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Believing you can be a smarter person can actually make you smarter. This is what the  findings on the American Psychological Association suggest. I think believing in something is always a positive attribute to a person since it creates goals to achieve for and the confidence to go get it, thus creating a drive to increase the chances of success. Being smart generally isn’t the thing that will make you achieve a goal. You simply need the drive to make it happen.  Read an excerpt from the APA after the jump.

Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, many people believe that intelligence is fixed, and, moreover, that some racial and social groups are inherently smarter than others. Merely evoking these stereotypes about the intellectual inferiority of these groups (such as women and Blacks) is enough to harm the academic [performance] of members of these groups. Social psychologist Claude Steele and his collaborators (2002) have called this phenomenon "stereotype threat."

Yet social psychologists Aronson, Fried, and Good (2001) have developed a possible antidote to stereotype threat. They taught African American and European American college students to think of intelligence as changeable, rather than fixed – a lesson that many psychological studies suggests is true. Students in a control group did not receive this message. Those students who learned about IQ’s malleability improved their grades more than did students who did not receive this message, and also saw academics as more important than did students in the control group.

via: APA