Because of you I did not give up – Peer effects in perseverance

Leonie Gerhards and Christina Gravert

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2020, vol. 81, issue C

Abstract: It has been shown that both perseverance as well as peer effects affect performance. In our experiment, we investigate the interplay between these two factors. Participants work on a wordplay task where we quantify perseverance as the decision to continue working hard in the face of challenges. We find that persevering on the task is significantly correlated with the psychological questionnaire measure of grit (Duckworth et al., 2007). In an additional treatment, we provide participants with information about a peer’s contemporaneous perseverance on the task. This significantly increases participants’ perseverance on the task independently of their perseverance as measured in the questionnaire, suggesting that it does not only depend on individuals’ inherent traits, but can also be increased by peers.

Keywords: Grit; Perseverance; Laboratory experiment; Peer effects; Real-effort (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 J24 M50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167487020300775
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:81:y:2020:i:c:s0167487020300775

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2020.102316

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read

More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().