If you’re a parent, teacher, coach, or manager who lives, loves, and works with tweens, teens, and 20s-somethings, you know that young people sometimes act in seemingly head-scratching ways, that you don’t always feel like you’re being listened to, and that it can be frustrating to try to guide them in acting towards positive ends.
The source of these challenges is often chalked up to the underdeveloped brains and hormones that tweens through young twenty-somethings possess. But my guest would say that what’s more to blame is the ineffective way mentors often approach young adults.
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. Today on the show, David and I discuss the “mentor’s dilemma” — the idea that you either have to be a tough authoritarian who holds young adults to high standards or a softie push-over who doesn’t crush a kid’s spirit — and how to navigate through this unnecessary dichotomy. David explains the critical importance of understanding what really drives young adults, what approaches cause them to shut down and disengage, and the best practices that parents, teachers, and other mentors can take to leave young adults feeling inspired, enthusiastic, and ready to contribute.
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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you’re a parent, teacher, coach, or manager who lives, loves, and works with tweens, teens, and 20-somethings, you know that young people sometimes act in seemingly head-scratching ways, that you don’t always feel like you’re being listened to, and that it can be frustrating to try to guide them in acting towards positive ends. The source of these challenges is often chalked up to the underdeveloped brains and hormones that tweens through young 20-somethings possess. My guest would say that what’s more to blame is the ineffective way mentors often approach young adults. 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.”
Today on the show, Dave and I discuss the mentor’s dilemma, the idea you either have to be a tough authoritarian who holds young adults to high standards or a softy pushover who doesn’t crush a kid’s spirit, and how to navigate through this unnecessary dichotomy. David explains the critical importance of understanding what really drives young adults, what approaches cause them to shut down and disengage, and the best practices that parents, teachers, and other mentors can take to leave young adults feeling inspired, enthusiastic, and ready to contribute. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/yeager.
All right. David Yeager, welcome to the show.
David Yeager: Thanks for having me.
Brett McKay: So, you are a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and you spent your career researching what motivates young people. How did you get into that?
David Yeager: Yeah, so I was a middle school teacher, initially out of college, and I loved motivating kids, getting them fired up, getting them excited to learn. And I at the time also coached basketball, and I ran the book club and so on. So, my main job at the time was to try to engage the next generation and I ultimately felt like a lot of the advice that I got wasn’t cutting it. I distinctly remember watching the science teacher next door, Miss Guilfoyle, and wondering, how in the world does she get her kids to line up and go to the assembly without punching each other? Like, that was… That’s the level at which I felt unprepared.
And I did have a couple moments where things went well in my class, and they were all moments where I created a project that caused young people to be in charge of their learning and do something creative. So, for instance, we read the book “The Outsiders” from S. E. Hinton. I taught in Tulsa, where I taught was down the street from the actual movie theater, the drive-in where the fateful climax of the book happens. And so we did a project where they had to come up with a conflict resolution set of workshops to give to the younger kids.
And that really worked well with my 7th graders. They felt like they had to really know their stuff in order to do a good job and to train up the younger kids in the school. And I just, I felt like most of the time I felt pretty incompetent as a teacher. But those moments where they were learning for a purpose and it was making them feel like they were valuable in school, those are the moments where I really captured their attention. And so I left the classroom to go to graduate school at Stanford and study child and adolescent psychology to figure out how to do more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff and hopefully give better advice to adults who really need it.
Brett McKay: So, one thing you’ve found when doing the research and talking to people who mentor young people in your own experience, is that one of the problems that these people face, like whether you’re a parent, a teacher, a coach, when you’re trying to help young people become the best they can be, is this thing called the mentor’s dilemma. What’s the mentor’s dilemma?
David Yeager: Yeah. The mentor’s dilemma is very simply the idea that anytime a young person is getting critical feedback or advice from an adult about how to change, it could come across in a way where the young person is offended or it just doesn’t feel good for them to be critiqued. And that creates a dilemma for the adult. And the dilemma for the adult is either I tell them the truth, but crush their spirit and maybe sacrifice their motivation, or I withhold the truth and I’m nice to them, but then they don’t improve. And so that’s a, it’s a hard choice because it feels like to help a young person along in their lives, you need to be a tough, almost authoritarian dictator, but be okay with their feelings being hurt or you need to be a pushover. And neither of those options are very good. And so it leaves a lot of adults feeling like they don’t know what to do and feeling ineffective.
Brett McKay: Yeah. And this shows up in all sorts of places. At school, obviously, when you want to give kids feedback on their essay, you don’t want to discourage them by saying, yeah, you’re just terrible. You need to do better. But at the same time, you want to tell them what they need to do to get better. You talk about, this happens at work, the source of a lot of conflict between younger generations and older generations, where the older generations like, well, these young people, they’re just snowflakes. They don’t know how to handle tough feedback. But you’re saying it’s not that they want to get better, it’s just that we don’t know how to talk to these young people so that we can give them the critical feedback they need, but in a way that motivates them.
