When the going gets tough: Grit predicts costly perseverance

In this research, we investigate how grittier individuals might incur some costs by persisting when they could move on. Grittier participants were found to be less willing to give up when failing even though they were likely to incur a cost for their persistence. First, grittier participants are more willing to risk failing to complete a task by persisting on individual items. Second, when they are losing, they expend more effort and persist longer in a game rather than quit. Gritty participants have more positive emotions and expectations toward the task, which mediates the relationship between grit and staying to persist when they are losing. Results show gritty individuals are more willing to risk suffering monetary loss to persist. To introduce the concept of grit, Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, and Kelly (2007) titled their paper Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals. With this defining phrase, we can envision how people with grit persist in endeavors related to important life objectives, and empirical research bears this out. Grittier individuals persist through to completion of important life goals like getting married, completing Army training, performing well in class (e.g., GPA), on other academic tasks (e.g., National Spelling Bee) and graduating from school, as well as performing well at work and remaining employed Personality researchers have primarily conceptualized grit as one facet of the larger personality trait of conscientiousness; indeed, there is empirical evidence that grit and conscientiousness overlap strongly (e.g., Duckworth & Quinn, 2009). While grit is most commonly seen as one facet of conscientiousness, some researchers instead conceptualize grit as a type of courage (Maddi, Matthews, Kelly, Villarreal, & White, 2012). Courage is the ability to push through fear to perform an action, and from this perspective on grit, grit is the courage to push through fear of failure to persist at a given task. Accordingly, while less gritty individuals ''change their direction in order to cut losses, " people with this kind of courage resist changing their direction and instead ''stay the course " (Maddi et al., 2012, p. 21). This tendency to resist changing direction when losses could be cut could have various implications for gritty individuals. First, we propose that it may inhibit their ability to perform on certain kinds of tasks. While previous research suggests that grit predicts more successful performance, such as in a Spelling Bee (Duckworth et al., 2007), grittier participants may not do as …