Make it happen
People underestimate the value of persistence for creative performance
Brian Lucas & Loran Nordgren
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, August 2015, Pages 232-243
Abstract:
Across 7 studies, we investigated the prediction that people underestimate the value of persistence for creative performance. Across a range of creative tasks, people consistently underestimated how productive they would be while persisting (Studies 1–3). Study 3 found that the subjectively experienced difficulty, or disfluency, of creative thought accounted for persistence undervaluation. Alternative explanations based on idea quality (Studies 1–2B) and goal setting (Study 4) were considered and ruled out and domain knowledge was explored as a boundary condition (Study 5). In Study 6, the disfluency of creative thought reduced people’s willingness to invest in an opportunity to persist, resulting in lower financial performance. This research demonstrates that persistence is a critical determinant of creative performance and that people may undervalue and underutilize persistence in everyday creative problem solving.
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Giorgia Cona et al.
PLoS ONE, July 2015
Abstract:
The present study was aimed at exploring the influence of cognitive processes on performance in ultra-marathon runners, providing an overview of the cognitive aspects that characterize outstanding runners. Thirty runners were administered a battery of computerized tests right before their participation in an ultra-marathon. Then, they were split according to the race rank into two groups (i.e., faster runners and slower runners) and their cognitive performance was compared. Faster runners outperformed slower runners in trials requiring motor inhibition and were more effective at performing two tasks together, successfully suppressing the activation of the information for one of the tasks when was not relevant. Furthermore, slower runners took longer to remember to execute pre-defined actions associated with emotional stimuli when such stimuli were presented. These findings suggest that cognitive factors play a key role in running an ultra-marathon. Indeed, if compared with slower runners, faster runners seem to have a better inhibitory control, showing superior ability not only to inhibit motor response but also to suppress processing of irrelevant information. Their cognitive performance also appears to be less influenced by emotional stimuli. This research opens new directions towards understanding which kinds of cognitive and emotional factors can discriminate talented runners from less outstanding runners.
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Olof Rosenqvist & Oskar Nordström Skans
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, September 2015, Pages 281–295
Abstract:
This paper provides field evidence on the causal impact of past successes on future performances. Since persistence in success or failure is likely to be linked through potentially time-varying ability, it is intrinsically difficult to identify the causal effect of succeeding on the probability of performing well in the future. We therefore employ a regression discontinuity design on data from professional golf tournaments exploiting that almost equally skilled players are separated into successes and failures half-way into the tournaments (the “cut”). We show that players who (marginally) succeeded in making the cut substantially increased their performance in subsequent tournaments relative to players who (marginally) failed to make the cut. This success-effect is substantially larger when the subsequent (outcome) tournament involves more prize money. The results therefore suggest that past successes provide an important prerequisite when performing high-stakes tasks.
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Disordered environments prompt mere goal pursuit
Bob Fennis & Jacob Wiebenga
Journal of Environmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
People have a strong need to perceive their environment as orderly and structured. Among the various strategies to defend against the aversive experience of disorder, the authors propose and test the novel hypothesis that people may reaffirm a sense of order by setting and pursuing goals that may be unrelated to the source of disorder. In a series of (lab and field) studies, the authors show that when environmental cues trigger an experience of disorder, or when people have a chronic need for order, and hence when they are motivated to restore perceptions of order, people are more attracted to clear, well-defined goals and motivated to attain them. Moreover, the authors show that the effect of a disordered environment on goal pursuit is driven by the need to reaffirm perceptions of order, and — conversely — that setting and pursuing goals is indeed functional in promoting a sense of order.
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Young-Hoon Kim, Chi-Yue Chiu & Jessica Bregant
PLoS ONE, June 2015
Abstract:
Previous research found that poor performers tend to overestimate how well their performance compares to others’. This unskilled and unaware effect has been attributed to poor performers’ lack of metacognitive ability to realize their ineptitude. We contend that the unskilled are motivated to ignore (be unaware of) their poor performance so that they can feel better about themselves. We tested this idea in an experiment in which we manipulated the perceived self-relevancy of the task to men and women after they had completed a visual pun task and before they estimated their performance on the task. As predicted, the unskilled and unaware effect was attenuated when the task was perceived to have low self-relevance.
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Dissociable Effects of Salience on Attention and Goal-Directed Action
Jeff Moher, Brian Anderson & Joo-Hyun Song
Current Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Everyday behavior frequently involves encounters with multiple objects that compete for selection. For example, driving a car requires constant shifts of attention between oncoming traffic, rearview mirrors, and traffic signs and signals, among other objects. Behavioral goals often drive this selection process; however, they are not the sole determinant of selection. Physically salient objects, such as flashing, brightly colored hazard signs, or objects that are salient by virtue of learned associations with reward, such as pictures of food on a billboard, often capture attention regardless of the individual’s goals. It is typically thought that strongly salient distractor objects capture more attention and are more disruptive than weakly salient distractors. Counterintuitively, though, we found that this is true for perception, but not for goal-directed action. In a visually guided reaching task, we required participants to reach to a shape-defined target while trying to ignore salient distractors. We observed that strongly salient distractors produced less disruption in goal-directed action than weakly salient distractors. Thus, a strongly salient distractor triggers suppression during goal-directed action, resulting in enhanced efficiency and accuracy of target selection relative to when weakly salient distractors are present. In contrast, in a task requiring no goal-directed action, we found greater attentional interference from strongly salient distractors. Thus, while highly salient stimuli interfere strongly with perceptual processing, increased physical salience or associated value attenuates action-related interference.
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The Snooze of Lose: Rapid Reaching Reveals That Losses Are Processed More Slowly Than Gains
Craig Chapman et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Decision making revolves around weighing potential gains and losses. Research in economic decision making has emphasized that humans exercise disproportionate caution when making explicit choices involving loss. By comparison, research in perceptual decision making has revealed a processing advantage for targets associated with potential gain, though the effects of loss have been explored less systematically. Here, we use a rapid reaching task to measure the relative sensitivity (Experiment 1) and the time course (Experiments 2 and 3) of rapid actions with regard to the reward valence and probability of targets. We show that targets linked to a high probability of gain influence actions about 100 ms earlier than targets associated with equivalent probability and value of loss. These findings are well accounted for by a model of stimulus response in which reward modulates the late, postpeak phase of the activity. We interpret our results within a neural framework of biased competition that is resolved in spatial maps of behavioral relevance. As implied by our model, all visual stimuli initially receive positive activation. Gain stimuli can build off of this initial activation when selected as a target, whereas loss stimuli have to overcome this initial activation in order to be avoided, accounting for the observed delay between valences. Our results bring clarity to the perceptual effects of losses versus gains and highlight the importance of considering the timeline of different biasing factors that influence decisions.
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The role of motivation for rewards in vicarious goal satiation
Stephanie Tobin et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, September 2015, Pages 137–143
Abstract:
We examined the role of reward sensitivity and the motivation to balance ‘have-to’ and ‘want-to’ goals in vicarious goal satiation. In Experiment 1, participants who read about a target who completed an academic goal performed worse on an academic (‘have-to’) task and were more interested in engaging in inherently rewarding (‘want-to’) activities than participants who read about an incomplete goal. In Experiment 2, after reading about a target who completed a ‘have-to’ goal, participants who were more sensitive to rewards performed worse on a similar ‘have-to’ task. Furthermore, in Experiment 3, this effect was significant only when participants saw their task as more of a work (i.e., ‘have-to’) task. Together, these findings support the idea that motivation for rewards plays a role in vicarious goal satiation and that other people's goal pursuits can affect observers' perceived balance of ‘have-to’ and ‘want-to’ goals.