News Story

KMi’s co-founder Kitty Chisholm wins STEM’s 3 minutes thesis competition

Nancy Pontika, Wednesday 20 Dec 2023

On December 4, Kitty Chisholm gave a 3-minute talk, titled "Can Belief in Brain Plasticity Really Enhance One’s Career?", which was based on her work towards a PhD. Her presentation was an introduction to her dissertation which looks at the power of growth mindset interventions over a longer period of time. The intervention is delivered via Immersive Reflection —a web application designed to stimulate reflection— and seeks to inspire and motivate managers to learn and apply that knowledge over time.

Embracing a growth mindset brings benefits such as increased persistence, resilience, a stronger appetite for challenges, and heightened motivation to learn. Managers with a growth mindset are more likely to coach subordinates, resulting in direct reports displaying enhanced organizational citizenship behaviors, voluntarily exceeding their job specifications. The project’s goal is to investigate not just shifts in mindset but also to assess how these changes lead to observable and lasting improvements in management behaviours over time in real-world situations.

Kitty’s doctoral experiment was inspired by KMI’s Democratic Reflection, an IDEA project—evolved from collaboration in collective intelligence and online thinking. This project was geared towards helping citizens sharpen their critical thinking and challenge previous assumptions as they engage with political debates.