David Yeager: Yeah. A big punchline in the book is the idea that you don’t really have to make that forced choice between being a jerk that crushes feelings or a pushover softie. You can uphold very high standards and be tough, but also be supportive so that the young person isn’t losing all their motivation and feeling offended. And the way to do that, it turns out, has a lot to do with communication. As you were saying, that all too often, if we’re upholding high standards and giving critical feedback and saying, you need to fix this or that, whether it’s at a performance review at work or, like you’re saying, an essay at school, we think it’s obvious that we’re trying to help the person. And so we don’t say anything about it. We’re just like, okay, here’s all the stuff to change.
But it’s not obvious to the young person that we’re on their side and trying to help them, because what they’re thinking is, does this person with power over me think I’m incompetent? And if the answer is yes, they think you’re incompetent, then almost everything that leader does to you is going to be offensive. So we’ve conducted research where we just clarify the intentions of the leader. So in one experiment we conducted with 7th graders, we had teachers provide a bunch of critical feedback on students’ essays. And then the students got them back. And then they were one of two notes handwritten by the teacher that were appended to the essays.
One of the notes conveyed something we call wise feedback. And wise feedback is just simply better communication. It’s where you say, I’m giving you these comments because I have very high standards and I know that you can meet them. So it’s still very high standards. You’re not being a pushover, but you’re explaining that the reason why you’re doing it is because you care about the young person and think that they have the potential to do it well in a controlled condition. The other half of students got a note that conveyed no information. And what we found was that that very short note doubled the rate at which students were willing to revise their essays. And that was great because it means that, you can still give critical feedback and have it turn into revised work and listening to adults, if you’re just a little bit better at communication.
Brett McKay: One of the big takeaways I got from this book, and I think really changed how I think about how I’m going to approach when I’m interacting with my own kids and also the young people I interact with at church or in sports, is that during this time period, you say it’s between ages of ten to 25, there are changes going on in a person’s brain where it makes them more sensitive to status and respect. Can you walk us through that change and then talk about how understanding this change can help us connect with young people better?
David Yeager: Yeah, I think that the main point is that when we see behavior of a young person like that, they get too offended when we give them feedback or, I don’t know, if they just can’t be independent and autonomous in the way we want them to be. It’s easy to look at that and say they’re being too sensitive and there’s something wrong with them, and they’re immature, and their brains aren’t fully developed, their hormones are in charge. We have a lot of cultural insults, really, to talk about young people. And what we found is that it really helps to think not about the adolescent brain and hormones as deficient in some way, but rather as just sensitive to different stuff than adults’ brains are sensitive to.
So it’s not like young people have a hormonally induced frontal lobotomy that makes it impossible for them to make wise decisions. It’s more like they’ve got a different set of priorities. Now, what are those priorities? What the neuroscience is saying, and I’m summarizing work by some great people, Adriana Galvan, Ron Dahl, many others, is that young people are really attuned to social experiences. So on the one hand, positive social experiences like pride and admiration, anything that signals that you have gained a measure of social status and respect in the eyes of people whose opinions you care about, but also negative social experiences, on the other hand, like shame and humiliation.
And the way I like to describe this is that the feeling of doing something really well and having other people notice that, that pride basically never feels as good as it does when you’re a teenager. And many people can think back and remember almost in the pit of their stomachs what it felt like to be taken seriously by a mentor or an adult or even an older, cooler kid, to have people legitimately acknowledge your accomplishments. A lot of those things, they feel awesome, you can remember them. Many people can also think back and remember a time where they were humiliated or falsely accused or unjustly talked down to by some adult or an older kid.
And the idea is that one of the things that testosterone and estradiol and other gonadal hormones do is they sensitize your brain to those experiences and make them kind of like a flashbulb memory, something that the neuroscientists often call it one trial learning, that just one experience of humiliation teaches you, “Wow, I’m not going to do that again.” And one experience of pride that’s intense is like, “I want to feel that way again as soon as possible.” And so the young person’s brain is really paying attention to that information so they can avoid the negative experiences and find the positive ones again and again. And so that sensitivity to social status and respect drives learning, but learning about how to be a socially successful person in your culture.
So, to summarize all this stuff, when I say the adolescent brain is sensitive to status and respect, I don’t mean that they’re wandering around trying to get more likes on Instagram. But what I mean is that they’re not really just in search of frivolous social status, but that deeper, more meaningful feeling that I’ve done something of value in the social group that I care about, and they have acknowledged that, and I want to do more of that. And I think when we see a lot of frustrating behaviors in young people, the mental reframe we can do as adults is to say, “Alright, what’s the most generous possible explanation for their behavior?” in the sense that they’re somehow trying to meet their need for status and respect from their perspective. So what is that? And I think that’s a really useful frame to think about young people and how to motivate them.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I thought that was incredibly useful. Talk about here you quote Erik Erikson. “The central task of adolescents is to gradually become an independent social actor who can contribute to the community. ” So that’s what you’re trying to do when you’re in adolescence. And so whenever you see your kid do something kind of like, “What are you doing there? Trying to look at it through the framework, how is this helping him gain status or a feeling of competency as an independent actor and being able to do something in his peer group? I think that’s really useful because I think the typical way, like you said earlier, we approach adolescents, these young people, is like they’re deficient somehow. Like oh, you know, they do this stupid stuff because their prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed and their hormones are just causing them to be crazy.
