Carol Dweck

Carol S. Dweck is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and one of the world’s leading researchers on motivation, personality, and development. Her research on implicit theories of intelligence—popularly known as “fixed” and “growth” mindset—has profoundly influenced education, parenting, business leadership, and sports coaching worldwide.

Dweck’s foundational insight is that people’s beliefs about whether their abilities are fixed or malleable shape their responses to challenge, failure, and feedback. Students who believe intelligence is developable outperform those who believe it is fixed, not because of raw ability but because of how they approach difficulty. This finding, published across decades of peer-reviewed research, became the basis for her bestselling book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

Her work has not been without controversy. The replication crisis in psychology prompted re-examination of some growth mindset studies, with mixed results. Dweck has engaged constructively with criticism, acknowledging oversimplifications in how the framework was popularly applied—particularly the reduction to “just praise effort”—and has called for more nuanced implementation that emphasizes strategy and productive struggle alongside effort.