Whether we believe Malcolm Gladwell’s trope that you need 10,000 hours of practice to achieve greatness in any discipline, it’s hard to imagine success being achieved without a large dose of perseverance. The question is, is such grit and determination something that’s inbuilt within us or is it something we can acquire?
It’s a question that a recently published study believes it has the answer to. The paper suggests that both peer pressure and learning can contribute to higher levels of perseverance. For instance, when I ride with my local cycling club, not only do I have peer pressure from the group to attend regular training rides, but I also gain from the experience of my fellow riders as we talk during each ride.
The researchers wanted to test whether there are certain conditions where perseverance is enhanced and certain conditions where it isn’t. They recruited a few hundred volunteers to complete various tasks in a lab environment. The task was pretty tedious, and all had the opportunity to break from the task and surf the web instead. To try and incentivize the participants, a small monetary bonus was offered if they completed 5 out of the 10 tasks within a 50 minute window.
A little help from some friends
Some of the volunteers were given some help from an experienced peer before they began the task. The results suggest that this interaction certainly had an impact upon the performance of each volunteer, but it was not always a positive one. The way the peer communicated with the volunteer was crucial. For instance, if they revealed that they had completed the tasks and achieved the bonus, this typically resulted in higher performance from the volunteers, but if they suggested that they had achieved the bonus as a result of their special talents, this discouraged the volunteers.
A second condition then sought to test the peer pressure angle, and required volunteers to justify their performance with another volunteer after they had completed the task. As before, this did appear to impact the levels of perseverance shown by volunteers, but this impact did not prove to be a lasting one.
What was perhaps the most interesting finding was that both forms of influence affected women more than they did men. In the peer pressure tract, female performance grew from 2.74 tasks solved to 3.97, whilst in the learning variant, performance grew a huge amount, from 0.71 tasks completed to 4.24.
The results are fascinating, not only because they show that perseverance can certainly be influenced, but that we can achieve significant results if we provide the right kind of support. This is especially so for female employees, who could benefit enormously from things such as mentoring.
