Psychologist, Stanford University professor.
Contemporary · Stanford, California
Install Carol's frameworks in Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add adamtpang/summon.guide
/plugin install carol-dweckInstalls 0 skills from Carol, plus the rest of summon.guide. Source on GitHub.
Dweck was born in New York City, the middle of three children and the only daughter, to parents who worked in the export-import and advertising businesses. A sixth grade classroom at P.S. 153 in Brooklyn, where the teacher seated students by IQ score and gave the highest scorers special privileges, left a lasting impression on her: she has described becoming increasingly afraid to risk her reputation as one of the smart kids, and avoiding challenges that might expose her as less capable. That early experience of watching intelligence treated as a fixed, rankable trait became the question her later research career was built to answer.
Dweck earned her Ph.D. in psychology from Yale in 1972 and joined the faculty at the University of Illinois, later holding positions at Harvard's Laboratory of Human Development and at Columbia University before moving to Stanford in 2004, where she holds the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professorship in Psychology. Her research beginning in 1988 introduced what she called implicit theories of intelligence, the finding that people tend to hold one of two underlying beliefs about ability, that it is a fixed trait or that it can be developed, and that this belief shapes how they respond to failure and challenge. In a series of studies with children, she found that praising a child for being smart after a success made them more likely to choose easier tasks afterward, give up sooner when a task got hard, and misreport their scores to protect their reputation, while praising the same children for their effort or strategy made them more likely to choose a harder task and treat a poor result as useful information rather than a verdict on their worth. She popularized this fixed versus growth mindset distinction for a general audience in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, published in 2006.
Dweck has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, won the E. L. Thorndike Award in 2009, and received the Yidan Prize for Education Research in 2017. Growth mindset has become one of the most widely adopted frameworks in K-12 education and corporate training worldwide, though large scale replication studies in the years since Mindset's publication have found smaller real world effects than the original popular framing suggested, a nuance Dweck herself has pushed back into the public conversation, repeatedly warning against watered down versions of the idea that equate it with simply praising effort or telling people to try harder.
Each Claude Code skill above is grounded in a specific passage of a specific book. These are the primary sources we drew from for Carol.
“Becoming is better than being.”
“Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?”
“Did I win? Did I lose? Those are the wrong questions. The correct question is: Did I make my best effort?”
“So what should we praise? The effort, the strategies, the doggedness and persistence, the grit people show, the resilience that they show in the face of obstacles.”
“When people with the fixed mindset opt for success over growth, what are they really trying to prove? That they're special. Even superior.”
Their voice on summon.guide is grounded in:
Further reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck
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