Fairy Tale Situation Test for Implicit Theories of Personality

Abstract

When judging others, individuals often unconsciously apply their own special knowledge and personal constructs about human beings, which eventually forms some implicit theories of personality (ITPs). On the basis of different implicit personality theories, these individuals thus divided into two categories: a type of people believe that personality attributes or traits are sequestration, namely entity theorists; another type of people believe that personality attributes or characteristics are gradient, i.e. incremental theorists. Unlike studies that focus on how personality traits interact, implicit personality theory explores people's beliefs about the fixity and plasticity of personality traits. Based on projective techniques, a fairy tale situation test is developed to explore whether the implicit personality theories of college students have consistency across different personal attributes (such as characteristic or ability), as well as whether entity theory and incremental theory are two dimensions or two poles of the same dimension. The result of the pretest shows that the compiled fairy tale situation test could be a measurement to analyse the universality of implicit personality theory and the structural pattern of its dimension. A formal test separated the implicit personality theories of 120 college students. The results of both the pretest and the formal test indicated that (a) college students had a common and consistent implicit theory across five personal attributes including character, ability, temperament, morality, and emotion and that (b) entity theory and incremental theory were two inverse poles of the same dimension in implicit theories of personality. These results show that Implicit Theories of Personality has the characteristics of two dimensions (entity theory vs. gradient theory).