Does believing morality can change make people act less morally?
People led to believe that moral character is changeable cheated more and discriminated more than people led to believe it is fixed or given no belief at all.
Source
The Dark Side of Malleability: Incremental Theory Promotes Immoral Behaviors
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Multi-study package: observer ratings (Study 1), correlational survey (Study 2), primed incremental vs entity beliefs with a rigged matrix cheating task (Study 3), and four-condition belief manipulation with a hiring discrimination task (Study 4).
- N
- N=183 · Study 1: 170; Study 2: 107; Study 3: 80; Study 4 pilot: 115; Study 4 main experiment: 183 (used as the primary N).
- Population
- Chinese adults recruited online and Chinese undergraduate/postgraduate students
- Outcome
- Perceived likelihood of immoral acts, discrimination against a hepatitis B carrier in a hiring vote, and cheating (self-reported solved unsolvable matrices and money taken)
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
In Study 1, online participants judged whether a person who sees morality as fixed or one who sees it as changeable would be more likely to behave badly. Study 2 measured people's own beliefs and their tendency to vote against a highly qualified job applicant who carried hepatitis B. Study 3 randomly assigned students to read a fake science article saying morality is genetic or malleable, then gave them unsolvable number puzzles with cash per 'solved' puzzle and let them pay themselves. Study 4 manipulated beliefs by telling students their university's moral standing was stable-high, stable-low, or average and mixed, compared with a no-manipulation group, and then measured hiring discrimination.
What they found
Observers expected the 'changeable morality' person to act immorally more often, with medium-to-large effects. Stronger incremental beliefs weakly predicted more discrimination. Students primed with the malleable view reported about twice as many solved (actually unsolvable) matrices and took more than twice as much money as those primed with the fixed view. In Study 4, the malleable condition discriminated more than both fixed-belief conditions and the untreated control, which did not differ from each other.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The proposed mechanisms (tolerance of one's own wrongdoing, protecting moral self-image) were never measured, so why the effect occurs is untested. Samples were Chinese and mostly female, the Study 4 effect was small, and the outcomes were ambiguous, low-stakes situations where cheating was unobserved, so the effect may not hold when wrongdoing is clear. Study 2 is correlational with a single scenario, and the Study 3 manipulation check was given before the outcome, which may have made the belief more salient.
Key terms
- Implicit theories
- Everyday beliefs about whether human attributes such as intelligence or morality are fixed or can change.
- Entity theory
- The belief that a trait, here moral character, is fixed and largely innate.
- Incremental theory
- The belief that a trait is malleable and shaped by environment and effort.
- Fundamental attribution error
- The tendency to explain behaviour by personality while underweighting situational causes.
- Priming
- Temporarily activating a belief or concept, here through a reading or writing task, to see how it shifts later behaviour.
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Quiz yourself
Which belief did the studies link to more immoral behaviour?
Common questions
Does this mean a growth mindset is bad?
Not in general; the authors argue malleable beliefs help in areas like intelligence and in rehabilitation, but for everyday moral choices they may loosen self-restraint.
How was cheating measured if no one watched?
The matrix puzzles had no solution, so any puzzle a participant claimed to have solved, and any extra money taken, counted as cheating.
Why include a no-manipulation control group in Study 4?
To tell whether the malleable belief increases wrongdoing or the fixed belief decreases it; the fixed groups matched the control, pointing to the malleable belief as the driver.
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