Individual differences in exploration and persistence: Grit and beliefs about ability and reward.

Gillian Dale,Danielle Sampers,C Shawn Green,Stephanie Loo,Emmanuel Manalo

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0203131

Abstract

The tradeoff between knowing when to seek greater rewards (exploration), and knowing when to settle (exploitation), is critical to success. One dispositional factor that may modulate this tradeoff is “grit.” Gritty individuals tend to persist in the face of difficulty and consequently experience greater life success. It is possible that they may also experience a greater tendency to explore in a reward task. However, although most exploration/exploitation tasks manipulate beliefs about the presence/magnitude of rewards in the environment, the belief of one’s ability to actually achieve a reward is also critical. As such, we investigated whether individuals higher in grit were more likely to explore, and how beliefs about the magnitude/presence of rewards, and the perceived ability to achieve a reward, modulated their exploration tendencies. Over two experiments, participants completed 4 different exploration/persistence tasks: two that tapped into participant beliefs about the presence/magnitude of rewards, and two that tapped into participant beliefs about their ability to achieve a reward. Participants also completed measures of dispositional grit (Experiment 1a and 1b), conscientiousness (Experiment 1b), and working memory (Experiment 1a and 1b). In both experiments, we found a relationship between the two “belief of rewards” tasks, as well as between the two “belief of ability” tasks, but performance was unrelated across the two types of task. We also found that dispositional grit was strongly associated with greater exploration, but only on the “belief of ability” tasks. Finally, in Experiment 1b we showed that conscientiousness better predicted exploration on the “belief of ability” tasks than grit, suggesting that it is not grittiness per se that is associated with exploration. Overall, our findings showed that individuals high in grit/conscientiousness are more likely to explore, but only when there is a known reward available that they believe they have the ability to achieve.

Highlights

We found support for the hypothesis that working memory would be unrelated to pure exploration behaviors on the Chain Task and Grid Task, but would be associated with persistence on both the Impossible Remote Associates Task (IRAT) and Impossible Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices (IRAPM)
Participants who took a more exploratory approach on the Chain Task were more exploratory on the Grid Task, and participants who persisted on the IRAT task persisted on the IRAPM task, but there was no relationship between the two different categories of task
We developed two pairs of tasks: one designed to measure the former inference, and one designed to measure the latter inference. Performance on these pairs of tasks was strongly correlated, such that participants who took a more exploratory approach on the Chain Task were more exploratory on the Grid Task, and participants who persisted on the IRAT task persisted on the IRAPM task

Summary

Introduction

We are often presented with situations in which we have to choose between settling for what we currently have, or pushing forward into an uncertain future to find something better. In the two exploration measures (Chain Task and Grid Task–see below), participants were repeatedly given the opportunity to either exploit a known reward or to explore for new and potentially larger rewards These two exploration tasks were designed in such a way that there was no reason for a participant to believe that if a better reward existed, that they would personally be unable to obtain it based on their assessment of their own abilities. The two persistence measures (the Impossible Remote Associates Task and the Impossible Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices; IRAT and IRAPM respectively) were designed to exclusively tap into participants’ beliefs about their own abilities In these two tasks, participants were given puzzles to solve, and they could either persist in attempting to find a correct answer, or could quit and move on to a new problem.

Ethics statement

Findings

Participants