Self-Belief and Mental Flexibility Keep Growth Mindset Alive Across Adulthood

The idea that abilities can be developed through effort—the belief psychologists call a growth mindset—has become one of the most influential concepts in modern motivational science. Since Carol Dweck’s foundational work, thousands of studies have explored how these beliefs shape achievement in schools, with large-scale experiments such as the 2019 National Study of Learning Mindsets published in Nature showing that brief interventions can improve academic outcomes for struggling students. Yet nearly all of that evidence comes from children, adolescents, and college students. What sustains a growth mindset in a 45-year-old returning to night classes, a mid-career worker retraining for a new profession, or an adult balancing learning with jobs and family? A new study published in Current Psychology by Ayperi Otru Kılıç and Osman Nejat Akfırat of Kocaeli University in Türkiye offers one of the most detailed answers to date, and its findings suggest that the psychological machinery behind growth-oriented beliefs works differently in adulthood than researchers have often assumed.

The research team recruited 840 adults aged 18 to 65 from an adult learning context, a population chosen precisely because it captures people who are actively engaged in education and skill development beyond the traditional school years. Participants completed validated self-report measures of four constructs: growth mindset, operationalized as incremental beliefs about intelligence; general self-efficacy, the belief in one’s capacity to organize and execute the actions needed to manage situations; cognitive flexibility, the ability to adapt one’s thinking and switch between mental strategies when circumstances change; and dispositional optimism, the generalized expectation that good things will happen in the future. The instruments included the Turkish adaptations of the Implicit Theory of Intelligence Scale, the General Self-Efficacy Scale, and the Cognitive Flexibility Inventory, all of which have established reliability and validity in Turkish-speaking samples.

Methodologically, the study went well beyond simple correlation. The authors analyzed the data using hierarchical regression, mediation analysis, and structural equation modeling, or SEM, a statistical framework that allows researchers to test whether a network of relationships among latent variables fits the observed data. Mediation analysis asks whether the connection between two variables flows through a third: in this case, whether self-efficacy promotes growth mindset partly because confident people become more cognitively flexible. The authors also divided the sample into developmental stages—emerging adulthood, roughly the late teens through the twenties, following Jeffrey Arnett’s influential framework; young adulthood; and middle adulthood—and tested whether the strength of these relationships changed with age using moderated mediation procedures described by Andrew Hayes.

The central finding was strikingly consistent: across the entire sample, self-efficacy emerged as the strongest predictor of growth mindset, followed by cognitive flexibility. In other words, adults who believed in their own capacity to handle challenges were substantially more likely to endorse the view that intelligence and abilities are malleable rather than fixed. This aligns with decades of theory going back to Albert Bandura’s 1997 work on self-efficacy, which positioned efficacy beliefs as the foundation of human agency. If you trust that your actions can produce desired outcomes, the logic goes, you are more likely to see ability as something you can build rather than a fixed endowment. The meta-analytic literature supports this connection in academic settings, with studies consistently linking self-efficacy to achievement, effort regulation, and persistence.

The mediation results added a mechanistic layer to this picture. Cognitive flexibility partially mediated the association between self-efficacy and incremental beliefs, meaning that part of the reason confident adults hold growth mindsets runs through their capacity to think flexibly. The structural equation modeling replicated this mediating role and confirmed adequate model fit using conventional criteria, including the widely used fit thresholds proposed by Hu and Bentler in 1999, with appropriate caution about overgeneralizing those cutoffs as later methodological work has advised. Conceptually, the pathway makes intuitive sense: people who are confident in their abilities may be more willing to entertain alternative perspectives, reframe setbacks, and try new problem-solving strategies, and that very openness to alternative approaches may reinforce the belief that abilities are not carved in stone. Flexibility, in this account, is the cognitive bridge between feeling capable and believing in growth.

