Difficulty-as-improvement: The courage to keep going in the face of life’s difficulties

Cultures often provide deservingness and authority-based narratives to explain the difficulties people experience in life. Accepting these narratives is culturally fluent but can be depleting. We predicted and showed that people often also interpret their life difficulties as opportunities for self-growth— a difficulty-as-improvement mindset. Our computational linguistic analyses of the “Common Crawl” corpus suggest that when people talk about difficulty they also talk about importance, impossibility, and improvement (Study 1). Studies 2-14 (total N = 2,378) use our brief difficulty-as-improvement measure to reveal that difficulty-as-improvement is both culture-general and culture-specific (endorsed more strongly in non-Western samples). Westerners (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, USA) and non-Westerners (China, India, Iran, Turkey) who endorse difficulty-as-improvement tend to experience themselves positively, as people who are optimistic, conscientious, virtuous, and whose lives have meaning. People who endorse difficulty-as-improvement tend to believe in deservingness (karma, a just world) and authority (spirituality, religiosity, conservatism).