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Learned industriousness: replication in principle
K L Hickman1, C Stromme, L G Lippman
1Department of Psychology, Western Washington University, Bellingham 98225-9089, USA.
The Journal of General Psychology
|November 27, 1998
Summary
High-effort training in cognitive tasks led undergraduate students to persist less on subsequent maze challenges. This suggests that reinforced high effort can decrease persistence in learning industriousness.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Educational Psychology
Background:
- Learned industriousness is a concept suggesting that effort can be a learned characteristic.
- Previous research indicates that reinforced high effort can enhance performance on subsequent tasks.
Purpose of the Study:
- To validate and extend findings on learned industriousness.
- To investigate the generalizability of reinforced high effort on subsequent performance.
Main Methods:
- Undergraduate students were assigned to high-effort, low-effort, or control training conditions.
- Training involved anagrams, addition, and perceptual discrimination tasks of varying difficulty.
- A criterion task involved solving pencil-and-paper mazes with the option to pass on any maze.
Main Results:
- Participants in the high-effort training group passed significantly fewer mazes compared to the low-effort and control groups.
- This indicates that prior high-effort training decreased persistence on the maze task.
Conclusions:
- The findings support the generality of reinforced high effort, demonstrating its potential to decrease persistence.
- This challenges the notion that high effort always leads to increased subsequent performance, suggesting a more complex relationship.