David Yeager: Yeah. I think that the default narrative we have in our culture now is something I call the neurobiological incompetence model. And I’m not trying to be unnecessarily complicated. All I mean is that societally, we think they’re idiots, right? And you see this anytime a parent talks to a kid and they say, “What were you thinking?” Right. That’s not an authentic question. That’s just me saying that I think you weren’t thinking. And when you say, “What were you thinking?” we don’t wait for a real answer. Right. Whether it’s a kid who snuck out of the house and the parents berating them in the hallway, or a teacher who’s yelling at a kid for skipping class or whatever it was.
The main problem is we tend to not figure out what the status and respect need was driving a young person’s behavior. Like, why did they think that this behavior was going to help them with that need? Because we don’t ask. And the reason why we don’t ask is because we think there’s nothing to learn. If you start with the assumption that their brains are deficient and therefore they’re idiots, then it doesn’t make any sense to try to understand the world from their perspective, because it’s just fundamentally flawed.
And then the main thing the young person should do in that world is listen to me, the adult who’s worked it all out. My logic is sound and good because my brain works and yours doesn’t, therefore, you should listen to whatever the contents of my brain are. That’s the kind of logic that you see quite a bit, and then that leads to a really harmful practice that in the book I call grownsplaining, kind of like the grown-up version of mansplaining, where you just imply this massive status difference between you, the grown-up, and them, the young person, and also assume that if only they listened to everything you said, then they would make wise decisions.
But that ignores the fact that young people often have reasons that make sense from their perspectives to feel like socially successful people in the groups that they care about. And so the trick is to get out of grownsplaining and into better practices. And when we do that, then we stop offending this need for status and respect, and we start working with it and using it as an asset and a resource.
Brett McKay: And then you also have a study that was done to see what happens when parents grownsplain to their kids or when they nag at their kids. What did that research show? ‘Cause I thought that was really interesting.
David Yeager: I love this. This is not my work, summarizing other people’s. It’s Jennifer Silk. I was at Pittsburgh, and then I learned about it through my collaborator, Ron Dahl, who’s amazing, been a mentor of mine. And it’s a great study. It’s the kind of study where you’re like, how did they not do this 20 years earlier? So what they did is they asked the question, what happens in the teenage brain when your parent is nagging you? And to do that, they did moms and daughters, because that’s the sample that they had. They could have done dads and sons or dads and daughters, etcetera, but so they had moms record themselves finishing the sentence, “It bothers me when you… ” Okay. And then they had the daughters listen to that recording while they were in the fMRI scanner.
So they’ve got a huge magnet circling their brain, looking at blood flow in different regions of the brain. And that allowed the researchers to infer what’s happening in the brain as the daughter’s listening to the nagging. And the nagging in the papers, it’s kind of awesome. I can’t believe they got this into a real academic paper. But it’s like, “You get mad when I tell you to grab your shoes and come down the stairs, and you get mad when I say your room is dirty and needs as a little cleaning,” and yada, yada, yada. “You just need to calm that down.” And so what do you see? What you see first is an increase in the anger regions of the brain. So the affective regions. So the daughters are pissed, basically. Then next, you see a decrease in two important regions. So one region of the brain that decreased is the prefrontal regions, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is a region associated with planning and so on.
So I like to summarize that as the brains are not thinking about how to change their behavior. So it’s not like the teenage girls are listening to the nagging and saying, “You know, you have a point, Mom. Everything I’m doing is, like, not right. And because you’ve pointed this out, I’m going to now change everything.” That’s not happening, right?
Brett McKay: Right. So, yeah, I thought that was really interesting, because basically, a teenager’s brain shuts down when you show them a lack of respect. I mean, they’re just done with you. And the opposite’s true. When they get respect, they’re surprisingly open to listening and changing and being influenced. And there was another study, the Vegemite study, where you’re trying to figure out how to get kids to take their medicine, because apparently it’s a big problem, particularly with kids who’ve gotten organ transplants. They gotta take their immunosuppressants. A lot of them don’t take it.
And so what you did, you brought in some young adults, and you gave them a taste of Vegemite, which is this, like, really gross brewers’ yeast food that they eat in Australia. They got a taste of it and like, “Oh, this is gross.” And then you guys told them, “Now you gotta take a big spoonful of it,” and you said, “You gotta do it because it’s good for you. And then by eating it, you’re gonna help advance science.” But you gave those instructions in two different ways to get them to take that second serving of it. So tell us about that study.
David Yeager: Yeah, so that study, it’s one of my favorite studies we’ve ever done. I spent a year at Stanford on sabbatical, and we came up with this model of status and respect when I visited with Ron Dahl. And we’re like, “We need a study to test these ideas that the hormones, like testosterone and status and respect, are all related in the teenage brain to behavior.” And the challenge is, like, it would be great to study a behavior like, does a young person take their medicine? But you can’t really do that study because you don’t want to have your control group being a bunch of children with cancer who then die because they didn’t take their chemo.
