Her paper "Children's entity and incremental theories of intelligence: Relationships to achievement behavior" was presented at the 1985 meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association in Boston.
[2] As a result, Dweck and her collaborators began studying how individuals unknowingly (or implicitly) assess their own intelligence and abilities through interaction and interpretation of their environment.
In certain situations, the incremental theorists studied were self-critical about the previous failure; these thoughts disrupted their performance on the subsequent task.
If there is no opportunity for improvement on the task, such as in the research study, thoughts of doubt about the failure affect future performance (Park & Kim, 2015).
Mastery goals are associated with incremental theory and lead individuals to engage and work in order to gain expertise in new things.
[9] Individuals who believe they have the ability to grow and add to their knowledge gladly accept challenges that can aid in growth towards mastery.
However, when these individuals lack confidence in their abilities, they will avoid, procrastinate, or possibly cheat in challenging situations that might make them appear incompetent.
[13] Incrementalist individuals generally have positive and stable self-esteem and do not question their intelligence in the face of failure, instead remaining eager and curious.
[14] Many children who see failure as a reflection of their intelligence will even lie about their scores to strangers to preserve their self-esteem and competence, since they connect their judgments of self to their performance.
[15] Implicit theories of intelligence develop at an early age and are subtly influenced by parents and educators and the type of praise they give for successful work.
Often children are given high praise for their intelligence after relatively easy success, which sets them up to develop counterproductive behaviors in dealing with academic setbacks, rather than fostering confidence and the enjoyment of learning.
Then, educators can change behaviors that may contribute to academic shortcomings for those with entity tendencies and low confidence in their abilities.
While these implicit beliefs regarding where intelligence comes from are relatively stable across time and permeate all aspects of behavior,[15] it is possible to change peoples' perspectives on their abilities for a given task with the right priming.
Transitioning students with low abilities can be oriented to a growth mentality when taught that their brains are like muscles that get stronger through hard work and effort.
This lesson can result in a marked improvement in grades compared to students with similar abilities and resources available to them who do not receive this information on the brain.
College students are able to overcome this negative impact after participating in an incremental thinking intervention, afterwards reporting higher levels of happiness according to the theory.
[6] An individual's implicit theory of intelligence can predict future success, particularly navigating life transitions that are often associated with challenging situations, such as moving from elementary to middle school.
Students followed throughout their middle school careers showed that those who possessed growth mindset tendencies made better grades and had a more positive view on the role of effort than students who possessed fixed mindset tendencies with similar abilities, two years following the initial survey.
[20] Students who have learning goals (associated with incremental beliefs) are more internally motivated and successful in the face of a challenging college course.
Similarly, those with entity beliefs are likely to endorse the fundamental attribution error more than those with incremental views, who tend to focus much more on the situation than internal characteristics of an individual.