In this blog post, I will summarize the paper Consumer psychology of implicit theories: A review and agenda by Shailendra Pratap Jain and Traylor Jordan Weiten. This paper was published in 2019 in the journal Consumer Psychology Review.
The paper explores how consumers’ implicit theories, or their beliefs about the malleability of human attributes and phenomena, affect their motivations, information processing, and judgments in various domains. Implicit theories can be divided into two types: entity theories, which assume that human traits are fixed and unchangeable, and incremental theories, which assume that human traits are malleable and can be improved with effort.
The paper reviews the existing literature on implicit theories and organizes it into three broad areas: brands, persuasion, and consumption behaviors. It also identifies some gaps, challenges in the current research, and proposes some directions for future studies.
Some of the key findings of the paper are:
- Implicit theories influence how consumers perceive and evaluate brands, such as their quality, authenticity, personality, and social responsibility.
- Implicit theories also affect how consumers respond to persuasive messages, such as their susceptibility to social influence, their preference for different types of appeals, and their resistance to counterarguments.
- Implicit theories shape how consumers engage in consumption behaviors, such as their goal setting, self-regulation, coping with failure, and ethical decision making.
The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of implicit theories for consumer psychology and suggesting some ways to measure, manipulate, and moderate them in future research.
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