Who is Carol Dweck
Carol S. Dweck is an American psychologist studying motivation, development and beliefs about personal abilities. She is Stanford’s Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology and, by courtesy, Professor of Education. Her work connects social, personality and developmental psychology. [1]
Education and university career
She graduated in psychology from Barnard College, Columbia University, in 1967 and completed her Yale doctorate in 1972. Her subsequent career examined why people with similar abilities may respond differently to difficulty or an unfavourable result. [2]
Before joining Stanford in 2004, she taught at Illinois, Harvard and Columbia, institutions associated with successive stages of her motivation and learning research. At Stanford she has also addressed parents and educators, connecting experimental questions about praise with discussion of everyday school experiences. [5]
Her Association for Psychological Science profile recalls a New York school classroom arranged by pupils’ IQ. This memory illustrates a recurring question in her career: how classifications and messages about ability can shape approaches to learning. [6]
Helplessness and responses to difficulty
In 1975 she published an experiment involving twelve children aged eight to thirteen who reacted strongly to failure. It compared success-based training with training that reframed explanations for outcomes, examining persistence on later problems. The small sample and bounded experimental tasks are part of interpreting the finding. [7]
With Ellen Leggett she presented a social-cognitive model of motivation and personality in 1988. It linked implicit self-theories to people’s goals and responses to difficulty, seeking to explain thoughts, emotions and behaviour together and distinguish mastery-oriented responses from helpless patterns. [8]
Learning and demonstrating competence
Goals, written with Elaine Elliott in 1988, distinguished learning goals from performance goals: developing competence versus securing favourable judgements or avoiding negative ones. The researchers manipulated goals and perceived ability to examine task choices, performance and verbal responses during difficulty. [17]
Fixed and growth mindsets
In Dweck’s formulation, a fixed mindset treats abilities as stable traits, whereas a growth mindset regards them as developable. Her 2015 Stanford interview emphasised work, strategies and help from others. This distinction concerns beliefs about learning without assuming that everyone begins at the same level. [4]
With Lisa Blackwell and Kali Trzesniewski she studied the transition to secondary education in 2007. Following 373 pupils linked intelligence beliefs with mathematics trajectories; a second study compared 48 intervention participants with 43 controls. These designs addressed longitudinal associations and a specific educational intervention, two distinct forms of evidence. [10]
Praise, strategies and feedback
With Claudia Mueller she published six studies of fifth-grade pupils in 1998. They compared praise for intelligence with praise for effort and observed different responses after difficult tasks, including persistence and goal choices. Feedback content became an experimental variable within a specific child population and set of activities. [9]
Self-Theories and Mindset
Self-Theories, published in 1999, brings together her research on motivation, personality and development, examining failure, goals, self-concept, relationships and stereotypes. Its questions extend beyond academic performance to judgements of other people and beliefs about their capacity to change. [11]
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success appeared in 2006 for readers in education, sport and management. Expanded editions address false growth mindset and organisational cultures. The popular book presents beliefs and experiences through examples, while scientific articles specify the designs and results of individual investigations. [12]
She coedited the second Handbook of Competence and Motivation with Andrew Elliot and David Yeager. Contributions address motivation, self-regulation, emotions, social settings and developing competence, placing her work within a collective field of diverse approaches and context-dependent applications. [20]
Larger-scale experiments
In 2019 she participated in a national US secondary-school experiment led by David Yeager and colleagues. A brief online intervention modestly improved grades among lower-achieving pupils and increased advanced-mathematics enrolment. Outcomes varied with school context, a central consideration in interpreting where the intervention could work. [13]
In Mindsets: A View From Two Eras, Dweck and Yeager traced the movement from early experimental questions to field studies and replication programmes. It presents their perspective on developing reliable interventions and studying psychological hypotheses in broader educational settings, documenting the cumulative and collaborative nature of the research. [16]
Scientific debate about effects
The size and robustness of intervention effects remain debated. In 2023 Brooke Macnamara and Alexander Burgoyne analysed 63 studies, finding a small overall effect and no statistically clear benefit among the highest-quality studies. They questioned design, analysis and publication practices that could inflate favourable conclusions. [14]
Elizabeth Tipton and colleagues argued that meta-analyses should better account for differences among interventions, populations and settings, disputing statistical choices. The exchange highlights distinctions between a belief, a particular intervention and its measured outcome. Educational effects require specification of who benefits, under which conditions and on what evidence. [15]
A broader theory of personality
In 2017 she proposed integrating motivation, personality and development through needs, goals and mental representations. It examined how experiences form beliefs, emotions and action tendencies that guide later behaviour. This theoretical work extends beyond intelligence, connecting processes often studied in separate areas of psychology. [21]
Awards and recognition
The American Psychological Association gave her its Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award in 2011, recognising work extending from helplessness to theories of ability, goals and responses to failure. [22] In 2012 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in psychological and cognitive sciences. [18]
In 2017 she received the inaugural Yidan Prize for Education Research, including funding for further work alongside personal recognition. [19] The Association for Psychological Science named her a William James Fellow in 2020 for contributions to psychological science. [6]
