Quitters Never Win and Forgivers Never Quit: Forgiveness Increases Task Persistence

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen R. Catanese ◽  
Julie Juola Exline ◽  
Roy F. Baumeister
Keyword(s):  
Task Persistence

scholarly journals If At First You Don't Succeed... Reconsider: Attainability Cues and Adaptive Disengagement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Townsley Christine
Keyword(s):  
Correct Answer ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Task Persistence ◽  
Within Subjects ◽  
Answer Option

Peoples’decisions to persist or disengage from a goal are essential to successful self-regulation. Whenpeople encounter unattainable goals, persistence can cause psychological and physicaldistress. The present study hypothesizes that variation in task persistence (an individual’s decisions to continue in a particular task or behavior) is due in part to peoples’ evaluations of the task’s attainability. In a within subjects design, participants were given two sets of challenging cognitive puzzles with several unsolvable items. The first set of puzzles had no cue about attainability, but the second set included an answer option indicating that the correct answer was not present. As predicted, the attainability manipulation had a significant effect on persistence, with participants spending less time on puzzles when they were cued that they might be unattainable. Most significantly, participants high in self-control spent less time on impossible puzzles in the un-cued condition, an effect opposite our prediction and the literature consensus.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document