6 ideas
When information is first encountered in a context that seems irrelevant or is accepted uncritically, people freeze it into a rigid mindset that later governs behavior even when circumstances change. Langer's studies showed that people told a condition applied to them only later still processed early information as fixed, so they failed to use it flexibly when it became relevant.
Langer and Rodin gave one group of nursing home residents a plant to care for and small decisions to make, while a comparison group had the same plant tended by staff and decisions made for them. The responsibility group became more alert, active and happier. At an 18-month follow-up fewer of them had died, suggesting that restoring even minor control affects health and mortality.
People act as if chance events are controllable when a situation contains features of skill tasks, such as choice, familiarity, competition or active involvement. In Langer's 1975 lottery study, people who picked their own ticket demanded far more money to give it up than people who were handed one. Choice alone made a random outcome feel partly theirs.
Asking to cut in line at a copier with 'because I have to make copies' worked almost as well as giving a real reason. People responded to the structure of a request plus 'because' rather than to its content. When the request was larger, the empty reason stopped working and people began to attend.
Mindfulness is defined not as meditation but as three active behaviors. First, continually creating new categories rather than relying on old ones. Second, staying open to new information, and third, recognizing that any situation can be seen from more than one perspective. Its opposite, mindlessness, comes from repetition, single-minded context, and treating distinctions made in the past as permanently true.
Fixating on outcomes makes people ask 'can I do this?' and freeze under fear of failure. Attending to process makes people ask 'how do I do this?', which breaks a goal into steps that can be adjusted and replaces judgment with engagement. Seen this way, many apparent incompetencies are really the result of labels such as 'too old' or 'not a math person' being applied to fixed end-states rather than to changeable steps.