So, like, it can’t be a real medicine for ethical reasons and obvious reasons. So you need something that feels enough, like it’s unpleasant, like you’re forced to take your medicine and could plausibly be good for you, but can’t have any real health consequences for the participants. So that’s why we picked Vegemite. And Vegemite is like the yeast at the bottom of the barrel after brewing a huge batch of beer. Imagine you then put that on toast, and there’s a great YouTube video that is called “Americans Eating Australian Foods.” and the absolute best part of that video is just watching people’s disgust as they eat a spoonful of Vegemite, and it cracks me up every time I see it.
So, we saw that video. We’re like, “Oh, my God, we got to do a Vegemite experiment. This is what we’re doing.” And the way the experiment is set up is we have 18 to 24 year olds come into the lab, they sample Vegemite, because most people don’t know how gross it is. In fact, there’s a philosophical principle called the Vegemite principle, which is that some things are so unpleasant and impossible to describe that you have to experience in yourself. And so, we have people sample Vegemite, and then they see two types of instructions from a medical professional.
On the one hand, the person asks you to take the medicine, which, again, is Vegemite, in a respectful tone and respectful words. In another condition, it’s disrespectful. And we wrote the disrespectful condition with doctors to try to match how they normally educate patients about taking their medicine. And it’s very much talking down to you. It’s like, “Based on my experience, what I know about medicine and disease, you should listen to me. If there’s a bad taste, try to ignore that,” et cetera, et cetera. In the respectful condition, though, it’s like, “Look, you know, you’re a college student, and I’m gonna tell you the real reason why you might want to take this.” And then they explain the logic. They use words that imply autonomy, so they say things like, “You might consider,” rather than saying “You should.”
Instead of saying, “Ignore that unpleasant taste,” they say, “Think of that unpleasant taste as you doing your part to help others.” Then at the end, they say, “Thank you for considering this,” rather than in the disrespectful condition, “Thank you in advance for your cooperation.” And then we leave the room. We have a camera that’s a hidden camera that’s recording whether people take the second spoonful of Vegemite. And we found that, in general, young people were about twice as likely to take the second spoonful of Vegemite if they were asked respectfully.
Brett McKay: That’s really interesting. And then you also experimented, like, what happens if you increase sex hormones like testosterone, which makes you more sensitive to status and respect. And what you found when you gave testosterone to low testosterone young people, and they got a nasal shot of testosterone, the respectful instructions had a whopping effect. I mean, just increased the amount of compliance when they were shown respect.
David Yeager: Yeah. And the disrespectful instructions became even worse for behavior whenever they got the nasal shot of testosterone. Yeah, it was really interesting. And that’s what we were trying to test, is basically if we can temporarily make you kind of 13-year-old that’s experiencing insane levels of testosterone for the first time, if we can temporarily put you in that state, can we make you even more sensitive to subtle differences in communication? And the answer was, yes, we can.
And what that suggests is that testosterone isn’t something that universally makes your brain idiotic just doing dumb stuff. It’s more like it’s sensitizing you to the social rewards and punishments in your environment and therefore, in the real world, what we need to think about is how are we creating social environments that are either supporting a young person’s drive for status and respect or not. And it’s not like their brains are universally and permanently broken. It’s like they’re just more sensitive to the context. And so we, the adults, need to be more sensitive to how we’re communicating in that context.
Brett McKay: Right. Make it more explicit. You’re trying to help them while maintaining their status, respect. Yeah, there’s an interesting point about testosterone. People have this idea that testosterone just makes people, makes, particularly young men, aggressive, hyper aggressive, and they just want to dominate. Its effect is context dependent. I think I read about, if you give testosterone to a bunch of Buddhist monks, they’re all going to see who can, out Zen each other, because that’s how you gain status amongst Buddhist monks. But if you give testosterone to a bunch of prison inmates, you might get something else.
David Yeager: Yeah. There’s a famous study I didn’t write about in the book, but they looked at testosterone in high schoolers and then tracked a relationship with deviant behavior versus leadership. And what they found was that if you had friends that already got in trouble a lot, then the more testosterone you had, the more you were getting in trouble and going to juvenile detention, etcetera. But if you had friends that were very pro-social and in sports and leadership and stuff, then the more testosterone you had, the more you were out volunteering in the community, the more you became a president of a club. So it was like more of a positive leadership.
So you can think of testosterone as just one indicator of a huge cascade of what’s happening in puberty in both boys and girls. And it’s about sensitivity to what counts for high social regard in your community. And so we, as the adults, should try to structure environments where we’re going to capture those positive leadership, pro-social type qualities rather than more deviant ways to get a good reputation.
