Carol Dweck

Carol Dweck (born 1946) is an American psychologist who holds the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professorship of Psychology at Stanford University. She studied at Barnard College and earned her doctorate at Yale University in 1972, and before moving to Stanford in 2004 she taught at the University of Illinois, Harvard and Columbia. Her research concerns motivation and the beliefs people hold about their own abilities. In 1988 she introduced the idea of implicit theories of intelligence and personality, and she later brought it to a general audience in the 2006 book Mindset, which contrasts a fixed mindset with a growth mindset. Her work shaped education and parenting advice worldwide, though attempts to replicate some mindset findings, and a large English trial of growth mindset training, have found small or null effects, and critics debate how far the idea travels.