What does Carol Dweck's Mindset actually say?

Few psychology books have travelled as far as Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, published by Random House in 2006. "Growth mindset" moved from Carol Dweck's research at Stanford into classrooms, offices and sports clubs, and somewhere along the way it became a slogan. The book itself is more interesting than the slogan.

The core idea

Dweck places people on a continuum according to where they think ability comes from.

• Fixed mindset. Ability is innate. You have a certain amount of talent or intelligence, and situations either reveal it or expose its absence.
• Growth mindset. Ability grows through effort, learning, practice and help from others. Where you start is just where you start.

The interesting part is what follows from each belief. If ability is fixed, every challenge is a test you might fail, so avoiding hard things makes sense and setbacks feel like verdicts. If ability can grow, challenges are where the growing happens, and setbacks are information. Dweck argues that people often do not know which belief they hold; it shows up in how they react when something goes wrong.

Where the book applies it

Mindset ranges widely: school, work, sport, the arts, parenting, management and the people you love. Some of its best-known advice concerns praise. Dweck warns that praising children for being clever can backfire, because it teaches them that their worth depends on looking clever, and the safest way to look clever is to avoid hard problems. Her alternative is to put the attention on the process: the effort, the approach, the learning.

The book is written for a general audience, with plenty of examples from real life. That makes it readable, though at times the examples are doing more work than the data.

What later research added

The book's success led to a great many studies and school programmes, and the picture became more nuanced.

• Effects can be small and conditional. A large national experiment in US secondary schools, published in Nature in 2019 with Dweck among the authors, found that a short online intervention of under an hour improved grades for lower-achieving students, and only where the peer culture of the school supported the message.
• Not every trial finds an effect. A randomised trial in England, run for the Education Endowment Foundation across 101 schools, found no extra progress in literacy or numeracy for pupils given growth-mindset training, as summarised on Wikipedia's page for the book).
• Some early data were questioned. Errors were found in data from one of Dweck's earlier studies, which she acknowledged.

The fair reading is that beliefs about ability matter, but a poster on the classroom wall does not change much by itself. Context, teaching and the culture around a person matter at least as much.

How to use it sensibly

Take the useful core: when something is hard, ask what you could practise or change rather than what it says about you. Notice the language you use after a setback. Avoid making a new fixed category out of "growth-mindset people". And treat the bolder claims in the book as hypotheses rather than guarantees. Our page on talent versus practice picks up the everyday side of this.