Examining the costs and benefits to lay theories of life satisfaction: A Double-edged sword perspective

• Examined the impact of incremental and entity lay theories of life satisfaction. • Employed an preregistered experiment with 713 online participants. • Incremental (vs. entity) lay theories associated with stronger motivation. • Incremental (vs. entity) lay theories also associated with blame and frustration. • We find costs and benefits of incremental and entity lay theories. We examined the impact of viewing life satisfaction as changeable through effort versus fixed in nature (i.e., incremental vs. entity lay theory). In a preregistered experiment, 713 online participants ( M age = 37.63 years; 53.9 % female) were randomly assigned to an incremental, entity, or control condition. Comparisons between conditions and correlational findings indicated that incremental (vs. entity) lay theories were associated with greater self-reported offset efficacy and stronger motivation, but also stronger onset responsibility, self-blame, and frustration. Notably, holding an incremental (vs. entity) lay theory was more strongly linked to desirable than undesirable outcomes. Nonetheless, this study reveals both costs and benefits of holding incremental and entity lay theories of life satisfaction.