Wikipedia Deep Dive

Carol Dweck

11 min read

The Sixth Grader Who Was Afraid to Raise Her Hand

In a Brooklyn classroom in the early 1950s, a young girl named Carol sat in a seat that announced her intelligence to everyone who walked through the door. At P.S. 153 elementary school, students weren't arranged alphabetically or randomly. They were seated by IQ score. The smartest kids sat in the front. The rest filled in behind them.

Carol was near the front.

This should have been a source of pride. Instead, it became a prison. The highest-IQ students got special privileges—they were the ones chosen to erase the blackboard, to carry the flag in assemblies. But Carol noticed something troubling happening inside herself. She began avoiding challenges. When a spelling bee came up, she didn't want to enter. A French competition? No thank you. The risk of failure, of proving that maybe she didn't belong in that front-row seat, felt unbearable.

Decades later, Carol Dweck would become one of the most influential psychologists in the world, and her research would center on exactly this phenomenon: how our beliefs about intelligence shape everything we're willing to attempt. The girl who was afraid to raise her hand would eventually help millions of people understand why they were afraid too—and what they could do about it.

The Fork in the Road

Dweck's central insight, which she began developing in earnest after earning her doctorate from Yale in 1972, is deceptively simple. When it comes to intelligence and ability, people tend to hold one of two beliefs.

The first belief goes something like this: You're born with a certain amount of intelligence, like a tank with a fixed capacity. You can fill it up with knowledge, but you can't make the tank any bigger. Your talents are what they are. Some people are math people. Some aren't. Some are creative. Some will never be.

Dweck calls this a "fixed mindset."

The second belief is different: Intelligence is more like a muscle than a tank. It can grow stronger with exercise. Your talents aren't predetermined—they're starting points. With effort, good teaching, and persistence, you can develop abilities you didn't have before. You might never become Einstein, but you can become significantly smarter than you are today.

This is what Dweck calls a "growth mindset."

These aren't just philosophical positions. They're predictive. They shape behavior in measurable ways. And the clearest place to see the difference, Dweck discovered, is in how people respond to failure.

What Failure Reveals

Imagine two students who both fail a math test. Both got the same score. Both feel disappointed. But watch what happens next.

The student with a fixed mindset interprets the failure as information about who they are. The test didn't just measure their performance on that day—it measured them. And the verdict is in: they're not a math person. The logical response is to avoid math in the future, to protect themselves from further proof of their inadequacy. Better to seem like you don't care about math than to try hard and fail again.

The student with a growth mindset interprets the same failure differently. The test measured their performance on that day, with that level of preparation, using the strategies they happened to employ. It says nothing permanent about their potential. The logical response is to figure out what went wrong and fix it. Maybe they need to study differently. Maybe they need to ask more questions in class. The failure is data, not destiny.

Here's the uncomfortable part: most people don't consciously choose their mindset. They absorb it from the world around them—from parents, teachers, and yes, from being seated by IQ in elementary school. And once absorbed, the mindset operates automatically, shaping reactions before conscious thought kicks in.

Dweck argues that you can watch someone's behavior and determine their mindset even if they can't articulate it themselves.

The Praise Paradox

One of Dweck's most counterintuitive findings concerns praise. Most parents and teachers believe that praising children's intelligence is good for them. "You're so smart!" feels like a gift, a confidence-booster that will help kids succeed.

It's actually a trap.

When you tell a child they're smart, you're teaching them that intelligence is a fixed trait that they either have or don't have. The child learns that their success came from being smart, which means any future failure would come from not being smart. And once kids believe their intelligence is on the line, they start avoiding anything that might expose them as less intelligent than advertised.

Sound familiar? That's exactly what happened to young Carol in Brooklyn.

Dweck's research showed that praising intelligence actually harms both motivation and performance. Children praised for being smart become less willing to take on challenging tasks. They become more likely to lie about their scores. They become more fragile in the face of difficulty.

The alternative isn't to stop praising children altogether. It's to praise the right things. Praise effort. Praise strategy. Praise persistence. "You worked really hard on that" sends a completely different message than "You're so smart." It tells children that success comes from something they can control.

Dweck's advice to parents is striking: "If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don't have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence."

The Misunderstanding Problem

After Dweck published her 2006 book "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success," growth mindset became a phenomenon. Schools across the world adopted the concept. Posters went up in classrooms. Professional development sessions were held. The phrase entered everyday vocabulary.

And then something went wrong.

The concept got simplified, diluted, and in many cases completely distorted. Growth mindset became synonymous with "just try harder" or "believe in yourself." Teachers started telling struggling students that all they needed was more effort, without providing the tools, strategies, or support to actually improve. The message became "you can do it if you want to" rather than "here's how we can work together to develop your abilities."

Dweck pushed back forcefully against this misinterpretation. "The growth mindset was intended to help close achievement gaps, not hide them," she wrote. "It is about telling the truth about a student's current achievement and then, together, doing something about it, helping him or her become smarter."

In other words, growth mindset isn't magical thinking. It's not pretending that everyone starts in the same place or that effort alone guarantees success. It's a framework for approaching challenges that leads to better outcomes than the alternative—but only when combined with honest assessment, effective strategies, and genuine support.

