Learned Industriousness

                                                    LEARN INDUSTRIOUSNESS


          Recent research suggests we can learn to be hard, persistent workers. Those of us who have been rewarded, often starting in childhood, for making strong efforts to achieve our own or assigned goals tend to develop a "work ethic" and a "moral ethic." Likewise, training in persisting or waiting for a worthwhile reward or achievement can help us develop better self-control involving handling delays. So, just as there is "learned helplessness," there is "learned industriousness."

          There is a "law of least effort:" we all try to get things (a pay off) the easiest way we can. That's smart and different from being lazy. Some of us take on hard challenges, others don't. You can also see an enormous range in the amount of effort people will expend to achieve a given goal. Of course, the value of a goal differs from person to person, but some people simply work much harder and longer than others. Why? Perhaps, according to Eisenberger (1992), because some have a long history of exerting intense effort and then being praised and well reinforced. In effect, some have been given "effort training" to be industrious, others haven't. One theory is that this training is effective because being repeatedly rewarded following long, hard efforts makes hard work in any situation seem less offensive, less aversive, less awful. Eisenberger has also shown that self-talk ("When I try hard, I do well on all my school work" and "when I don't, I don't") further enhances this "effort training." Both high effort and attention to tedious detail, if reinforced, become less unpleasant and less avoided. Thus, reasonable and challenging-but-demanding work or study experiences may produce harder working employees or more motivated students.

          Eisenberger suggests another law, the "law of more effort:" if hard work has paid off for you in the past in many different ways, your effort and self-control will increase more, as compared to individuals who have worked less hard, as the stakes get higher. Likewise, a boss, teacher, or parent who has positively encouraged and reinforced your high performance and hard efforts in the past will provide more motivation to you than a person who is or has been more permissive.

          Unfortunately, while "effort training" seems simple at first, a little thought makes you realize that the actual work conditions as well as your attitudes and personality traits are all involved in determining if your hard work is viewed as yielding rewards or punishment. If hard work is seen as stupid and/or obnoxious, then one may develop "learned laziness." Also, our willingness to work hard, regardless of our past experience, is, in part, a function of our needs and the nature of the work, e.g. mental or physical, clean or dirty, cooperative or competitive, social or isolated, all of which may reflect one's reinforcement history (Eisenberger, Kuhlman & Cotterell, 1992). Most important aspects of life are complex.

          Another fascinating feature of this program of research is the moral consequences of "effort training." Children required to do hard math problems first, cheated less on a later anagram test than students given easy math problems first. We need to know more about the relationship between industriousness and honesty, caring, and other morals. But there are reasons to doubt that the relationship is simple because in some situations having a high need for achievement increases our tendency to cheat.

          Later, we will discuss the harm that can be done to a person's performance, especially on interesting tasks, by extrinsic reinforcement. Eisenberger's research contradicts this; he found that extrinsically rewarding hard work improves performance. Moreover, he says rewarding progressively improving performance (harder and harder effort?) did not reduce intrinsic interest. To me it seems clear that in order to maintain optimal motivation you have to consider both your intrinsic and extrinsic pay offs (see intrinsic satisfaction section). The motivation problem is complicated by the fact that only parts of working or studying are interesting and exciting, other parts are hard and difficult, still other parts are tedious or boring, and so on. You have to cope with all parts of life, so it is important for our work to be satisfying, but a history of hard, rewarding efforts involving long delays of reinforcement may also be important in preparing us for the unavoidably hard and uninteresting parts.