Progress-focused

Urgent optimism: Building a sustainable future together In her book Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet , Hannah Ritchie makes the case for urgent optimism. She offers a hopeful look at the challenges of sustainability and climate change. Ritchie, a Scottish data scientist and senior research fellow at the University of Oxford, is also deputy editor of Our World in Data . With her expertise in climate, energy, food and biodiversity, she invites readers to cut through the doom-mongering and build a sustainable future with urgent optimism.

“I’m not for Trump, but you have to admit: he campaigned brilliantly!” These are the kinds of comments you hear regularly in response to Trump’s election victory. It’s reminiscent of the admiration for a chess player who wins by secretly moving chess pieces when his opponent isn’t looking. Is that ‘brilliant play’? Of course not. Yet a former president who spread more than 30,000 demonstrable lies during his term is praised for his ‘strategic insight’. This perverse logic, in which effectiveness is confused with excellence, is eroding the foundations of the American democratic constitutional state. And that of other countries if we're not careful and stop admiring misconduct.

In progress-focused work, motivation plays a central role. One of the most important pillars is supporting autonomous motivation . This means that people engage in activities that they find interesting or important. But not everyone responds the same to autonomy support. Why is that? And what can we do when people respond less positively to it? Here, causality orientation theory (COT) – a relatively “forgotten” mini-theory within self-determination theory (SDT) – offers valuable insights. Read here how you can work with individuals with different causality orientations.

In a few days, the US presidential election will take place, with potentially far-reaching consequences. Donald Trump is a former president who has repeatedly and openly attacked the democratic rule of law . He has a serious chance of being re-elected. This article is an urgent warning against Trump and similar politicians. It examines why we as a society often fail to recognize the deliberate evil of some individuals. Our blindness to evil can have dangerous consequences for both individuals and society.

  Ferber et al. (2024) Ferber et al. (2024) investigate in a recent article how parental factors are related to the intrinsic and extrinsic goals of children. The study is a meta-analysis of 49 reports. These focus on the influence of parental aspirations and parenting styles on the goals that children pursue. The researchers looked at intrinsic goals such as personal growth and relatedness, and extrinsic goals such as wealth and status. The study aimed to provide insight into how parents contribute to the development of these different types of goals in their children. 

In today’s political landscape, we increasingly see irrationality and cheating being employed as strategies to gain and maintain power. This phenomenon not only undermines the foundations of a healthy democracy but also opens the door for leaders who are willing to sacrifice ethics and integrity for personal gain.

Many people feel powerless in the face of big problems like climate change. This sense of powerlessness can prevent them from taking action, because they think their individual efforts make little difference. Recent research by Jankowski, Mlynski, and Job (2024) offers new insights. It discusses how our beliefs about the changeability of the world—a “ growth mindset about the world ”—play a crucial role in breaking through the illusion of powerlessness .

  Recent research by Wang (2024) examines the relationship between self-compassion and posttraumatic growth in adolescents. The research also looked at the role of basic psychological needs.

  In our increasingly complex society, the need for cognition (NFC ) plays an important role. NFC is the tendency of people to like to think, to make cognitive efforts and to derive pleasure from challenging thought processes. A new article by Aerts et al. (2024) discusses this. In this publication, the authors explore how NFC develops during childhood and adolescence, and which factors influence this development. In this article, I discuss the insights and tips from their research. 

Daron Acemoglu , Simon Johnson , and James A. Robinson , authors of the book Why Nations Fail , are the 2024 winners of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel . The prize, often referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, was awarded for their research into why some countries are rich and others poor. Their work explains how political and economic institutions determine the prosperity of nations. Institutions—the rules and systems that determine how a society functions—are key to understanding differences in prosperity and poverty, they argue.

Robert J. Sternberg , an influential psychologist and psychometrician known for his extensive work on intelligence , has published an article: “ What is intelligence, really? The futile search for a Holy Grail ” (2024). In this piece, Sternberg, Professor of Human Development at Cornell University, rethinks the nature of intelligence and criticizes the ongoing search for an all-encompassing definition of intelligence.

