Carol Dweck

Introduction

Carol Susan Dweck (born 17 October 1946) is an American psychologist whose central claim is that what people believe about their own ability changes what they do about it. Someone who believes intelligence is a fixed quantity tends to avoid situations in which they might look unintelligent, and to read difficulty as evidence about themselves. Someone who believes intelligence can be developed tends to seek the same situations out, and to read difficulty as information about what to do next. The beliefs produce different behaviour, and over time different outcomes.

She calls these fixed and growth mindsets, and behind the terms is a more careful formulation: implicit theories of intelligence — the entity theory (ability is a fixed thing you have) and the incremental theory (ability is a malleable thing you develop). Dweck's argument is not that the second is nicer. It is that holding it changes the meaning of effort, the interpretation of failure, and the goals a person adopts, and that those are the mechanisms through which achievement happens.

The idea is now one of the few psychological findings to have been adopted wholesale by schools, businesses and parents — and it is also one of the most consequential cases in psychology's replication crisis. Large pre-registered trials and three meta-analyses have established that the effect of growth-mindset interventions on academic achievement is very small, near zero in the highest-quality studies, and concentrated in specific subgroups rather than general. Dweck has acknowledged this and has herself written about what she calls the "false growth mindset" — the adoption of the language without the practice.

Early Life and Education

Dweck was born in New York City. She took her undergraduate degree in psychology at Barnard College in 1967 and her PhD at Yale in 1972.

Her early work was on learned helplessness — the phenomenon, then being mapped by Martin Seligman and colleagues, in which an organism that has experienced uncontrollable punishment stops trying to escape it. Dweck was studying it in children, and she noticed something the paradigm did not predict: the children did not respond uniformly. Some, faced with failure, collapsed into exactly the helplessness the theory described. Others did the opposite — they became more engaged, changed strategy, and sometimes said out loud that they liked a hard problem.

That split is the origin of everything she later built. The interesting question, as she came to see it, was not why children fail but why failure produces two such different responses. Her answer, worked out over the next decade, was that the children were interpreting the failure differently — as information about a fixed capacity, or as information about an inadequate strategy.

Academic and Professional Career

Dweck held faculty positions at the University of Illinois (1972–1989), Harvard (1989–1994) and Columbia (1994–2004), and moved to Stanford in 2004, where she is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology.

The theoretical framework was set out in 1988, in "A Social-Cognitive Approach to Motivation and Personality", written with her graduate student Ellen Leggett and published in Psychological Review. That paper is the source of the distinction between entity and incremental theories and of the claim that the theories generate different goal systems. It is the academic foundation; the 2006 book is the popular one.

The empirical work most people know came from two studies. In 1998, Claudia Mueller and Dweck ran the praise experiment: children were given a task and then praised either for their intelligence ("you must be smart at this") or for their effort ("you must have worked hard at this"). The children praised for intelligence subsequently chose easier tasks, reported enjoying the task less, and performed worse after hitting difficulty. The children praised for effort chose harder tasks and maintained their performance. The finding — that praising ability can make a child fragile — became one of the most cited results in educational psychology and entered parenting advice directly.

In 2007, Lisa Blackwell, Kali Trzesniewski and Dweck followed 373 seventh-grade students through the transition to middle school and found that students holding an incremental theory showed a rising trajectory in mathematics grades over two years while entity theorists declined, and that an intervention teaching incremental theory produced gains.

She consolidated the research programme in Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development (1999) and reached a general audience with Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006).

Her honours include election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003), the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (2011), election to the National Academy of Sciences (2012), and the inaugural Yidan Prize for Education Research in 2017.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Implicit theories: entity and incremental

Dweck's technical claim is about the lay theories people hold about the malleability of personal attributes. An entity theory treats an attribute — intelligence, personality, moral character — as a fixed entity that a person has a certain quantity of, which can be measured and judged but not substantially changed. An incremental theory treats the same attribute as a raw material that can be developed.

The two theories produce, in her account, different meanings for the same events:

It is worth stating what the theory is not, because it is routinely misread. It is not a claim that anyone can do anything. It is not a claim that effort alone suffices — Dweck has been emphatic that praising effort without strategy or outcome is useless. And it is not a general theory of personality; it is a theory about the consequences of holding certain beliefs.

Goal orientation

The mechanism runs through goals. Dweck and Leggett argued that an entity theory pushes a person toward performance goals — the aim of validating an attribute and avoiding the appearance of lacking it — while an incremental theory pushes toward learning (mastery) goals — the aim of increasing competence.

The consequences differ most sharply under difficulty. Under a performance goal, a difficult task is a threat: failing it would reveal something. Under a learning goal, difficulty is the point. This is why, in Dweck's account, the effect of mindset shows up most clearly not in easy conditions but in the response to setbacks — and why her critics' focus on whether it moves average grades may be asking the theory a question it was not designed to answer.

The praise research

The 1998 finding, and the body of work around it, established something that has held up better than the intervention literature: that the way adults respond to children's performance shapes how children understand ability. Praising intelligence teaches a child that ability is what is being assessed and that failure means they do not have it. Dweck's practical recommendation — praise the process, the strategy and the effort rather than the trait — is now standard in education and is one of the parts of her work least affected by the replication controversy.

Later work and the "false growth mindset"

Dweck has spent the last decade on the gap between the theory and its implementation. She coined false growth mindset for the superficial version: praising effort regardless of outcome, telling students they can do anything, declaring an organisation "growth-oriented" without changing what it rewards. She has written that "in the beginning, we did not recognize the complexity of the implementation", and her position now is that a growth mindset requires telling the truth about current performance and then doing something specific about it — not reassurance.

