Accessibility navigation


Social contagion of challenge-seeking behaviour

Ogulmus, C., Lee, Y., Chakrabarti, B. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6649-7895 and Murayama, K. (2024) Social contagion of challenge-seeking behaviour. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153 (10). pp. 2573-2587. ISSN 1939-2222

[img]
Preview
Text (Open Access) - Published Version
· Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives.
· Please see our End User Agreement before downloading.

1MB
[img] Text - Accepted Version
· Restricted to Repository staff only
· The Copyright of this document has not been checked yet. This may affect its availability.

996kB

It is advisable to refer to the publisher's version if you intend to cite from this work. See Guidance on citing.

To link to this item DOI: 10.1037/xge0001620

Abstract/Summary

Despite having little economic utility, people are sometimes motivated to seek challenges (i.e., proactively choosing to work on a more difficult task than an easier one). The present study investigated whether just observing others’ challenge-seeking behaviors could motivate people to seek more challenging tasks—the social contagion effect of challenge-seeking. The participants were presented with pairs of options, each associated with a math word problem of a certain difficulty level. We examined whether the participants’ preference for a more challenging (i.e., more difficult) option changes after observing the decisions of others who hold a challenge-seeking or a challenge-avoiding attitude. Five experiments consistently showed that, while the participants generally avoided challenging word problems, observing challenge-seeking in others increased the probability of participants choosing more challenging options. These results indicate that our motivation to seek challenges may be instilled, in part, through social processes.

Item Type:Article
Refereed:Yes
Divisions:Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics (CINN)
Interdisciplinary centres and themes > ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders) Research Network
Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology
Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Psychopathology and Affective Neuroscience
ID Code:116928
Publisher:American Psychological Association

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

University Staff: Request a correction | Centaur Editors: Update this record

Page navigation