“I need to control myself.” This simple statement raises a profound question: Who is the “I” that needs to control, and what is the “myself” that needs to be controlled? How can someone be one and the same, yet appear to be made up of many different parts? This confusion shows up not only in language, but also in our thinking about the self. Think of terms like “self-coaching” or “self-compassion.” Who is coaching whom? Who is showing compassion, and to whom? This raises the question: What is the true self? In this article, we’ll look at three key theories that help us better understand the self: mindset theory, self-determination theory (SDT), and Douglas Hofstadter’s idea of ​​the self as a “strange loop.” 

Recent advances in mindset research highlight the importance of teacher mindsets in shaping classroom culture. Understanding how teacher mindsets and behaviors impact students is useful for promoting positive educational outcomes. A new study by Muenks et al. (2024) helps in this regard.

  "Gen Z has no work ethic", "Boomers don’t understand technology", "Millennials are lazy and spoiled." We hear them a lot: these kinds of generational stereotypes . These stereotypes are used to explain differences in work attitude, lifestyle, or values. But how true are these statements? Is there really such a big difference between generations, or are we missing the real point? In this article I will discuss, based on research by sociologist Martin Schröder, why the distinction between generations is of little use.

I recently received a message that got me thinking about what I call “ the illusion of effortless success .” Someone shared with me their struggle: they saw themselves as a constant struggle, while others around them seemed to achieve everything effortlessly. When asked about pride in their own accomplishments, their response was a soberingly negative one. This struck me, not only because of its candor, but also because it echoes a sentiment that many of us are familiar with.

  Psychological knowledge is useful to everyone because psychology permeates every aspect of our lives. From our deepest thoughts to our interactions with others, psychological factors influence how we perceive the world and how we act in it. As George Miller so aptly put it in 1969 :

The mindset theory and the self-determination theory are two important pillars of progress-focused work. Within the progress-focused approach, we see both theories as important and complementary frameworks for understanding commitment, progress, and well-being. A new study also looks at the relationships between these two theories, in particular the interplay between mindset and basic psychological needs.

Two concepts are central to the progress-focused approach : the growth mindset and autonomous motivation. These theories form important pillars of our approach, which is aimed at sustainable effort and meaningful progress. But do growth mindset and autonomous motivation have anything to do with each other? Don't the concepts come from very different research schools? The answer is yes, they are definitely related. In this article, I look at some studies that show there is an interesting interplay between growth mindset and autonomous motivation.

Ethical leadership plays an important role in shaping the ethical culture within organizations. People often associate dominant leadership with strong performance and decision-making power, but recent research by Brady and Sivanathan (2024) shows that this leadership style can also have unintended negative consequences for workplace ethics. These findings are relevant for organizations that strive for both high performance and an ethically responsible work environment.

The negativity bias influences how contact between groups reinforces prejudices and ideas about other groups. This has long been researched by psychologists. Previous research suggests that positive intergroup contact can reduce prejudice. However, a recent meta-analysis by Paolini et al. (2024) points to a more complex picture. This is especially true when people can choose whether they have contact with others. I discuss this meta-analysis below. The researchers looked at the role of negative and positive experiences in intergroup contact. They also looked at the influence of self-selection and the impact of negativity bias.

The mental health of young people is increasingly under pressure, partly due to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers are therefore looking for effective ways to support adolescents in dealing with these challenges. A recent study by Lipsey et al. (2024) examined the effectiveness of a brief online growth mindset intervention targeted at high school students. This approach could not only help reduce depressive symptoms, but also strengthen the mental resilience of young people.

We often see intelligence as the source of progression and innovation. But Robert Sternberg shows in a new article that intelligence is not necessarily good. In his article “ Dark Intelligence: When the Possibility of 1984 Becomes Reality ”, he introduces the concept of 'dark intelligence'. In this article, I will change this term to 'malicious intelligence' (see explanation below). With malicious intelligence, intelligence is not used for the good of society but for harmful and even malicious purposes. His work raises questions about the ethical side of intelligence and the responsibility that comes with cognitive abilities.

As a psychology student in the 1980s, I learned that researchers Schmidt and Hunter indicated that IQ tests were strongly predictive of job performance, with correlations ranging from 0.51 to 0.65. However, recent research by Steel and Fariborzi (2025) suggests that this correlation may have decreased to as low as 0.16.

A new study by Zhao et al. (2024) provides insight into the benefits of a growth mindset. The study examines how a growth mindset can contribute to greater mental resilience and adaptability. This specifically examines the role of cognitive fusion and negative information bias.