Research Library

The authors examine how an organization’s fixed (entity) or malleable (incremental) theory of intelligence affects people’s inferences about what is valued, their self- and social judgments, and their behavioral decisions. The authors find that people systematically shift their self-presentations when motivated to join an entity or incremental organization. People present their “smarts” to the entity environment and their “motivation” to the incremental environment. They also show downstream consequences of these inferences for participants’ self-concepts and their hiring decisions.