand how it gets better. And the way it gets better
00:40:07.920
ideally involves something that the person can do. You can take steps. You can talk to this person or
00:40:13.140
that person. You can join this or that activity. And then over time, it can snowball into a better
00:40:18.280
outcome. And we've done a number of experiments where with high schoolers and bullying, we found that
00:40:23.760
this storytelling approach about belonging reduced levels of cortisol, improved health, even improved
00:40:30.140
grades up to a year later. And in the college setting, in a paper that was led by Greg Walton and many
00:40:36.680
others in science a couple of years ago, we found that you could reduce a portion of overall achievement
00:40:43.840
gaps for entire universities. If you could help young people tell themselves a better story about
00:40:49.220
belonging, ideally early on in the process. That's really interesting. I wanted to end with
00:40:54.740
this antidote. It was actually a really powerful story you told about how understanding that young
00:41:02.200
people are motivated this period between the ages of 10 to 25. They're motivated by status and respect.
00:41:07.960
How understanding that helped like quitting smoking or stopping smoking campaigns. Oh yeah.
00:41:13.900
Walk us through that. Yeah. I mean, this is, I'm glad you came back. This is one of my favorite
00:41:18.920
stories. And a lot of people have written about the truth campaign is what it's called, but I did some
00:41:24.320
original reporting on it. That was fun to do. So when the tobacco companies had to settle for a large
00:41:31.980
amount of money with the state of Florida, because the science, especially on secondhand smoking was
00:41:37.900
super clear about how it was causing cancer and therefore a health burden for the state, they were
00:41:43.860
required to pay for ads. The tobacco companies were in a couple of different ways. One, they hired their
00:41:50.980
own firms to come up with anti-smoking ads. And also they had to put money into this other entity
00:41:58.100
that would hire its own firm. So the smoking ads that the tobacco companies paid for were think,
00:42:05.880
don't smoke. And tobacco is wacko if you're a teen. And it's just like, I mean, it's so great. I just
00:42:13.560
like the, this is the best evil genius move I've like ever seen. So think, don't smoke. I use this in my
00:42:19.780
class a lot. And I always ask like, okay, what does that imply? And it implies of course that you're
00:42:25.120
not thinking. Right. And so it's already nagging you. And then it says, don't smoke. So it's like
00:42:31.680
grown splaining to you. It's just telling you what to not do. So at first insults you and second tells
00:42:37.340
you what to do. So it's like in three beautiful words, they offended everything about the teenage
00:42:43.300
mind with think, don't smoke. So that was, that was pretty smart on their behalf. And what they found
00:42:48.380
is that the more that counties were exposed to think, don't smoke ads, the more young people
00:42:54.540
were intrigued by smoking and the more positively they felt about the tobacco companies. Tobacco is
00:42:59.940
wacko. If you're a teen is the other one. I mean, so good, right? So first of all, what does that
00:43:04.760
imply? It implies that tobacco is not wacko if you're grown up. And the number one thing teenagers
00:43:12.200
want to do is be like grownups. And so it's a subtle argument telling you to smoke more.
00:43:19.620
Therefore you're a grownup, but also it was just dorky. I mean, tobacco is wacko. I mean,
00:43:24.040
can you imagine being like 15 and you're at like, you know, after sports practice in a circle with like
00:43:31.540
four other kids. And one is like the girl you have a crush on and you're just dying to look cool in front
00:43:36.220
of her and you would do anything. And then she'd hands you a cigarette and you're like, sorry,
00:43:40.980
unfortunately I'm a teen. So this would be wacko for me to do. Like, of course that wouldn't happen.
00:43:46.300
And so what Bogusky did is he was the creative director at a agency called Crispin Porter plus
00:43:52.940
Bogusky. That's now a very well-known agency, but at the time was kind of an upstart newer agency.
00:43:58.240
He was contacted by the other pool of money from the Florida settlement that was more run by a third
00:44:06.640
party and the centers for disease control. And he was going to create the anti-smoking ads with the
00:44:11.700
tobacco company's money from the settlement. And the center for disease control had a strategy that was
00:44:18.640
very much in the groan-splaining vein of things and was destined to fail. And the reason Bogusky,
00:44:25.140
Bogusky, who was just like an awesome, cool guy. And I got to meet him and talk with him and just
00:44:30.500
like, just like the most creative, fun person you've ever met in your life. And he had previously
00:44:36.560
seen the CDC strategy and he sent a bunch of his creative staff out to skate parks. So he had
00:44:43.040
employees who looked like 16 year olds basically. And they showed up with, you know, stocking caps and
00:44:47.860
chain wallets at the skate park and then would talk to other teenagers and be like, Hey, uh,
00:44:52.420
and then, and they would ask the three main points of the CDC strategy. And the CDC strategy was
00:44:58.240
smoking will cause cancer. Smoking gives you yellow teeth and smoking is not sexy.
