Implicit theories of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom.
A prestudy and four experiments were conducted in order to understand the nature and use of people's implicit theories of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. In the prestudy, a brief questionnaire was sent out to professors in each of the fields of art, business, philosophy, and physics, and was also given to laypersons. The questionnaire asked subjects to list behaviors characteristic of an ideally intelligent, creative, or wise person in one's field of endeavor, or in general, for laypersons. In Experiment 1, individuals from the same populations rated, on a 9-point scale, the extent to which each of the behaviors listed at least twice in the Prestudy was characteristic of an ideally intelligent, creative, or wise individual. In Experiment 2, a subset of the behaviors from the prestudy was sorted by subjects in order to yield a multidimensional space characterizing the subjects' implicit theories for each of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. In Experiment 3, subjects rated themselves on a subset of the behaviors from the prestudy, and these ratings were correlated with ideal prototype ratings to yield a measure of resemblance to the prototype. Resemblance scores were then correlated with scores on standardized ability tests. In Experiment 4, subjects rated hypothetical individuals described in simulated letters of recommendation in terms of their intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. The results revealed that people have systematic implicit theories of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, and that they use these implicit theories accurately both in evaluating themselves and in evaluating hypothetical others. Moreover, the implicit theories for each of the constructs show at least some convergent-discriminant validity with respect to each other.