Carol S. Dweck

Carol S. Dweck (born 1946) is an American psychologist whose work belongs to social psychology and to the study of motivation and personality. She holds the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professorship of Psychology at Stanford University. She is best known for her theory of mindsets, which has had considerable influence well beyond academia.

Dweck graduated from Barnard College in 1967 and earned her doctorate in psychology at Yale University in 1972. She then taught at the University of Illinois, Harvard and Columbia before joining Stanford in 2004. Her research centers on motivation, personality and development, and at Stanford she teaches courses on personality, social development and motivation.

Her key contribution to social psychology is the concept of implicit theories of intelligence, which she first introduced in a 1988 paper. In her account, people hold implicit views about where their abilities come from, and these views can be placed along a continuum. Those who believe ability is innate tend toward a fixed mindset and often dread failure, which they take as a verdict on their worth. Those who believe abilities grow through effort, learning and persistence hold a growth mindset and treat setbacks as opportunities to improve. Dweck argues that mindsets are not always conscious but can be seen in behavior, especially in the face of difficulty.

Dweck brought these ideas to a general readership with Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, published in 2006. Her work has also been criticized. Some researchers have struggled to replicate certain findings, and a large randomized controlled trial of growth mindset training in English schools, reported in 2019, found no additional gains in literacy or numeracy. Even so, her influence on education and popular psychology is substantial, and the idea of a growth mindset remains part of contemporary debates about teaching.