Growth Mindset and Willingness to Collaborate with AI: The Role of Subjective Age

As AI has been increasingly used in decision-making at work, it is important to understand what drives employees’ willingness to collaborate with AI. Drawing on selection–optimization–compensation theory and implicit theory of intelligence, we aim to explore whether a growth mindset increases employees’ willingness to collaborate with AI via AI self-efficacy and test the moderating role of employees’ subjective age. We tested this moderated mediation model across four studies. Studies 1 (N=216) and 2 (N=136) surveyed working adults to test the positive effect of growth mindset and the moderating role of subjective age. Study 3 (N = 175) manipulated growth (vs. fixed) mindset to test the causal effect for the conditional effect. Study 4 (N = 150) employed a 2 × 2 between-subject experiment manipulating both mindset and subjective age and tested AI self-efficacy as the mechanism. We found that growth mindset consistently predicted higher willingness to collaborate with AI, especially among subjectively older employees, but AI self-efficacy did not show a significant mediating effect. This research explores how mindset-based resources can mitigate motivational barriers associated with psychological aging in AI adoption and identifies subjective age as a key boundary condition.