Optimism told a different and more surprising story. Across the full sample, dispositional optimism was not a robust independent predictor of growth mindset once self-efficacy and cognitive flexibility were accounted for. However, when the researchers examined developmental subgroups, optimism was uniquely predictive only in emerging adulthood—the life stage spanning roughly ages 18 to 25, when identity exploration, instability, and open possibilities dominate. This developmental specificity makes theoretical sense. Emerging adults are still constructing their self-theories, and a generally hopeful outlook about the future may be especially influential at an age when beliefs about one’s own potential are actively forming. By midlife, when identities are more consolidated and demands are more structured, the general expectation of good outcomes may simply matter less for sustaining beliefs about malleable abilities than the more task-specific resources of confidence and flexibility.

An important nuance, and one the authors emphasize, is that the age-related patterns were suggestive rather than definitive. Descriptive comparisons hinted that the mediating pathway from self-efficacy through flexibility to growth mindset was stronger in emerging adulthood and weaker in midlife, but formal moderated mediation tests indicated that these developmental variations were not statistically robust. In plain terms, the study cannot claim that the psychological architecture of growth mindset genuinely changes with age; it can only report that optimism showed a stage-specific association and that the core mechanisms appear broadly stable across the adult lifespan. This honesty matters in a field where developmental claims are often overstated, and it reflects the study’s careful use of formal interaction testing rather than relying on subgroup differences alone.

The findings arrive at a moment when adult learning has become a central policy concern. The OECD’s 2021 Skills Outlook argued that lifelong learning is essential for navigating technological change and labor market disruption, and UNESCO has called for public action on education in a post-pandemic world. Meanwhile, meta-analytic work by Jeni Burnette and colleagues in 2023 has mapped when, how, and for whom growth mindset interventions actually work, while other researchers, including Brooke Macnamara and Alexandra Burgoyne, have raised pointed questions about whether mindset interventions reliably raise achievement. Within this contested landscape, the new study contributes something distinctive: evidence that growth-oriented beliefs remain psychologically meaningful well beyond youth, and that they are anchored in resources—self-efficacy and cognitive flexibility—that are potentially trainable. Prior work has also shown that growth mindsets predict cognitive gains in older adults participating in multi-skill learning interventions, and that they relate to depression, well-being, and adjustment over time, suggesting real stakes for adult outcomes.

For practitioners designing adult education, workplace reskilling programs, or professional development courses, the implications are concrete. If self-efficacy is the strongest correlate of a growth mindset, then programs that build mastery experiences—structured opportunities for adults to succeed at progressively challenging tasks, the classic route to efficacy beliefs described by Bandura—may do double duty, strengthening both confidence and the underlying belief that abilities can grow. If cognitive flexibility partially carries that effect, then exercises that encourage perspective-taking, strategy switching, and reframing of errors may amplify the benefit. The study also cautions against one-size-fits-all messaging: optimism-focused approaches, whatever their merits elsewhere, may be most relevant to the youngest adult learners rather than to midlife participants.

Like all cross-sectional research, the study has limits that the authors acknowledge through their design choices. Self-report measures capture perceived flexibility and confidence rather than objectively assessed executive function, and the correlational design cannot establish whether self-efficacy causes growth mindset, whether growth mindsets bolster self-efficacy, or whether both are downstream of other factors. The adult learning context, while ideal for studying motivated learners, may not generalize to adults outside educational settings. Still, the study’s scale, its multi-method statistical approach, and its lifespan framing make it a significant step toward a psychology of mindset that does not stop at the school gates. As economies demand continuous reskilling and adults increasingly return to learning throughout their working lives, understanding what keeps the belief in growth alive at 25, 40, or 60 may prove as consequential as the school-based research that made growth mindset famous in the first place.

Subject of Research: Psychological predictors of growth mindset across adulthood

Article Title: Psychological resources supporting growth mindset across adulthood: evidence from an adult learning context

Article References: Otru Kılıç, A., & Akfırat, O. N. (2026). Psychological resources supporting growth mindset across adulthood: evidence from an adult learning context. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1633. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10201-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10201-w

Keywords: growth mindset, self-efficacy, cognitive flexibility, optimism, adult development, lifespan psychology, emerging adulthood, motivational psychology, structural equation modeling, adult learning, reskilling, incremental beliefs