Abstract

People have implicit theories about whether personal characteristics, such as intelligence or personality, are fixed or grow with individual effort, and these implicit theories have been known to influence people’s goal setting and related behaviors. By applying the implicit theory of intelligence to preference, we noted that individuals differ in their implicit theories about the changeability of food preferences. In an online survey of 200 Korean adults, existing scales were used to measure implicit theories about the changeability of food preferences, variety seeking tendency with respect to foods, satisfaction with food-related life, and overall life satisfaction in turn. The results of serial mediation analysis showed that having the incremental theory in food preference is related to higher food variety seeking, which leads to satisfaction with food-related life and overall life satisfaction. As for the effect of the implicit theory of food preferences on overall life satisfaction, only the indirect effect was found to be significant. We measured food variety seeking by both tendency and objective food frequency, but only variety seeking tendency showed the serial mediation effect. The contributions and implications of the results were discussed.