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; the growth mindset, which treats it as something that can be developed; and the praise studies, which found that praising talent made children more likely to avoid difficulty while praising effort made them persist.
The book became widely influential in education and management. Dweck has since written about the ways the idea has been misused, including the 'false growth mindset' that praises effort without strategy, and large later trials found the effects of brief growth-mindset lessons to be real but modest.
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.