With David Yeager and colleagues she has also worked on wise interventions: brief, precisely targeted psychological interventions that work through meaning rather than through teaching content, and whose effects depend on the surrounding context supporting them.

Major Publications

• "A Social-Cognitive Approach to Motivation and Personality" (1988, with Ellen Leggett, Psychological Review) — the theoretical foundation
• Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development (1999) — the research programme consolidated
• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006) — the book that carried the idea into schools, businesses and parenting
• Handbook of Competence and Motivation (2005, edited with Andrew Elliot) — the field survey
• "Implicit Theories and Their Role in Judgments and Reactions" — the attributional work with Ying-yi Hong and colleagues

Impact and Legacy

Growth mindset is one of the handful of psychological ideas to have escaped the discipline entirely. It is embedded in teacher training, school curricula, parenting advice, management consulting and elite sport. Dweck's recommendation about praising process rather than trait has been absorbed into ordinary practice to the point where its origin is invisible, and the distinction between learning and performance goals underwrites much of contemporary work in achievement motivation.

Within psychology, her contribution is to have made subjective theories — what people believe about their own attributes — a legitimate object of study with measurable consequences. That movement, from objective situation to interpreted situation, is the social-cognitive tradition in which she works, and mindset is its best-known product.

Criticism

This is where the honest accounting is difficult, and it is the part most often omitted.

The intervention effects are very small. Sisk, Burgoyne, Sun, Butler and Macnamara (2018, Psychological Science) ran two meta-analyses. Across 273 effect sizes and roughly 365,000 students, the correlation between mindset and academic achievement was r ≈ 0.10 — about one per cent of the variance. Across 43 intervention studies and roughly 57,000 students, the effect of mindset interventions on achievement was d ≈ 0.08, which moves a median student from the 50th to about the 53rd percentile. They also found signals of publication bias, meaning the true effect is probably smaller.

The best-quality studies find almost nothing. Macnamara and Burgoyne (2023, Psychological Bulletin, doi:10.1037/bul0000351) pooled 63 studies and 97,672 students, held them to a stricter quality bar, and found an overall effect of d = 0.05; among the highest-quality studies — pre-registered, with manipulation checks and no confounds — the effect fell to d = 0.02 and was not statistically significant. They reported that 94% of the studies bundled the growth-mindset message with other content such as study skills, making the active ingredient impossible to isolate, and that researchers with financial conflicts of interest were about 2.5 times more likely to report positive effects. A separate 2023 meta-analysis by Burnette and colleagues, using different methods, found a more favourable d = 0.14 for targeted populations with strong implementation. The disagreement is unresolved and is now one of the more visible live disputes in educational psychology.

The largest pre-registered trial found effects concentrated in a subgroup. The National Study of Learning Mindsets (Yeager, Hanselman, Walton and colleagues, 2019, Nature) was a pre-registered randomised trial of 12,490 ninth-graders in 65 US schools. Two brief online sessions produced a GPA gain of about 0.10 grade points among lower-achieving students and a 5.3 percentage point reduction in D and F grades — and essentially nothing for average and high-achieving students. Critically, the effect depended on school context: it nearly doubled in schools whose peer norms supported challenge-seeking and vanished in schools that treated struggle as evidence of low ability. Findings have been replicated in Norway and by MDRC analysts, which is the strongest thing that can be said for the intervention.

Replications have failed outright. Li and Bates (2019) attempted to reproduce the 1998 praise study with 624 students in China and found no effect. The UK's large "Changing Mindsets" trial, with 4,584 students, found effect sizes of approximately zero on all outcomes — including for the disadvantaged students who were supposed to benefit most. A large trial in Argentina produced null results. Two UK studies of teacher-delivered interventions found no effects, suggesting that changing teacher behaviour does not automatically change student outcomes.

And the pattern is the signature of publication bias. As studies have become more rigorous — pre-registered, with manipulation checks and proper controls — effect sizes have consistently shrunk. That is what you would expect if the early literature was inflated by flexible analysis and selective publication, and it is the reason the highest-quality studies now find the smallest effects.

The corporate and institutional misuse is a separate problem. Growth mindset has been adopted by organisations as a way of locating performance problems in employees rather than in management, workload, pay or resourcing: train the workforce to embrace challenge, and when they struggle, the explanation is that they have not adopted the right mindset. Dweck has objected to this directly, and it is not what her research supports — but it is now one of the concept's most common applications.

What survives the criticism is narrower than what is popularly believed. The correlational claim — that how people interpret their own ability affects how they respond to difficulty — is well supported. The specific recommendation about praise is well supported. The claim that a brief mindset intervention will meaningfully raise achievement at scale is not: it is, at best, a small effect concentrated in struggling students in environments that already reward effort, and at worst an artefact of a biased literature.

Associated Figures

• Martin Seligman — whose learned helplessness paradigm produced the research question she started from
• Ellen Leggett — co-author of the 1988 paper that set out the theory
• Claudia Mueller — co-author of the 1998 praise study
• Lisa Blackwell and Kali Trzesniewski — collaborators on the longitudinal middle-school work
• David Yeager — who has carried the intervention work forward and led the National Study of Learning Mindsets
• Albert Bandura — whose self-efficacy is the neighbouring construct in the same social-cognitive tradition

Learn More

• Personality Psychology
• Positive Psychology
• Rumination
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• History of Psychology
• Benjamin Hardy — who argues personality can be deliberately redesigned, a stronger claim than trait research supports
• All Psychologists A–Z

References

• Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.