There are at least two distinct ways to think about intelligence. Some people believe that intelligence is a fixed characteristic, something you are born with, like your bone structure or hair color. Others believe that intelligence is more malleable and can be shaped throughout your life. Regardless of whether either of these is true, it seems that the belief itself can change our behavior.
A new study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that believing that intelligence is fixed makes people more likely to overestimate their own intelligence and therefore less likely to develop their own intellectual capacity.
The study used a GRE-style test administered to participants, and it found that people who believe intelligence is fixed are more likely to spend time on easy test questions, but they avoided challenging ones. By contrast, people who have a growth mindset regarding intelligence—believing that intelligence can be developed and changed—are more likely to spend their time on the hardest questions. This develops their skills in answering the problems they find the most difficult.
This challenge-averse behavior causes people with fixed ideas of intelligence to overestimate their own smarts. Since they don’t spend time on the hard parts of a task, they tend to think they’re better at the task overall. People with malleable views about intelligence tended to spend more time on hard questions during the test given to them by researchers, and they were therefore more able to accurately assess their own abilities. This finding is similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which found that people who are relatively unskilled in a task fail to recognize their own ineptness and therefore overestimate their abilities.