Life Is a Roller Coaster When You View the World Through Entity Glasses

In their model of implicit theories, Dweck, Chiu, and Hong articulate an ambitious conceptual framework with far-ranging implications for personality, motivation , and social behavior. The authors identify two fundamentally different world views that influence how individuals process and respond to social information , and they detail the motivational and social consequences of these world views in two important domains of human behavior (achievement and moral judgment). Dweck et al. have marshalled an extensive array of empirical evidence demonstrating that an individual's beliefs about the malleability of intelligence and morality have a major impact on the way impressions are formed, information is processed, goals are adopted, setbacks are handled, and social reward and punishment is administered. The elegance, simplicity, and scope of the model are truly impressive. In the following , we outline some questions and concerns about the model as presently articulated. One important question about this model, which is essentially a theory about individuals' theories about traits, is whether Dweck et al. themselves hold an entity or incremental theory in conceptualizing this individual difference variable. That is, do theories of intelligence and morality represent fixed world views, or are these perspectives malleable? The data indicate that the entity -incremental dimension is domain specific but reliable over time within domains. These data and the use of global and stable terms like world view and immut-able suggest that "once an entity theorist, always an entity theorist" (within domains, of course). However, the authors also cite evidence that entity and incremen-tal theories can be experimentally manipulated, suggesting that these theories are, to some degree, malleable. These seemingly discrepant positions-that implicit theories represent stable world views within domains, yet they can be experimentally manipulated are difficult for us to reconcile. Intuitively, it seems odd that an individual who views the world through entity glasses could be persuaded to adopt an incremental theory as a function of a brief experimental manipulation. We have additional questions regarding the precise nature of the incremental and entity theories, based on the manner in which Dweck et al. assess the two world views. Although the authors claim that approximately 85% of participants can be classified as holding a clear theory within each domain, we are not convinced that they have actually established a clear dichotomy between entity and incremental theorists. Individuals identified as incremental theorists are defined by virtue of their rejection of entity theories rather than …