Personal qualities are malleable and fixed: Ambivalent mindset, capability ranking reinforcement, and parent–child relationship among Hong Kong Chinese parents

Abstract

Past research showed that people may hold contradictory ideas about something or someone. Mindset ambivalence refers to the psychological state in which a person holds contradictory beliefs about the malleability of a valued attribute and spontaneously expresses agreement with both the fixed and growth mindsets. Our past findings showed that a sizable proportion of Hong Kong Chinese adults possess the ambivalent mindset. In the present study, 101 Hong Kong Chinese parents completed a survey during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings provided further support for the prevalence of the ambivalent mindset. In addition, we found that parents with the ambivalent mindset tended to support several parental practices that would reinforce the relative ability rankings of their children. These practices included person praise, mobilization of effort to compensate for low ability, and lowering of expectation to avoid future failures. Finally, the use of these parental practices was accompanied by deterioration of parent–child relationship when children displayed undesirable self-regulatory behaviors. We discuss these findings’ implications for growth mindset interventions in Chinese societies.

Growth mindset predicts teachers’ life satisfaction when they are challenged to innovate their teaching

“…The mean of these two growth mindset items was used to form the growth mindset measure (α = .81) and the mean of two fixed mindset items was used to form the fixed mindset measure (α = .80). We decided to treat the two mindset measures as separate measures because of their small negative correlation in the current study (r = −.21) and other studies of adults' mindset in Hong Kong (see Chiu et al, 2023). To explain the weak correlation between the growth and fixed mindset measures, Chiu et al (2023) posit that people may agree that intelligence can grow over time, but that the interpersonal rankings of intelligence across individuals are fixed.…”

“…We decided to treat the two mindset measures as separate measures because of their small negative correlation in the current study (r = −.21) and other studies of adults' mindset in Hong Kong (see Chiu et al, 2023). To explain the weak correlation between the growth and fixed mindset measures, Chiu et al (2023) posit that people may agree that intelligence can grow over time, but that the interpersonal rankings of intelligence across individuals are fixed. A similar argument was put forward by Roberts et al (2006) to explain how Big-5 personality traits change across the life course, whereas crosssectional interpersonal rankings of individuals along these traits are relatively stable.…”