Western industrialized cultures have large histories of being very "essentialist," which means we often think things about people (their learning, their "performance") are explained by fixed, born-with-it (innate) traits. This is an attribution bias we (in my culture) have. It has frequently led us to miss the fact that there is variance *within people* and to not learn as much about the environmental factors that help people access their full potential, or block them from this
Why does the essentialist thing matter? Because like the tape recorder and the computer, we LEAP to thinking that how people perform at *tasks* is equivalent to *how people are.* This is a really dangerous assumption that leads into a lot of grifter, bullshit thinking. For instance, thinking that measuring that people who are essentially undermotivated to achieve successful learning (already a challenging ask) in a laboratory session is the same thing as measuring their "ability"
If you have a fediverse account, you can quote this note from your own instance. Search https://mastodon.social/users/grimalkina/statuses/114784394328169690 on your instance and quote it. (Note that quoting is not supported in Mastodon.)