Effort without direction is just exhaustion. Growth mindset means believing improvement is possible and then actually doing the work to make it happen.

The Replication Crisis

Science doesn't run on enthusiasm. It runs on evidence. And in recent years, Dweck's research has faced serious scrutiny.

Timothy Bates, a psychology professor at Edinburgh University, spent several years trying to replicate Dweck's findings. He couldn't. Neither could his colleagues. This is a significant problem in scientific research—if an effect is real, other researchers using the same methods should be able to find it too.

Dweck responded that the replication attempts weren't creating the right experimental conditions, that the effect is subtle and requires careful implementation. But critics found this defense troubling. As researcher Nick Brown put it: "If your effect is so fragile that it can only be reproduced under strictly controlled conditions, then why do you think it can be reproduced by schoolteachers?"

Brown also applied a statistical test called GRIM, which checks whether reported averages are mathematically possible given the sample sizes, to one of Dweck's influential 1998 studies. Some of the numbers didn't add up. When Brown reviewed the original data, he found recording errors. To her credit, Dweck publicly acknowledged these problems. Brown praised her "openness and willingness to address the problems."

In 2019, a large-scale test put growth mindset to the ultimate trial. The Education Endowment Foundation in England ran a randomized controlled experiment across 101 schools involving over 5,000 students. This is the gold standard of educational research—schools were randomly assigned to receive growth mindset training or to serve as controls, and students were tested using standardized national exams.

The results were disappointing. Students who received growth mindset training showed no additional progress in reading, grammar, punctuation, spelling, or mathematics compared to students who didn't receive the training.

This doesn't mean the concept is worthless. The underlying psychology—that beliefs shape behavior—is well-established. But the gap between laboratory findings and classroom results is wider than many hoped. Changing mindsets in controlled experiments is one thing. Changing them at scale, through brief interventions, in the messy reality of actual schools, may be something else entirely.

The Grading Trap

There's an irony in what happened to growth mindset in schools. A concept meant to liberate students from the tyranny of fixed labels got turned into... another fixed label.

Some schools began assessing students on their mindset. Children received grades on their "attitude toward learning." Six-year-olds were evaluated on whether they demonstrated growth mindset characteristics.

This completely misses the point.

David James, a professor at Cardiff University and editor of the British Journal of Sociology of Education, identified a deeper problem. When we tell students that success depends on their mindset, we're putting the responsibility for failure on the individual student. "It individualizes the failure," James said. The message becomes: "They couldn't change the way they think, so that's why they failed."

This ignores everything outside the student's head: inadequate resources, poor teaching, social disadvantages, learning disabilities, trauma, poverty. A growth mindset is not a substitute for a functioning school system.

James acknowledges that it's valuable to recognize intelligence isn't fixed and unchangeable. But he believes the limitations of mindset theory outweigh its uses when it becomes a way to blame students for structural problems.

The Career of a Questioner

Through all of this, Dweck has continued her academic work. Her journey from Brooklyn to the heights of academic psychology took her through Barnard College (where she graduated in 1967), Yale (Ph.D., 1972), the University of Illinois, Harvard, Columbia, and finally Stanford, where she's held a prestigious endowed chair since 2004.

The accolades accumulated. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2012—memberships that place her among the most distinguished scientists in the country. She received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 2011. In 2017, she became one of two inaugural winners of the Yidan Prize for Education Research, which came with approximately $3.9 million split between a cash award and project funding.

She married David Goldman, a theater director who founded the National Center for New Plays at Stanford. Her work has appeared in journals like Psychological Science and Nature. Her popular book has sold millions of copies and been translated into dozens of languages.

But perhaps most importantly, she kept asking questions. In 2017, she announced she was developing a broader theory that places motivation and mindset formation at the heart of how personality develops. The research continues.

What Remains

Strip away the hype, the oversimplification, the failed replications, and the educational fads. What's left?

Something important, actually.

The core insight—that our beliefs about our own abilities shape how we approach challenges—remains psychologically sound. People who believe they can improve tend to try harder, persist longer, and learn more from failure than people who believe their abilities are fixed. This is true even if the exact mechanisms are more complex than initially thought, and even if brief interventions can't reliably shift mindsets at scale.

There's also something valuable in Dweck's analysis of praise. The insight that praising intelligence can backfire, that it teaches children to protect their reputation rather than take risks, helps explain a common pattern that many parents and teachers have observed but couldn't quite articulate.

And the story of young Carol in that Brooklyn classroom remains powerful precisely because it's so recognizable. How many of us have avoided challenges because we were afraid of what failure might reveal about us? How many opportunities have we passed up to protect an image of ourselves as smart, talented, or capable?

The growth mindset concept, at its best, offers a way out of that trap. Not through magical thinking or empty affirmation, but through a different interpretation of what failure means. If abilities can be developed, then failure is information about where you are, not who you are. It's a starting point, not a verdict.

That shift in perspective won't solve every educational problem. It won't close achievement gaps by itself. It won't turn struggling students into scholars through willpower alone. But for individuals wrestling with their own fears of failure, their own tendency to avoid challenges, their own difficulty recovering from setbacks—it offers something genuine.

A different story to tell yourself. And sometimes, that's where change begins.