Effort-Related Choices: the Impact of Ability Beliefs, Mistakes, and Sympathetic Nervous Activity

Some students view their abilities as malleable with effort and aim to improve themselves (incremental beliefs), while others believe abilities are fixed and cannot change with effort and aim to prove themselves (entity beliefs). Here, we investigated how such ability beliefs in undergraduates (N=115) relate to their effort investment during a challenging arithmetic task, indexed by whether they make low vs high effort-related choices (easy vs difficult equations). The influential social cognitive theory suggests that past performance experiences (mastery vs failure) and physiological state are important sources for competence self-evaluations. Therefore, we investigated whether and how effort-related choices are further influenced by making mistakes during the task and sympathetic nervous system activity measured with impedance cardiography. Results showed that ability beliefs did not predict effort-related choices, but making mistakes led participants to choose lower difficulty levels in the subsequent round. Sympathetic nervous activity was not associated with subsequently chosen difficulty levels. This study further supports the importance of mastery experiences for effort investment, and provides a novel approach for integrating different levels of influence on effort-related choices during an educationally-relevant task.