Professor Mary C. Murphy is a social psychologist whose new book,

Cultures of Growth, explores what specific traits can make individuals and

teams successful. Tonight, Murphy shares her brief but spectacular take on how to create cultures of growth.

Cultures of genius are really problematic.

If you Google the word genius, you're going to see a lot of Einstein.

You might see some Thomas Edison or a Steve Jobs.

You might even see Elon Musk.

They're all white, they're all male.

You don't see women. You don't see people of color, LGBTQIA people, you don't see people with disabilities.

And so what we see over and over is that these cultures of genius really focus on who fits that narrow mold and it has consequences.

I grew up in San Antonio, Texas as part of a bicultural, Hispanic working-class family.

I think that an American culture we all like to think that we are independent agents,

but I think we under appreciate how much the world

shapes us and how much the cues in the environment tell us are we valued are we

respected do we have what it takes or don't we? And we all have the power to create these environments around us and we have to do that. As a researcher, I focus on how our environments and the cues within them shape our motivation and our

engagement and I figure out how we can recreate these environments.

The fixed mindset holds that talent and

ability and intelligence are relatively fixed traits. You either have them or

you don't. You're a math person or you're not. You're a creative person or

you're not. And the growth mindset is often seen as the opposite.

It holds that we have universal potential.

The book I wrote is called Cultures of Growth.

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