Carol S. Dweck

Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., is widely regarded as one of the world's leading researchers in the fields of personality, social psychology, and developmental psychology. She has been the William B. Ransford Professor of Psychology at Columbia University. She is now the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her scholarly book Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development was named Book of the Year by the World Education Fellowship. Her work has been featured in such publications as The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, and she has appeared on Today and 20/20. She lives with her husband in Palo Alto, California.

Dweck was born in New York. Her father worked in the export-import business, and her mother in advertising. She was the only daughter and the middle sibling of three children. In her sixth grade class at the P.S. 153 elementary school in Brooklyn, New York, students were seated in order of their IQ. Students with the highest IQ scores could erase the blackboard, carry the flag, or take a note to the principal's office. She said in a 2015 interview, "On the one hand, I didn't believe that a score on a test was that important; on the other hand, every student wants to succeed in the framework that's established. So looking back, I think that glorification of IQ was a pivotal point of my development."