The Dark Side of Malleability: Incremental Theory Promotes Immoral Behaviors

Abstract

Implicit theories drastically affect an individual’s processing of social information, decision making, and action. The present research focuses on whether individuals who hold the implicit belief that people’s moral character is fixed (entity theorists) and individuals who hold the implicit belief that people’s moral character is malleable (incremental theorists) make different choices when facing a moral decision. Incremental theorists are less likely to make the fundamental attribution error (FAE), rarely make moral judgment based on traits and show more tolerance to immorality, relative to entity theorists, which might decrease the possibility of undermining the self-image when they engage in immoral behaviors, and thus we posit that incremental beliefs facilitate immorality. Four studies were conducted to explore the effect of these two types of implicit theories on immoral intention or practice. The association between implicit theories and immoral behavior was preliminarily examined from the observer perspective in Study 1, and the results showed that people tended to associate immoral behaviors (including everyday immoral intention and environmental destruction) with an incremental theorist rather than an entity theorist. Then, the relationship was further replicated from the actor perspective in Studies 2–4. In Study 2, implicit theories, which were measured, positively predicted the degree of discrimination against carriers of the hepatitis B virus. In Study 3, implicit theories were primed through reading articles, and the participants in the incremental condition showed more cheating than those in the entity condition. In Study 4, implicit theories were primed through a new manipulation, and the participants in the unstable condition (primed incremental theory) showed more discrimination than those in the other three conditions. Taken together, the results of our four studies were consistent with our hypotheses.

The Doors of Social Robot Perception: The Influence of Implicit Self-theories

“…Research has consistently demonstrated that people hold differing beliefs about the fixed or mutable nature of a variety of self-attributes such as intelligence (Blackwell et al, 2007;Dweck et al, 1995;Robins and Pals, 2002), personality (Erdley et al, 1997;Chiu et al, 1997b), morality (Chiu et al, 1997a;Huang et al, 2017), emotions (King and dela Rosa, 2019;Tamir et al, 2007;De Castella et al, 2013), and relationships (Knee, 1998;Knee et al, 2003;Ng and Tong, 2013), among others. These types of beliefs are referred to as implicit self-theories (Dweck and Leggett, 1988;Molden and Dweck, 2006) -or, more colloquially, mindsets.…”

Retribution versus rehabilitation as motives for support of offender’s punishment: the moderating role of mindsets about malleability

“…Li & Bates, 2019;see Mueller & Dweck, 1998;, there is robust evidence to support the e ectiveness of manipulating mindsets about malleability in the wider population (Andersen & Nielsen, 2016). Of particular relevance to the current study are ndings indicating that one's mindset of malleability can be e ectively primed by reading a short article with persuasive empirical evidence in support of the notion that change is possible in various domains, such as intelligence (Bergen, 1991;Hong et al, 1999;Nussbaum & Dweck, 2008), body weight (Burnette, 2010), personality and character (Chiu et al, 1997;Rattan & Dweck, 2010), criminal behavior (Rade et al, 2018), and morality (Huang et al, 2017).…”

“…A xed mindset concerning personality traits predicts aggressive desires and produces more hostile attributional biases (Yeager et al, 2013). By contrast, a malleable mindset is related to a greater tolerance of immorality (Huang et al, 2017), a greater willingness to forgive (Iwai & de França Carvalho, 2020), more compassionate legal assessments (Weimann-Saks et al, 2019), and decreased support for harsh sanctions (Plaks et al, 2009). Consequently, relative to those with a xed mindset, people with a malleable mindset are less likely to assert attributions of internal proclivity for criminal behavior and to expect o enders to re-o end, and they are more likely to make less punitive judgments (Tam et al, 2013).…”

On the Malleability of Consumer Attitudes toward Disruptive Technologies: A Pilot Study of Cryptocurrencies

“…In general, there is some disagreement on whether an individual's character, competence and attitude is rather fixed (entity theory) or malleable (incremental theory) [21]. The importance of a theorist's respective viewpoint on the assessment of actual behavior was confirmed in previous research [22].…”