Dr. Patricia Kuhl: There are some pernicious effects that come from the fact that we are such social creatures, and one of them leads to the role that identity plays in learning. As human beings, we are very aware of how we are the same or different than others. We’re conscious of how we look different, how we act different, how we speak with different languages. Each of those gives us a kind of identity about ourselves. It turns out that the studies have demonstrated that your identity as a learner plays a huge role in the pathway that you take in school, the kinds of classes you think you’d be attracted to, the disciplines or the careers you think you’d be good at as opposed to poor at. By second grade, girls have absorbed the stereotype as to whether or not their academic interests would tend towards math or not. In the United States, girls by second grade will report, girls aren’t interested in math. Girls aren’t good at math and they don’t care about math. By third grade, they’ve absorbed that with regard to themselves. They say, “I’m not interested in math. “I don’t care about math. “I’m not good at math.” That’s independent of what their scores are in math. This work is demonstrating how important the belief system is to academic skills. It doesn’t matter where in the world you live, you want to belong. You don’t want to be alone. Teachers who have a tendency to work on the math skill itself can ignore this other part, the psychology of your belief system. It’s so important for teachers and parents to understand the power of the social brain. If we’re helping our children negotiate their place in the world, we have to understand the degree to which their social responses to others and from others are building identities that will allow them or cut them off from pathways that they might follow.