We will be investigating the effects of encouragement on task persistence. Participants will be students who are enrolled in PSY 1000 courses who elect to participate in partial fulfillment of course requirements. Participants will be randomly assigned to either the “encouragement group” or the “no encouragement group” and to either the “easy task group” or “difficult task group.” The task will consist of a challenging maze (see attached).
For the encouragement group, we will tell them before they begin the task that “they can do it” and that “this is something we know they can do.” For the no encouragement group, we will simply give them instructions for the maze (i.e., “work on the maze until you’re asked to stop”). Participants in the “easy task group” will be given five minutes to work on the maze; participants in the “difficult task group” will only be given two minutes to work on the maze.
After the time is up, we will then give participants another challenging maze to do, actually an “impossible” maze. They will have as long as they want to work on this maze. We will time how long they wish to work on it. We predict that the “easy/encouragement group” (i.e., those participants who were successful on the first task and who were encouraged) will work longer on the task than the other groups.
After participants are done with the task, they will be thanked and debriefed.