Carol Dweck

Carol Dweck grew up in New York City in the 1950s, academically strong enough to land in a sixth-grade class that a teacher, Mrs. Wilson, seated by IQ score, row one seat one for the highest-ranked student. Dweck has said the arrangement did not scar her personally, but she noticed for years afterward how it shaped classmates, especially girls, who came to treat a number assigned to them at eleven as a verdict on what they were capable of. She earned a bachelor's degree from Barnard College in 1967 and a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale in 1972, then began a career studying, more or less directly, the question that classroom had raised: whether people who believe intelligence is fixed behave differently from people who believe it can grow.

Dweck built her career at the University of Illinois, Harvard's Laboratory of Human Development, Columbia, and, since 2004, Stanford, where she holds the Lewis and Virginia Eaton professorship in psychology. Her research distinguished a "fixed mindset," the belief that abilities are essentially innate, from a "growth mindset," the belief that abilities develop through effort and strategy, and found that students holding the growth view responded to setbacks with more persistence and better long-term performance. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006) turned the distinction into a mainstream idea, adopted by schools, corporations and sports programs worldwide, and in 2017 she won the roughly four-million-dollar Yidan Prize for Education Research, among the largest prizes in the field. She continues teaching and publishing at Stanford.

The idea that made her famous became, in the retelling by schools and consultants, simpler and more absolute than her own research supports, and she has spent much of the past decade pushing back against a version of "growth mindset" reduced to empty praise -- telling a child "you can do anything" instead of teaching them a strategy for doing it better. The research itself came under direct challenge: critics including Timothy Bates and Nick Brown reported difficulty replicating her results, Brown's statistical analysis surfaced errors in a 1998 study that Dweck acknowledged, and a large 2019 trial across 101 British schools and more than five thousand pupils found no significant effect of a mindset intervention on literacy or numeracy scores. She has continued defending the underlying theory while conceding that its popular application often gets it wrong.

Whether growth mindset survives as rigorous science or gets remembered mainly as a well-marketed classroom slogan is still an open question inside psychology and education research, and Dweck, now in her eighth decade and still publishing, is actively part of that argument rather than a settled subject of it. Her admirers, including researchers like Angela Duckworth who built related work on grit, treat the mindset distinction as durable and real even where specific studies have not replicated. Her critics argue the concept was oversold well past what any single body of research could support. The dispute has not slowed how widely the term is used in American classrooms, which is itself part of what critics find frustrating about it.

Carol Dweck's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success book
  Introduced the fixed-versus-growth-mindset distinction to a general audience 2006
• Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development book
  Earlier academic statement of implicit theories of intelligence 1999
• Project for Education Research That Scales (PERTS) other
  Stanford center applying mindset research at scale in schools 2013

• 1967 aged ~21 Graduates from Barnard College
• 1972 aged ~26 Earns her Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University
• 1989 aged ~43 Joins the faculty at Columbia University
• 2004 aged ~58 Joins Stanford University as a professor of psychology
• 2006 aged ~60 Publishes Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
• 2017 aged ~71 Wins the Yidan Prize for Education Research
• 2019 aged ~73 A 101-school U.K. trial finds no significant effect of a mindset intervention

• Angela Duckworth b. 1970
  Psychologist whose research on grit reshaped conversations about success and character education. influenced
• Malcolm Gladwell b. 1963
  Staff writer for The New Yorker whose books on social science became publishing phenomena. popularized her ideas for a general audience
• William James 1842–1910
  Founded American psychology as a discipline and shaped pragmatist philosophy at Harvard. earlier theorist of the psychology of belief
• B. F. Skinner 1904–1990
  Developed operant conditioning and made behaviorism the dominant mid-century American psychology. rival school of behavioral psychology