Brett McKay: Your book’s called “10 to 25” because these changes start happening around age ten. That’s when a lot of kids start… Girls start puberty. Then it goes until 25. We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
And now back to the show. I want to talk about this, going back to that neurological incompetence model you talk about in the book. When you have that view of young people that are sort of these broken, not fully formed adults, the way you approach them is you can either take that very authoritarian approach where you just nag them to like, hey, you’re just a dummy. Here’s what you need to be doing. Or you can take a more like a softie approach, like, well, you know, kids are just kids. They’re dumb, so we can’t really hold them to high standards. And as you said earlier, that’s not a good approach. You’re not going to help a young person if you take that approach. Instead, you recommend with this knowledge that young people, what they’re looking for right now in this ages ten to 25, they’re looking for status and respect. You recommend taking a mentor mindset. What does a mentor mindset look like?
David Yeager: Yeah, so that is a great summary. I think that if you think… Go back to the mentor’s dilemma. It felt like there were only two choices. Either you are a tough, demanding leader that enforces all the rules. We call that an enforcer mindset, or you’re a kind of soft, but caring and affectionate, more or less pushover. And I call that a protector mindset. And it’s important to point out that you can be a good person and have either of those approaches. And in fact, I think most people, even when they get it right, sometimes fall into one or the other of those two approaches.
So an enforcer, you could feel like, look, society is going to hell in a handbasket, and someone’s got to protect everyone from the insanity that’s happening. And that’s why I have to maintain standards, and I can’t let your feelings get in the way of me doing the right thing. I think a lot of people in the enforcer bucket think that way, and it makes sense. On the protector side, they say, well, look, society is so hard right now. Kids are just way too stressed. You know, young adults, they went to college through COVID, and they missed so much, and they’re kind of feeble and there’s a mental health crisis, and I just need to protect them because I care about them. I can’t possibly load them up with more stuff that they can’t accomplish because that would be cruel.
So I think you can go to bed each night and put your head on your pillow and feel good about yourself in either the enforcer or the protector mindset. And what I want to say to people is, look, if you’re super high standards, high demanding, great, keep that. Just add the support. Make it so that everyone that you’re mentoring or working with, whether you’re a parent or a manager or a teacher, make it so that they can meet your high standards. If you’re on the protector side, if you mainly prioritize removing stressful experiences so that young people aren’t crushed by them, well, maintain that concern and that support, great. But then add the standards and what you get when you have the high standards and the high support, the best of the enforcer and the best of the protector. That’s what I call the mentor mindset.
And what I’ve found is that when I’ve gone out to look for the best managers at Microsoft, the best K-12 teachers, the best college professors, the NBA’s best shooting coach, when I go look at what they do, these are people who don’t have the problem of kind of wimpy, helpless, non-independent young people. They have young people doing amazing stuff year after year, again and again. And they do it without crushing the young person’s spirit and making them feel overwhelmed. And what all of them are doing is they’re maintaining very high standards, like legitimate standards, not a fake standard just to make someone feel good, but they make sure that the young person can meet it, that they have enough support to meet it. And so they’re all doing mentor mindset, I found.
Brett McKay: And then you talk about practices that you can do to develop this mentor mindset and one of the practices you offer is be more transparent when you’re interacting with young people. What does that look like?
David Yeager: Yeah. So the simplest and easiest thing you can do, if in your mind you’re saying, “Yeah, I want to have high standards, I want to be supportive, and that’s going to work with a young person’s desire for status and respect rather than against it,” the simplest thing you can do is just be clearer about what you’re doing and why. And what I found is that the reason why we need to do that is because young people come to interactions with us with a little bit of suspicion. They start out thinking, “You know, most adults have talked down to me and not treated me with respect. And so I’m going to assume that that’s what’s happening until further notice.”
And that’s fine. But it causes lots of frustration for adults because they’ll do things like, be a surgeon and giving medical residents critical feedback to help them be better doctors. And the junior doctors will say, “This person thinks I’m a terrible doctor and they hate me,” rather than “They’re caring for me and they’re trying to help me to be a better doctor.” So where we’re over young people, whether it’s a parent or a teacher or a boss, and they could reasonably feel threatened by what we’re doing, if you just explain your intentions about two to three times more than you think you need to, then that can go a long way.
If you just explain yourself, “Here’s what I’m doing and why. Here’s why I thought it’s in your best interest. And also, here’s how I’m going to support you to do the following.” Just that little explanation can cause them to view our behaviors in a more positive light.
Brett McKay: And that goes back to that wise feedback you talked about earlier. So instead of just giving the critical feedback, “Hey, here’s what’s wrong with your essay,” or “Here’s what you did wrong during the operation,” before you do that, you’d say, “Look, I have really high standards of what I expect, and but I think you’re capable of doing it. So I’m giving you this feedback so that you can get better.” Like, you’re being incredibly transparent about why you’re doing this because it’s not obvious to the young person.
David Yeager: Right. And I write about a manager at a supermarket named Olay [0:30:48.8] ____ in Norway, and I interviewed him and all of his employees, and it’s just amazing what he does. He says stuff like, “I care about you too much to hold you to low standards. I want you to be the best version of yourself at this job. And I then want to brag about you to my boss so that you’re in line for promotions, so that you’re getting training, etcetera.” So he makes it about them earning a high-status reputation, a prestigious reputation, for having done a good job, and that’s motivating to people.
