Carol Dweck
American psychologist known for implicit theories and the growth mindset
Stanford psychologist who studied how beliefs about the malleability of ability shape motivation and achievement. She popularised the fixed versus growth mindset in her 2006 book Mindset.
Why this person matters
Dweck's work links beliefs about ability to how people respond to setbacks, and it shaped educational programmes worldwide. The size of mindset effects on achievement is debated, and Dweck and her co-author David Yeager have written about those controversies themselves.
Main contributions
Learned helplessness and attributions
Her 1972 Yale thesis was titled The Role of Expectations and Attributions in the Alleviation of Learned Helplessness in a Problem-Solving Situation. It began her work on how people explain failure.
Implicit theories
With Ellen Leggett (1988) she described core assumptions about whether personal attributes can change. A fixed theory sees ability as innate, and a growth theory sees success as coming from effort, learning and training.
Mindset
She presented the idea to general readers in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Random House, 2006).
Context and limits
Sisk and colleagues (2018) combined 273 studies (N = 365,915) on mindset and achievement and 43 intervention studies, and reported weak overall effects, with some support for benefits among low-income or academically at-risk students. Yeager and Dweck dispute how the average was read (r = .09, with very high heterogeneity) and report that lower-achieving students gained 0.11 standard deviations in grades in their national study; these figures are the authors' own. A 2019 trial in England with 5,018 pupils found no additional progress in national reading, grammar and maths tests.
In your introductory course
Motivation and emotion.Dweck appears in motivation, intelligence and education, and in personality as implicit theories. Students learn the growth mindset and, increasingly, the debate about effect sizes.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 10.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1972
Received her PhD from Yale University.
- 1988
Introduced implicit theories of intelligence and personality in a paper with Ellen Leggett.
- 2006
Published Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
- 2020
Published What Can Be Learned from Growth Mindset Controversies? with David Yeager in American Psychologist.
Sources
- Yeager and Dweck, What Can Be Learned from Growth Mindset Controversies? (American Psychologist, 2020), PMC author manuscriptOriginal work. Text passages inspected.
- Association for Psychological Science, Sisk et al. (2018), To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement, abstractSociety or association. Abstract inspected.
- NIESR, Growing pains: growth mindset effects are hard to measureSociety or association. Text passages inspected.
- Stanford Center for Advanced Study, Carol DweckUniversity. Institutional biography inspected.
- Wikipedia, Carol DweckReference work. Reference article inspected.