The Motivated Fluidity of Lay Theories of Change

People encounter an almost overwhelming quantity of information about human behavior and the social world everyday. Despite this information overload, humans are markedly adept at finding signal in the noise, interpreting the inputs in their complex environments in a way that both simplifies and makes meaning. People use a variety of shortcuts or heuristics to make sense of these stimuli (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974); they also access a range of lay theories about the nature of humans, natural processes, and how the world works. Lay theories are sometimes referred to as naïve or folk theories acknowledging humans as naïve scientists attempting to make sense of a complex world (Heider, 1958; Kelly, 1955). These lay beliefs are also commonly called implicit theories in part due to the recognition that these beliefs often operate at an automatic rather than conscious level—people have assumptions, largely unexamined, about the world around them which guide their judgments, but which have rarely been articulated in careful detail or bolstered with rational argument. These implicit theories provide a lens through which people see the world and can shape their understanding of behavior, actions, and decisions in powerful ways. This volume explores a wide range of these lay beliefs and articulates the many ways they can influence human thought, behavior and choice. To a large extent, these literatures tend to focus on how lay theories affect people’s responses, either by examining individual differences in people’s lay beliefs or by directly manipulating or creating the lay belief people hold. We will review only a small portion of this literature to paint a general picture of this approach. We focus primarily on one kind of implicit theory: people’s beliefs about the fixed or malleable nature of