And so I talked to this one woman who she was like, “Yeah, I got called into the manager’s office for goofing off in the back room, and he really laid into me,” and I was like, “Oh, man, were you offended? Were you gonna quit? And did you yell at him? Did you complain to your colleagues?” She was like, “No, he was looking out for me.” Like, he more or less yelled at her, but she was like, ‘That’s because he thinks I could be better at this job.” And she didn’t have a college education. She wasn’t going to do anything else besides retail. She didn’t have ambitions for anything else. But her boss took her seriously, and now, five years later, she’s still with the company, and she’s in a leadership track.
So, yeah, I think that just clarifying what we’re doing sometimes takes the sting out of the negative experience of being critiqued, and it can turn it from something that young people hate to something that is a turning point in their lives.
Brett McKay: You also talk about asking better questions. What are some mentor mindset questions we can start asking to help young people work through their own problems?
David Yeager: Yeah, I think asking questions is one of those things where I studied all these exemplary mentor mindset leaders, and I was surprised that they’re almost always asking what the young person was thinking and where they were headed and so on, rather than telling them what to do. I mean, I think in my own kind of mediocre life as a teacher, if I saw a kid make a mistake, I’d be like, “Oh, you just missed this part. This part is easy. You got it. Go do this.” And I would just kind of tell them what to do and think I was doing a great job because I told them that they should be confident.
And the great teachers I watched never did that at all. They would just be like, “Huh? What? That’s your answer? That’s interesting. Where did that come from?” And then they explain their logic and they’re like, “Huh? Well, what would happen if you did this?” And then they would change something and then they’d be like, “Oh, my God, I get it.” And there would be these moments where the kids piecing it together in their head rather than the teacher troubleshooting it in their head and then telling the kid what the problem is. And so questioning is this way of kind of building autonomy and agency and expertise in the young person so that they have to do the thinking.
The NBA coach that I followed, his name is Chip Engelland. He was the Spurs shooting coach for 17 years when they, the San Antonio Spurs, when they won a series of championships for the NBA. And he’s always kind of asking questions, and I asked him why, and he said, “My goal is to give them a coach in the head, that maybe they shoot with me for an hour, but they’ve got dozens of other hours in the day. I want them to be applying the same thinking even when they’re not with me.” And I think that questioning is a way to give that to a young person while also implying that they have it in them to think for themselves. So the secondary purpose of a question, of course, is that it’s just more respectful than telling someone what to do.
Brett McKay: How do you ask questions so it’s not patronizing? ‘Cause, you know, okay, I’m gonna ask my kid a question, like, when they mess up, “What were you thinking?” The kid’s like, “Okay, I’m shutting down.” So how do you ask these questions so it shows respect?
David Yeager: Well, there’s a lot of interesting science on this. The linguists distinguish between different types of questions, and the style that seems to be most effective in this kind of case is what is called an authentic question with uptake. So an authentic question just means that the asker is legitimately curious about the person’s response. So, like, “What were you thinking?” is not an authentic question because you don’t actually want to know the answer, what they were thinking. But you could ask something very similar. You could be like, “Huh? What was your logic here? Like, you know, walk me through.” And there’s a way of doing that where it feels like an accusation, but there’s also a way of doing it where the young person’s like, “Oh, okay, well, they’re kind of curious about what my thinking was.”
So authentic is the first part, and the second is uptake. Uptake just means that your line of questioning builds in some way on what the young person has said. So again, if you say, “What were you thinking?” and then you already know that you’re just going to prosecute a case, like you’ve got a series of questions you’re going to ask, no matter what they said. That’s not uptake. The other person isn’t contributing to that conversation. It’s a one-way conversation. But uptake, in its very simplest form is, I mean, you can even do it with the old negotiation tactic of mirroring to say, you can just repeat back to the young person what they said, but with an inquisitive tone.
There’s great research on this. It’s called a repeat sometimes in the literature, like if a kid says, “1, 2, 3, 5, 9, 10” and then you could say, “That’s incorrect, it should be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,” but you could also say, “5, 9, 10?” And then the young person would immediately know that you’re questioning their logic there. And then they would correct it. They’d be like, “Oh, yeah, you’re right. It’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.” You can do the same kind of thing in dialogue with a young person by just mirroring back to them what they said in an inquisitive tone. And then that starts the conversation.
Brett McKay: We also talk about the importance of belonging and helping kids get motivated. Talk to us about that research.
David Yeager: Yeah. So we now know there’s a fundamental need to belong, right? To be connected to others. The more that that idea has become popular, the more that ideas about belonging have become a caricature. So you see on college campuses, they’ll hand out “You belong” laptop stickers, as though that’s going to make students feel like they belong because the sticker told them. Or you see anti-bullying campaigns where it’ll say, “You belong,” and it’s like a kid in a jumpy house who’s alone, and they’re jumping for joy. And you look at the poster, the “You belong” poster, and you’re like, “Well, why is that kid alone? And also that kid’s way too old to be in a jumpy house.” And so maybe that’s why they don’t have any friends or whatever it is.
