Self-doubt, attributions, and the perceived implicit theories of others

Abstract

Four studies explored whether perceived implicit theories (Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995) of others have the potential to engender self-doubt and influence one's self-attributions. Study 1 showed that people are aware of the attributional implications of evaluators' implicit theories. Study 2 showed that people can use social cues to detect evaluators' implicit theories. In Study 3, participants who believed that significant others endorsed an entity theory of intelligence exhibited greater self-doubt and made attributions for their own outcomes that were more stable (for negative events) and global (for negative and positive events). Finally, in Study 4, a manipulation of evaluators' implicit theories interacted with performance expectations to predict self-doubt about an upcoming evaluative situation. Compared to their counterparts with incremental evaluators, participants with entity evaluators reported greater self-doubt when they expected to do poorly and less self-doubt when they expected to do well. Discussion focuses on social influences on self-construal.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert M. Arkin

We thank James Beggan for his helpful comments on a previous draft. A report of some of these data was presented at the 2002 convention for the Society of Personality and Social Psychology.