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A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality.

1988/04/01 by Carol S. Dweck, Ellen L. Leggett · 75 citations
Psychology · #Cognitive and psychological constructs research #Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology #Psychological Testing and Assessment

paper · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.95.2.256

Abstract

Past work has documented and described major patterns of adaptive and maladaptive behavior: the mastery-oriented and the helpless patterns. In this article, we present a research-based model that accounts for these patterns in terms of underlying psychological processes. The model specifies how individuals ' implicit theories orient them toward particular goals and how these goals set up the different patterns. Indeed, we show how each feature (cognitive, affective, and behavioral) of the adaptive and maladaptive patterns can be seen to follow directly from different goals. We then exam-ine the generality of the model and use it to illuminate phenomena in a wide variety of domains. Finally, we place the model in its broadest context and examine its implications for our understand-ing of motivational and personality processes. The task for investigators of motivation and personality is to identify major patterns of behavior and link them to underlying psychological processes. In this article we (a) describe a re-search-based model that accounts for major patterns of behav-ior, (b) examine the generality of this model—its utility for un-derstanding domains beyond the ones in which it was originally

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