Those kind of glib belonging-by-fiat messages don’t really convince a young person that they can be accepted by a group that they care about. And that’s fundamentally the issue, is that to be accepted, you have to feel like you’ve added something of value to what the group cares about. And you can’t declare that by fiat yet young people have to show it. They have to get what the anthropologists call earned prestige. So in, like, our evolutionary history, you couldn’t just talk a big game about tracking down a deer and feeding it to everyone else. Or you couldn’t just because you’re tall, say, “Alright, that person’s going to get us lots of food,” or whatever it is they need to do to contribute. Like, you actually have to go out and kill the deer, help them kill the deer, and bring it back.
You have to show the group that you have something of value. And so the feeling of belonging and being accepted is intimately tied to feelings of competence. Where all this is going is that what we found is that a much better way to help young people with a sense of belonging, whether it’s high schoolers getting bullied or college students wondering whether they’re in the right place or new employees in their twenties, wondering if they’ve picked the right job is to help them deal with and, and by deal with, I mean tell themselves a better story about any worries about competence early on in their career or their role.
So imagine a college student who starts out in a calculus class and then bombs the first test. They’re like, “Well, I’m an idiot, I don’t know calculus and therefore I don’t belong in this class, or maybe even at this university.” Or an employee where they do their first major project, they give a presentation to senior management and it kind of bombs. And they’re like, “Do they think I’m an idiot? Like am I an idiot? Should I not be here?”
So, your competence worries are tied to your belonging. So, what we have found in our experiments is you can give people a different story about their competence early on in some role or career, and then they can reach a different set of conclusions about belonging. So, what’s the different story? The different story is basically that early difficulties are normal. That they’re struggling in a first presentation or in a first exam is a normal part of doing something ambitious and hard that is legitimately challenging, and that not everyone is doing. And so, you should expect some level of difficulty. And it’s not a sign you don’t belong; it’s a sign that actually, you’re coming to belong because you’re starting to face the new, higher, more difficult standards.
And then the next step is to help them understand how that normal experience of difficulty improves. You can’t just say, “Hey, everybody goes through difficulty, and it sucks for everybody.” You have to also help them understand how it gets better. And the way it gets better ideally involves something that the person can do. You can take steps, you can talk to this person or that person, you can join this or that activity, and then over time, it can snowball into a better outcome.
And we’ve done a number of experiments where, with high schoolers and bullying, we found that this storytelling approach about belonging reduced levels of cortisol, improved health, even improved grades up to a year later. And in the college setting, in a paper that was led by Greg Walton and many others in science a couple of years ago, we found that you could reduce a portion of overall achievement gaps for entire universities if you could help young people tell themselves a better story about belonging, ideally early on in the process.
Brett McKay: That’s really interesting. I wanted to end with this anecdote. It is actually a really powerful story you told about how understanding that young people are motivated this period between the ages of ten to 25, they’re motivated by status and respect. How understanding that helped, like quitting smoking or stopping smoking campaigns.
David Yeager: Oh, yeah.
Brett McKay: Walk us through that.
David Yeager: Yeah, I mean, this is… I’m glad you came back. This is one of my favorite stories. And a lot of people have written about the Truth Campaign is what it’s called. But I did some original reporting on it. That was fun to do. So when the tobacco companies had to settle for a large amount of money with the state of Florida, because the science, especially on secondhand smoking, was super clear about how it was causing cancer and therefore a health burden for the state, they were required to pay for ads. The tobacco companies were, in a couple of different ways.
One, they hired their own firms to come up with anti-smoking ads, and also they had to put money into this other entity that would hire its own firm. So the smoking ads that the tobacco companies paid for were “Think. Don’t Smoke” and “Tobacco is whacko if you’re a teen.” And it’s just like, I mean, it’s so great. This is the best evil genius move I’ve ever seen. So “Think. Don’t Smoke.” I use this in my class a lot, and I always ask, okay, what does that imply? And it implies, of course, that you’re not thinking. Right? And so, it’s already nagging you. And then it says “Don’t Smoke.” So, it’s like grownsplaining to you. It’s just telling you what to not do. So it first insults you and second tells you what to do.
So, in three beautiful words, they offended everything about the teenage mind with “Think. Don’t Smoke.” So, that was pretty smart on their behalf. And what they found is that the more that counties were exposed to “Think. Don’t Smoke” ads, the more young people were intrigued by smoking and the more positively they felt about the tobacco companies. “Tobacco is whacko if you’re a teen” is the other one. I mean, so good, right? So, first of all, what does that imply? It implies that tobacco is not whacko if you’re grown-up. And the number one thing teenagers want to do is be like grown-ups. And so, it’s a subtle argument telling you to smoke more, therefore, you’re a grown-up. But also, it’s just dorky.
I mean, “Tobacco is whack.” I mean, can you imagine being like, 15 and you’re like, you know, after sports practice in a circle with four other kids, and one is like the girl you have a crush on and you’re just dying to look cool in front of her, and you would do anything, and then she hands you a cigarette and you’re like, “Sorry, unfortunately, I’m a teen, so this would be whacko for me to do.” of course, that wouldn’t happen.
