Contextual and personal determinants of preferring success attributed to natural talent or striving

Highlighting Effort Versus Talent in Service Employee Performance: Customer Attributions and Responses

“…The marketing literature has focused on attributions of one’s own performance and demonstrated their impact on brand or product evaluations (Mathur, Block, and Yucel-Aybat 2014; Murphy and Dweck 2016). The current research highlights the importance of studying attributions of others’ performance, because even for the same level of performance, people’s beliefs about performance attribution can change judgments of those others (Brown et al 2018; Tsay 2016). For instance, people expect hardworking others to perform better on novel tasks (Brown et al 2018).…”

“…Extending the existing literature, the current research examines the attributions of competence as a new dimension of competence influencing warmth perception, holding the objective level of competence constant. Research in social psychology has corroborated dedicated effort and natural talent as two internal sources of people’s performance (Brown et al 2018; Tsay and Banaji 2011). In the case of dedicated effort, competent performance is believed to be the result of commitment, perseverance, and hard work.…”

“…Academic research suggests two types of performance attribution: one to dedicated effort and the other to natural talent (Brown et al 2018; Dweck 2000; Weiner 1972). Psychology and marketing literature has mainly examined a fixed or malleable view of people’s own performance and its impact on how they judge themselves (e.g., judgments of one’s own intelligence or personality; Dweck 2000; Dweck and Leggett 1988), their own performance (e.g., academic performance; Hong et al 1999; Weiner 1972), or brands/products (Mathur, Block, and Yucel-Aybat 2014; Murphy and Dweck 2016), providing little insight on relationship judgments and behaviors toward others.…”

Pre-post Changes in Implicit Theories of Second Language Acquisition After a Successful Learning Experience

“…In the U.S. people show a preference for a person who has always possessed a positive trait compared to someone who acquired that trait over time (Lockhart et al, 2013), and students are most attracted to peers who earn high grades with little effort (Juvonen and Murdock, 1995). Although success without effort is attractive, even when talent is never mentioned, people assume that a performer who supposedly achieved success through hard work must have natural talent as well (Brown et al, 2018). Many students report believing that learning will occur either quickly or not at all, and this belief predicts worse academic performance (Schommer, 1994).…”

What you are and what you do : the effect of noun-verb framing in earnings conference calls

“…Conversely, a potential-based award triggers evaluators' focus on the future expectation of the subject, and it likely goes to people with a performance that improves over time. Brown et al (2018) show that evaluating people in a certain domain makes people focus on the worker's natural talent in that domain. On the other hand, when the evaluation is about a new domain, people care more about the worker's effort shown in the description rather than the natural talent.…”