Organizational Lay Theories of Intelligence and Trust Among Minority Women

Organizational lay theories are beliefs held by organizations regarding the fixed versus malleable nature of abilities and intelligence. Past research found that predominantly White women trusted an organization with an incremental (i.e., malleable) mindset more than an organization with an entity (i.e., fixed) mindset (Emerson and Murphy, 2015). What is still not known is how racial and ethnic minority women would respond to entity vs. incremental company mindsets. This study recruited Black and Latina college women and randomly assigned them to evaluate a health internship organization that held either an incremental or entity mindset about competence and intelligence. Women then rated how much trust they felt for the organization, and then completed a difficult visuospatial matrices task. Findings revealed that both groups trusted the incremental organization more, but for the African American women, the effect was much larger, meaning they trusted the entity organization less than the Latina women. Order in which the moderator scales and manipulation were presented also interacted with race and mindset condition.