To Persist or not: The Powerful Influence of Outcomes on Persistence Across Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Persistence is essential to success, yet people have to choose when to persist because efforts do not always yield expected outcomes. Are children sensitive to outcome cues (objective or subjective) and use this information to guide their future efforts? This symposium provides compelling answers to this important question. The first talk documents the effect of continued success on 4- to 6-year-old children’s persistence, demonstrating that children tend to stick with a challenge when they get better over time. The second talk investigates whether continued failures influence 18-month-old infants’ decisions to persist. In particular, the findings suggest that infants are less committed after repeated setbacks; they direct their efforts to explorations instead. The next two papers suggest that children also consider subjective evaluations. In particular, the third paper illustrates the role of parental praise on 8- to 12-year-olds’ exploration in a virtual reality task, finding that modest praise discourages exploration in children with high self-esteem and encourages exploration in children with low self-esteem. The last paper examines how 4- to 9-year-old American and Chinese children use praise towards others to guide their perceptions of relative competence, which can affect their persistence. The paper finds that praising a peer’s stable traits, but not their efforts, undermines children’s self-efficacy. The four presentations are richly varied, with a diversity of ages, cultures, methodological approaches and response measures. Nevertheless, they provide an encompassing investigation of children’s sensitivity to objective and subjective evidence to allocate their future efforts, casting light on ways to enhance children’s persistence.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chair

• Minghui Wang, Cornell University

Individual Presentations

• Children Stick With a Challenge When Their Performance Improves Over Time - Presenting Author: Julia Anne Leonard, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Hunter Z. Liu, University of Pennsylvania; Non-Presenting Author: Skyler Cordey, University of Pennsylvania; Non-Presenting Author: Allyson P Mackey, University of Pennsylvania

• Reconceptualizing Persistence: Exploratory Behavior as Rational Adaptation - Presenting Author: Mia Radovanovic, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Antonia K Soldovieri, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Hannah Solby, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Rachel Horton, University Of Washington; Non-Presenting Author: Kelsey Lucca, Arizona State University; Non-Presenting Author: Jessica A Sommerville, University of Toronto

• Does Parental Praise Foster Children’s Exploration? A Virtual Reality Experiment - Presenting Author: Eddie Brummelman, Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA); Non-Presenting Author: Stathis Grapsas, Tilburg University; Non-Presenting Author: Katinka van der Kooij, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

• Young Children use Third-Party Praise to Infer Competence - Presenting Author: Minghui Wang, Cornell University; Non-Presenting Author: Lindsay Tuttle, Cornell University; Non-Presenting Author: Michelle Wang, New York University; Non-Presenting Author: Lining Sun; Non-Presenting Author: Steven Othello Roberts, Stanford University; Non-Presenting Author: Lin Bian, University of Chicago