The Cultural Historical Complexity of Human Personality Adaptation

Research on implicit intelligence has conceptualized students’beliefs about the nature of intelligence as either fixed or malleable. This research haslargely not included African American adolescents, a group for whom beliefs aboutintelligence have a cultural historical complexity related to both scientific racism andmaster narratives of race and intelligence. The purpose of this study was to investigatethe nature of implicit theories of intelligence for 63 African American adolescents whoare seventh and eighth graders in a public charter school. The two-way ANOVA revealedthat these adolescents held a malleable view of intelligence, which did not vary bygender or grade. Exploratory correlation analysis showed some consistent relationshipswith achievement motivation variables found in other studies. These findings may beexplained by African American cultural values and the personality characteristicadaptations that they make living within a racialized society