How Malleable Are Beliefs about Traits? Self-Theories About Traits as Motivated Reasoning After Reliving a Negative Self-Conscious Emotion

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that beliefs about the malleability of one's personality traits can manifest as motivated reasoning within certain situations, but no studies have examined whether this motivated reasoning is a consequence of emotional states. Based on Gausel and Leach's (2011) model on negative self-conscious emotions, we investigated this possibility by asking participants to relive a moral failure from the past year where they felt either guilt, shame, rejected, or inferior. We hypothesized that reliving a feeling shame or guilt would motivate participants to describe the Big Five trait they attributed most as a cause of their past moral failure as more malleable than their least attributed trait. We also hypothesized that feeling rejected or inferior would motivate participants to act defensively by describing their most attributed trait as less malleable than their least attributed trait. Participants who relived feeling guilt tended to describe their most attributed trait as more malleable than their least attributed trait, but this was not true for participants who relived a feeling shame, rejection, or inferiority. These results suggest that feeling guilt can elicit motivated reasoning about the malleability of one's traits with implications beyond reparative behaviors following a moral failure.