Psychological Review 1988, Vol. 95, No. 2, 256-273 Copyright 1988 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0033-295X/8S/$00.75 A Social-Cognitive Approach to Motivation and Personality Carol S. Dweck University of Illinois Ellen L. Leggett Harvard University 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 developed, and (c) explore the broader implications of the model for motivational and personality processes. Toward this end, we begin by describing two major patterns of cognition-affect-behavior that we identified in our early work: the maladaptive "helpless" response and the more adap- tive "mastery-oriented" response (Diener & Dweck, 1978, 1980; Dweck, 1975; Dweck & Reppucci, 1973).' The helpless pattern, as will be seen, is characterized by an avoidance of chal- lenge and a deterioration of performance in the face of obsta- cles. The mastery-oriented pattern, in contrast, involves the seeking of challenging tasks and the maintenance of effective striving under failure. Most interesting, our research with children has demon- strated that those who avoid challenge and show impairment in the face of difficulty are initially equal in ability to those who seek challenge and show persistence. Indeed some of the bright- est, most skilled individuals exhibit the maladaptive pattern. Thus it cannot be said that it is simply those with weak skills or histories of failure who (appropriately) avoid difficult tasks or whose skills prove fragile in the face of difficulty. The puzzle, then, was why individuals of equal ability would show such marked performance differences in response to challenge. Even more puzzling was the fact that those most concerned with their We would like to thank the following individuals for valuable discus- sions and comments: Kathleen Cain, Gerald Clore, Cynthia Erdley, El- len Markman, John Nicholls, Judith Rodin, Patricia Smiley, and Robert Wyer. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Carol S. Dweck, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, 603 E. Dan- iel Street, Champaign, Illinois 61820. ability, as the helpless children seemed to be, behaved in ways that impaired its functioning and limited its growth. Our efforts to explain this phenomenon led us to the more general conceptualization of goals (Dweck & Elliott, 1983). We proposed that the goals individuals are pursuing create the framework within which they interpret and react to events. Spe- cifically, in the domain of intellectual achievement, we identi- fied two classes of goals: performance goals (in which individu- als are concerned with gaining favorable judgments of their competence) and learning goals (in which individuals are con- cerned with increasing their competence). We then tested and supported the hypothesis that these different goals foster the different response patterns—that a focus on performance goals (competence judgments) creates a vulnerability to the helpless pattern, whereas the pursuit of learning goals (competence en- hancement) in the same situation promotes the mastery-ori- ented pattern (Elliott & Dweck, in press; Farrell & Dweck, 1985; Leggett & Dweck, 1986). The question that remained, however, was why individuals in the same situation would pursue such different goals. This led us to the more general conceptualization of individuals' implicit theories. Here, we tested the hypothesis that different theories about oneself, by generating different concerns, would orient individuals toward the different goals. Specifically, we showed that conceiving of one's intelligence as a fixed entity was associ- ated with adopting the performance goal of documenting that entity, whereas conceiving of intelligence as a malleable quality was associated with the learning goal of developing that quality (Bandura & Dweck, 1985 2 ; Dweck, Tenney, & Dinces, 1982; Leggett, 1985). Thus we will present a model in which individu- ' The term helpless was adapted from the animal work of Seligman, Maier, and Solomon (1971). At the time of bur initial work (Dweck & Reppucci, 1973), only animal work on helplessness had been con- ducted. See the section on control formulations (The Attributional Ap- proach) for a discussion of how our current approach differs from other approaches to human helplessness. 2 This study has been cited in previous works as M. Bandura & Dweck (1981, unpublished manuscript). It was the first of our studies on im- plicit theories of intelligence. 256