Author
Carol S. Dweck
The Stanford psychologist whose research on fixed and growth mindsets changed how classrooms and companies talk about ability.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Carol Dweck is a professor of psychology at Stanford University, previously at Columbia, whose research over several decades has focused on motivation, and on why some people are undone by failure while others come back stronger.
Mindset, published in 2006 and updated in 2016, gave her findings to a general reader: the fixed mindset, which treats ability as a verdict, and the growth mindset, which treats it as developable, and the praise studies showing that praising talent makes children fragile while praising effort makes them persist.
The book became one of the most influential in education and management, and Dweck has since written and spoken about the ways the idea has been misused, including the 'false growth mindset' that praises effort without strategy.
The signature
Dweck writes as a researcher explaining her own experiments, with the children and students who took part as the characters. Her signature is the pair of mindsets and the two words that switch between them, 'not yet', and the insistence that the belief about ability, not the ability, is what decides the response to difficulty.