2.22 How can we coach adults to change profound beliefs? A mindset based approach

Academic team: Kitty Chisholm (Knowledge Media Institute, OU)
Policing partners: N/A
Status: In progress

The research aims to test a short growth mindset intervention, delivered via an app that encourages reflection, to motivate and improve the capacity of managers in one or more police forces to learn and apply that learning sustainably over time.

The benefits of a growth mindset have been shown to be increased persistence, resilience, appetite for challenge, motivation to learn and to apply that learning.  Growth mindset managers tend to be more willing to coach subordinates and their direct reports show more organisational ‘citizenship’ behaviours (willingly going above and beyond their job specification). 

The whole project will examine not just changes in mindset, but the extent to which those changes translate to observably improved management behaviours, sustained over time, in the case of managers in a range of public and private organisational contexts.  This includes a CPRL member police force, which has signed up to take part in this Ph.D. research project.

News

Landmark Article in the British Journal of Social Psychology

Professor Clifford Stott (Centre for Policing Research and Learning) has published a Landmark Article in the British Journal of Social Psychology, one of the discipline’s leading international journals. The paper examines the historical relationship between social psychology, crowd theory, and the governance of public order.

1st April 2026