Will the Effects of a Mindset on Individual Behavior be Moderated by Another Mindset?

In recent years, priming mindsets has been accepted as an effective way to influence individual behavior in different fields of psychology and has begun to be used as an intervention for promoting desired individual behavior. However, the effects of mindsets interventions are heterogeneous. To better understand this heterogeneity, this paper attempts to propose a theoretical framework for understanding the interplay between different mindsets. By reviewing previous studies, this paper found that the task attributes of identifying mindsets can be categorized into three different categories (task core attributes, periphery attributes, and the attributes of means that would accomplish the tasks), and that mindsets under different attributes categories mainly affects different cognitive stages. Based on this framework, we propose two mutually complementary approaches to explore the mutual influence of mindsets: (1) whether the influences of different cognitive stages corresponding to two mindsets are consistent; and (2) whether the intersection of the task sets corresponding to two mindsets is the empty set. According to this framework, when the influence of different cognitive stages is not consistent, or when the intersection of task sets is the empty set, usually, there is a negative influence between the two mindsets on each other; conversely, there may be a facilitative influence between the two mindsets. More empirical studies should be utilized in the future to explore the interplay between different mindsets and to focus on both similarities and differences of different mindsets, and the methods of mindset formation and initiation.