00:45:03.520
And so Bogusky's team would be like, Hey, uh, did you know smoking causes cancer? And then some kid
00:45:11.260
at the skate park while smoking a cigarette could perfectly describe the science of how smoking
00:45:16.580
causes cancer. So there's like no surprise there. And then he'd be like, yeah, but do you know what'll
00:45:21.200
give you yellow teeth? And like, yeah, when I'm 60, but not now. And by the way, smoking makes me
00:45:27.520
super sexy cause I get laid all the time. And so smoke is the best. So it's like everything about
00:45:33.360
the CDC strategy was destined to fail. And so Bogusky came back to the boardroom and was like,
00:45:39.660
this is not going to work and came up with alternative strategy. That's now called the truth campaign.
00:45:45.320
And the idea behind the truth campaign is to really work with the young person's desire for
00:45:51.960
status and respect rather than against it. And in this context, what that means is saying, look,
00:45:57.000
the reason why so many teenagers smoke is because the tobacco companies marketed cigarettes to them
00:46:03.220
at an early age in a deceptive way, only to exploit their desire to fit in or whatever. So they could
00:46:10.600
make money and get you hooked for the rest of your life. And then you'll die when you're old and kind
00:46:17.180
of just revealing the authentic marketing strategy of the tobacco companies. And all this stuff is true,
00:46:22.600
right? Joe Camel, Marble, man, they're designed to appeal to teenagers, especially teenage boys.
00:46:28.580
And so they ran ads initially in Florida that showed tobacco executives walking through a hospital,
00:46:35.580
talking to dying cigarette smoking patients, thanking them for their years of service,
00:46:42.000
and then wondering aloud, how are we ever going to replace you? And then the executives turn around
00:46:47.760
and see like a teenage girl in the waiting room. And then they creepily stare at the teenage girl.
00:46:53.380
And that ad says something about how, you know, like what do a bunch of old men want from teenage girls
00:47:00.060
is more or less what the argument goes. And so that's just so gross. Like it was immediate turnoff.
00:47:05.580
Teenagers are like, I'm not going to give money to these people. They're a bunch of
00:47:08.640
creepy old executives that are, you know, like trying to attract teenagers. So that ad,
00:47:15.500
that series of ads reduced smoking in Florida. And then very soon after all 50 States joined a
00:47:22.080
settlement against tobacco companies. And then Bogusky's group was hired to come up with
00:47:27.100
another round of ads that kind of funny in the second round, they made a new rule that they
00:47:32.360
couldn't attack the executives personally because his ads were too effective. So instead, Bogusky
00:47:38.140
created ads where the teenagers would flood the streets around a tobacco company's high-rise
00:47:43.460
building without showing the faces of the executives. And they would yell into megaphones.
00:47:49.420
They would organize demonstrations, basically rebelling against the tobacco companies. But the ads
00:47:56.420
never say smoking causes cancer or you shouldn't smoke. They never tell you what to do at all,
00:48:01.640
but they do imply if you want to join a large group of young people, just like you who are choosing of
00:48:07.460
their own free will to stand up for their autonomy and freedom against injustice, then one way for you
00:48:12.800
to do that is to not smoke. And what they found over time was that smoking went from 20 or 30%,
00:48:21.000
depending on the analyses to less than 6%, sometimes down to 3% within a few years.
00:48:27.460
And it is that the truth television ads, the anti-smoking ads from the early 2000s are considered
00:48:32.920
the most successful public health campaign ever in the history of the United States,
00:48:37.340
besides the campaign to increase seatbelt use, which now everyone wears a seatbelt in the seventies,
00:48:42.220
nobody did. So basically teen smoking and seatbelts are the kind of the only two successes
00:48:46.440
of the establishment. And the way they did it with smoking was by being counter-cultural,
00:48:52.320
not going with the establishment way of telling young people how to make wise decisions. So they
00:48:58.380
did the opposite of groan-splaining and it really tapped into a young person's drive to be accepted
00:49:03.780
by peers, to make a contribution, to follow a meaningful purpose, all these bigger things.
00:49:09.100
So I think it's a great way to end because it just perfectly encapsulates these themes.
00:49:13.180
And it also is counterintuitive. No one would have thought it. So if one good thing happens from
00:49:18.720
this book, hopefully it's that people stop using the old kind of disrespectful,
00:49:24.360
you know, spiritual cousin of think, don't smoke approach and start using more of the insights that
00:49:30.980
Bogusky and his team developed for the truth campaign.
00:49:34.380
Well, Dave, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book
00:49:38.500
Yeah, the book is for sale on Amazon. It's called 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People.
00:49:43.020
I run a research institute at UT Austin called the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute.
00:49:48.700
And we have lots of free resources and interventions and papers. And I would love to
00:49:53.620
be in touch with people and hear what they think. And I do reply to emails and I'd be happy to chat
00:50:01.780
Fantastic. Well, David Yeager, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:50:05.660
My guest today was David Yeager. He's the author of the book,
00:50:07.860
10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores
00:50:11.940
everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is slash Yeager, where you find links to resources,
00:50:25.380
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website
00:50:29.180
at artofmanly.com, where you find our podcast archives. And while you're there, make sure
00:50:32.840
to sign up for our newsletter. We've got a daily option and a weekly option. They're both free.
00:50:36.520
It's the best way to stay on top of what's going on at AOM. And if you've not done so
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00:50:49.800
As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay.
00:50:53.060
Remind you to not listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.
00:51:06.520
AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.