Personhood beliefs across cultures

International audiencePersonhood beliefs—beliefs about what it is to be a person or what it is that defines human beings—can vary both across individuals and across cultural groups. This entry introduces the concepts of lay dispositionism and implicit personality theories, then briefly presents different sets of personhood beliefs that have been studied in the social psychological literature: entity versus incremental beliefs; essentialist beliefs; trait beliefs; and contextualism beliefs. Evidence of cultural variation of these sets of beliefs and their consequences is reviewed