Abstract
The type of praise children receive influences whether children choose to persist after failure. One mechanism through which praise affects motivation is through the causal attributions inferred from language. For example, telling a child “You got an A on the test because you’re smart,” provides an explicit link between possessing a trait and an outcome, specifically that intelligence causes success. Nonetheless, most praise given to children is ambiguous, or lacks explicit attributions (e.g., “yea” or a thumbs up). To investigate the effects of ambiguous praise on motivation, we randomly assigned 95 5–6-year-old children to a praise condition (verbal trait; verbal effort; verbal ambiguous; or gestural) and measured motivation using task persistence, self-evaluations, and eye fixations on errors. Ambiguous praise, similar to verbal effort praise, produced higher persistence and self-evaluations, and fewer fixations on error after failure compared to verbal trait praise. Interestingly, gestures produced the highest self-evaluations. Thus, praise without explicit attributions motivated as well or better than praise explicitly focused on effort, which may suggest that children interpret ambiguous praise in the most beneficial manner.
Highlights
A player scores a goal in a soccer match and her coach gives her a high five
Explicit attributions appear to be unnecessary for praise to influence motivation positively
Praise without explicit attributions explaining the causes of success and failure was as motivating as praise with explicit attributions (“You did a good job drawing”), the verbal and gestural praise used in our study produced positive motivational effects similar to verbal effort praise
Summary
A player scores a goal in a soccer match and her coach gives her a high five. A teacher says, “Awesome!” after a student solves a difficult math problem. If ambiguous praise is interpreted as effort praise (e.g., a thumbs up is interpreted as meaning “good job”), motivation outcomes should be similar to those associated with verbal effort praise (i.e., high persistence and self-evaluations scores, low visual fixations on error). Children do not directly experience successes or failures, this method has produced clear effects of praise type (Cimpian et al, 2007; Zentall and Morris, 2010, 2012), such that children who heard stories about themselves receiving verbal trait praise were less motivated than those who received verbal effort praise. Children who received verbal effort praise showed a decrease in visual fixations from pretest to post-test, suggesting that errors became more salient for children who received verbal trait praise, even when the pictures were made by “another child.” The current study investigated how children who received ambiguous praise responded to errors compared to those who received verbal effort or verbal trait praise
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