Implicit theories and evaluative processes in person cognition

Evaluative processes are often considered to be a cornerstone of social perception. The present study seeks to understand an individual-difference factor that is linked to evaluative processing. Specifically, past studies have shown that individuals who believe that people have fixed traits (''entity theorists'') are more inclined to diagnose traits from person information than are those who believe that people's personality is malleable (''incremental theorists''). Because evaluation is typically an integral part of trait diagnosis, we hypothesized that relative to incremental theorists, entity theorists would process person information in a more evaluative manner. To test this, subjects were presented with the test scores of a fictitious pilot trainee. Later, they were asked to perform on a priming task in which the test scores were used as primes on some trials. As predicted, entity theorists' response times indicated that they attached evaluative meaning to the test scores, but those of incremental theorists did not. In addition, subjects' judgments of the trainee's performance and recall of his test scores suggested different processing strategies among entity theorists than among incremental theorists. (C) 1997 Academic Press.