Perception of Intelligence Influences Learning Patterns

A collaboration of researchers in the United States has recently determined that people tend to change their opinions about how they believe they will handle learning depending on the way they perceive intelligence in both themselves and others.

These results go up against established knowledge and public wisdom, which holds that the easier something is to learn, the easier it will be to remember. To put this scientifically, the difficulty or complexity of a task is believed to influence memory and learning patterns.

But this is not at all what experts found during the new research. The complexity of the task being performed had less to do with the overall result than the way the individual performing the task regarded intelligence.

To make more sense of these findings, it is important to take a look at the two types of perceptions on intelligence that the team used for this study. The work team was made up of experts from the Columbia University, the Northwestern University and the Washington University in St. Louis.

Some people for example believe that the way their intelligence evolved is fixed, and that trying to shape it or change it in any way is futile. Experts call people using this perspective “entity theorists.”

“They decide they are not really capable of learning it [the topic of study],” therefore they perceive their own intelligence in a certain way, says CU expert and study team member David B. Miele, PhD, quoted by PsychCentral.

On the other hand, there are those who believe that applying hard work, discipline and persistence to learning will lead to improved understanding and intelligence, and these people are usually called “incremental theorists.”

In the study, the researchers wanted to see whether these two types of perception were also influencing people's ability to learn, or their learning patterns. Details of the work have been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of the scientific journal Psychological Science.

“We have to be sensitive to personal limitations and at the same time not feel those limitations are the end all-be all. Effort can always lead to some amount of improvement, but you also need to be aware of the law of diminishing returns,” Miele went on to say.

In the study, entity theorists were better at predicting the amount of time needed to complete certain tasks. Conversely, incremental theorists tended to express overconfidence of their ability to remember complex things, while at the same time showing signs of hesitation when remembering easy things.

Therefore, the team concluded that both type of perceptions have their individual merits and drawbacks. Yet, they appear to be on equal footing, as far as the overall result goes.