When other people help us work harder

We are more perseverant when working besides others. This is the takeaway from a study at COBE Lab by the researchers Leonie Gerhards og Christina Gravert.

In the field of psychology, grit refers to the ability to persevere to accomplish one’s goals in the face of challenges and setbacks. Some people consistently show more grit than others.

But having grit ourselves is not all that determines how hard we work. Working besides others can make us more perseverant by itself. This was what Leonie and Christina discovered with their experiment.

The Experiment

Leonie and Christina paid 152 participants to make anagrams—that is, to rearrange the letters of words to make new words.

For each word presented to them, participants were paid 5 DKK if they could rearrange the letters to find an anagram. However, they could also choose to skip words they found too difficult. Each skip cost them 3 DKK.

Participants were also asked to complete a psychological questionnaire designed to measure their level of grit. The researchers wanted to know who would persevere to find anagrams of difficult words, and who would skip.

For some participants, the researchers moreover continually informed them how often another participant was skipping words. Their prediction was that observing another participant working at the same task as themselves in this way would make them more perseverant.

Findings

Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that people with high levels of grit skipped less, persevering in finding anagrams even of difficult words.

But individual grit wasn’t all that mattered. Observing another participants’ skips made participants persevere more and skip less themselves—regardless of their own individual level of grit.

This demonstrates what researchers call the peer effect: We work harder and persevere more to accomplish our goals in the face of challenges and setbacks if we are working beside others.

The study was called “Because of you I did not give up – Peer effects in perseverance” and was published in Journal of Economic Psychology in 2020