The Growth Mindset of Beauty Promotes Risk-Taking Propensity and Behavior.

Abstract

Beauty has pervasive implications for success in various domains of life. Given this broad and visible nature, whether and how a belief in the improvability of this important human attribute influences judgment and decision-making is largely unknown. We found that beauty implicit theories can produce strong cross-domain impact on risk-taking behavior. Using both hypothetical choices and real behaviors in one cross-country survey and nine experiments, including three supplementary studies (N = 4,015), we found that (a) incremental theorists, who believed that beauty is malleable and improvable, took greater risks than entity theorists, who believed that beauty is fixed, and (b) an incremental belief of beauty heightens a sense of optimism that one will achieve positive outcomes in various domains of life, which consequently promotes risk-seeking behavior. These findings demonstrate that domain-specific implicit theory (i.e. beauty in our case) can affect behavior beyond that domain (non-beauty related risk-taking).