Implicit beliefs of Chinese students: The universality and specificity across different personal attributes.

摘要

Are personality, intelligence and other personal attributes inherited and unchangeable (entity implicit theory)? Or, are they greatly influenced by the environment and are changeable (incremental theory)? Understanding the reality is important. But knowing students' subjective belief of the changeability and malleability of intelligence, personality, etc. is also necessary. This is because such belief will affect their attitude and lead to totally different behaviour.; The present research attempts to find whether there is an underlying guiding thought that affects students' belief of the changeability across intelligence, personality and other personal attributes. For example, some students believe that intelligence is inherited from parents and is difficult to be changed. Will these students also believe that personality, morality, etc. are also inherited and are difficult to be changed? Or, will these students have different beliefs towards different personal attributes? Thus, our main focus is to explore the generality and commonality of implicit theories across different personality attributes.; The whole research is composed of nine interrelated analyses. Through in-depth interviews and questionnaire surveys, we examine: (1) Is there a common implicit theory across students' belief of five major personal attributes, namely, personality, intelligence, creativity, emotional intelligence and morality? (2) For each personal attribute, is there be a common implicit theory governing all the components (e.g., in personality, the components are introversion/extroversion, agreeableness, emotional stability, conscientiousness, openness to experience)? (3) Is implicit theory one- or two-dimensional? That is, are entity and incremental theories at the two poles of one dimension or are they at two different dimensions? (4) Is there any difference in student's implicit belief among primary, junior secondary and senior secondary students? (5) Are students more concerned with outperforming others (performance goal) believe more in that intelligence cannot be changed (entity theory) (i.e., the relation between achievement goal and implicit theory)?; The subjects in the research consisted of a total of 1670 Primary 6, Junior Secondary 2 and Senior Secondary 1 students in Chang Chun, China. Statistical analyses where conducted mainly with structural equation modeling through the comparison of different models and fit indexes to confirm different hypotheses.; The results showed (1) the common and general implicit theory was found only in some of the personal attributes and was in contradiction to some previous research findings; (2) the internal structure of implicit theories was generally in congruence with the corresponding explicit theory findings; (3) in previous studies, the practice of putting the entity and incremental theories at two poles of one dimension was supported; (4) in intelligence, personality, creativity, etc., students had a stronger entity implicit theory as they became older; however, in morality, incremental theory increased with age. (5) Students' entity belief was related to the performance goal while their incremental belief was associated with the learning goal. In sum, the present research provides preliminary results and explanation to some quite controversial issues related to implicit theories, which hopefully can point to directions for further exploration and development.