And so, what Bogusky did is… He was the creative director at an agency called Crispin Porter + Bogusky. That’s now a very well-known agency, but at the time was kind of the upstart, newer agency. He was contacted by the other pool of money from the Florida settlement that was more run by a third party and the Centers for Disease Control, and he was going to create the anti-smoking ads with the tobacco companies’ money from the settlement. And the Center for Disease Control had a strategy that was very much in the grownsplaining vein of things and was destined to fail. And the reason Bogusky, who was just like an awesome, cool guy, and I got to meet him and talk with him and just like the most creative, fun person you’ve ever met in your life. And he had previously seen the CDC strategy and he sent a bunch of his creative staff out to skate parks.
So, he had employees who looked like 16-year-olds, basically, and they showed up with stocking caps and chain wallets at the skate park and then would talk to other teenagers and be like, “Hey.” And they would ask the three main points of the CDC strategy. And the CDC strategy was smoking will cause cancer, smoking gives you yellow teeth, and smoking is not sexy. And so, Bogusky’s team would be like, “Hey, did you know smoking causes cancer?” And then some kid at the skate park, while smoking a cigarette, could perfectly describe the science of how smoking causes cancer. So, there’s like no surprise there. And then he’d be like, “Yeah, but do you know it’ll give you yellow teeth?” And like, “Yeah, when I’m 60, but not now. And by the way, smoking makes me super sexy because I get laid all the time. And so, smoking is the best.”
So, everything about the CDC strategy was destined to fail. And so, Bogusky came back to the boardroom and was like, “This is not going to work.” And came up with an alternative strategy that’s now called The Truth Campaign. And the idea behind The Truth Campaign is to really work with the young person’s desire for status and respect rather than against it. And in this context, what that means is saying, look, the reason why so many teenagers smoke is because the tobacco companies marketed cigarettes to them at an early age in a deceptive way, only to exploit their desire to fit in or whatever so they could make money and get you hooked for the rest of your life, and then you’ll die when you’re old, and kind of just revealing the authentic marketing strategy of the tobacco companies.
And all this stuff is true, right? Joe Camel, Marlboro Man, they’re designed to appeal to teenagers, especially teenage boys. And so, they ran ads, initially in Florida, that showed tobacco executives walking through a hospital, talking to dying cigarette-smoking patients, thanking them for their years of service, and then wondering aloud, “How are we ever going to replace you?” And then the executives turn around and see, like a teenage girl in the waiting room, and then they creepily stare at the teenage girl, and the ad says something about how, you know, “What do a bunch of old men want from teenage girls?” is more or less what the argument goes. And so, that’s just so gross. Like, it’s an immediate turn-off.
The teenagers are like, “I’m not going to give money to these people. They’re a bunch of creepy old executives that are trying to attract teenagers.” So that series of ads reduced smoking in Florida. And then very soon after, all 50 states joined a settlement against tobacco companies. And then Bogusky’s group was hired to come up with another round of ads. Kind of funny in the second round, they made a new rule that they couldn’t attack the executives personally because his ads were too effective. So instead, Bogusky created ads where the teenagers would flood the streets around a tobacco company’s high-rise building without showing the faces of the executives, and they would yell into megaphones, they would organize demonstrations, basically rebelling against the tobacco companies.
But the ads never say smoking causes cancer or you shouldn’t smoke. They never tell you what to do at all. But they do imply if you want to join a large group of young people just like you, who are choosing of their own free will, to stand up for their autonomy and freedom against injustice, then one way for you to do that is to not smoke. And what they found over time was that smoking went from 20 or 30%, depending on the analyses, to less than 6%, sometimes down to 3%, within a few years. And it is the truth. Television ads, those anti-smoking ads from the early two thousands, are considered the most successful public health campaign ever in the history of the United States besides the campaign to increase seatbelt use, which now everyone wears a seatbelt. In the seventies, nobody did.
So basically, teen smoking and seatbelts are the kind of the only two successes of the establishment. And the way they did it with smoking was by being countercultural, not going with the establishment way of telling young people how to make wise decisions. So they did the opposite of grownsplaining, and it really tapped into a young person’s drive to be accepted by peers, to make a contribution, to follow a meaningful purpose, all these bigger things. So I think it’s a great way to end because it just perfectly encapsulates these themes and it also is counterintuitive. No one would have thought it. So if one good thing happens from this book, hopefully it’s that people stop using the old kind of disrespectful spiritual cousin of think, don’t smoke approach and start using more of the insights that Bogusky and his team developed for the Truth campaign.
Brett McKay: Well, David, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
David Yeager: Yeah, the book is for sale on Amazon. It’s called “10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People.” I run a research institute at UT Austin called the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute, and we have lots of free resources and interventions and papers. And I would love to be in touch with people and hear what they think, and I do reply to emails, and I’d be happy to chat with people and share what we have.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, David Yeager, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
David Yeager:Thanks a lot.
Brett McKay: My guest today was David Yeager. He’s the author of the book “10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People.” It’s available on Amazon.com, and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is/yeager, where you can find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you’ll find our podcast archives, and while you’re there, make sure to sign up for our newsletter. We’ve got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on in AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
