Effort as Person-Focused Praise: "Hard Worker" Has Negative Effects for Adults After a Failure

Although work with children demonstrates a benefit of process-focused praise relative to person-focused praise on post-failure motivation, few studies have examined this result in adults. We tested the effect of three types of praise on adults' post-failure outcomes: person-focused intelligence ("high intelligence"), person-focused effort ("hard worker"), and process-focused effort ("worked hard") in a sample of 156 adults recruited from Amazon's MTurk. Participants completed a set of easy visual pattern recognition problems and were told that they performed better than most adults and were given one of the three types of feedback. They then completed more difficult problems and were told that they had not performed well. Participants in the "hard worker" condition (compared to "worked hard") were more likely to endorse intelligence as a reason for failure. They also reported lower perceived success and less enjoyment than participants in other conditions. Participants in the "high intelligence" condition were more likely to attribute their failure to intelligence than participants in the "worked hard" condition. The results suggest that the benefit of process-focused praise typically found in children (worked hard compared to intelligent) was mostly not replicated in adults, and person-focused effort praise was detrimental in a non-college student adult sample.