Carol S. Dweck

Carol S. Dweck is one of the world's leading researches in the field of motivation and is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. Her research has focused on why  people succeed and how to foster success. She has held professorships at Columbia and Harvard Universities and has lectured all over the world.Her scholarly book Self-theories: Their Roles in Motivation, Personality, and Development was named Book of the Year by the World Education Federation. Her work has been featured in such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, and she has appeared on Today and 20/20. 

Her work is at the intersection of developmental psychology, social psychology and personality psychology. She has conducted research focused on the self-conceptions people use to structure the self and guide their behavior. Particularly, she studies the role that mindsets play in motivation, achievement and interpersonal processes. Dweck's research addresses a fundamental human need for competence. By describing the motivational processes that affect learning and achievement, she shows how adopting a "growth" versus "judgment" mindset can importantly alter people's achievement paths. Dweck's empirical work has shown that seeing the self as consisting of a collection of fixed attributes (the "judgment mindset") can blind us to our potential for future growth and discourage us from engaging in constructive behaviors to improve ourselves. In contrast, seeing the self as a developmental project in progress (the "growth" mindset) can light up paths to self-growth and excellence.