“You just can’t get better at creativity”: Categorising skill proficiency as a product of ‘traits’ or ‘training’

Research on ‘implicit theories’ of intelligence and ability suggests that individuals tend to be predominantly more ‘entity’ or fixed (skill is invariant over time), or ‘incremental’ or growth (abilities are improvable and changeable) in terms of their beliefs about the nature of intelligence. However, there have been few investigations of participants’ willingness to make these implicit theories explicit across a range of capabilities. Here, we investigate the responses participants give when asked to categorize Schooling, Creative, Physical fitness or Home skills as the product of the ‘traits’ an individual has or the ‘training’ they receive as part of life experience and development. Participants also completed individual differences measures of held implicit theories of intelligence. A total of 488 participants from the UK and US completed the study. On average, 26% of the skill judgments were categorised as ‘trait’. The categorisations varied by skill, with the skills ironing (11.90%) and chemistry (12.10%) receiving the fewest ‘trait’ categorisations and the skills of singing (63.20%), drawing (63.20%), and painting (57.70%) receiving the most. In general, the Creativity domain received the highest average trait endorsement (39.71%). Participants’ self-report fixed implicit theories of intelligence also predicted the number of trait categorisations they made. The results are discussed in the context of research indicating the possible implications on outcomes of domain-specific beliefs.