The kids who had stuck to a task they could do well on actually performed worse

From The Up Side of Down by Megan McArdle, page 11.

McArdle talks about the importance of mind-set as it impacts willingness to accept new and more challenging (and therefore more likely to increase capability) tasks.

Dweck puzzled over what it was that made these people so different from their peers. It hit her one day as she was sitting in her office (then at Columbia), chewing over the results of the latest experiment with one of her graduate students: the people who dislike challenges think that talent is a fixed thing that you're either born with or not. The people who relish them think that it's something you can nourish by doing stuff you're not good at.

People who believe that outcomes are determined by preordained levels of talent are referred to by Dweck as having a fixed mind-set. Those who believe in the capacity to cultivate talent are referred to as having a growth mind-set.

McArlde elaborates.

In one of Dweck's best-known experiments, children were given a simple cognitive task to do and, after they completed it, were praised for their performance. Half of them were told something like, "Wow! You did really well - you must be very smart!" The other half were told, "Wow! You did really well - you must have worked really hard!"

Even Dweck was surprised by the magnitude of the effect she saw. When they were offered a follow-up test to take, and told that one was easy and the other one was hard, the students who had been praised for their effort eagerly embraced the more challenging test. Those who had been praised for their intelligence were far more likely to choose the easy path.

As you might expect, this eventually translated into performance: during the third round, when everyone was given another easy test, the kids who had eagerly attacked the difficult problems showed improvement, while the kids who had stuck to a task they could do well on actually performed worse.

This would seem to link with the sense of superiority (capability to accomplish) in Chua and Rubenfeld's The Triple Package. In turn that raises the prospect that the victim advocacy approach taken towards gender, race, LGBT, etc. might be subverting their own goals. If the message is that failure is preordained because of societal institutions, that undermines the confidence in effortful experimentation likely to increase one's capabilities, and therefore one's likelihood of success.

Presumably this has some correlation with people's orientation towards the perspective people take about outcomes. Some people view the pie as fixed and the primary issue is how to divide the pie among claimants. Others view the pie as dynamic and growing and are focused more on the fairness of the process (the equal applicability of rules) rather than fairness of distribution per se. I am guessing that those who are of a fixed mind-set view the world as a zero-sum game whereas those of a growth mind-set take the opposite view.