Abstract/Summary

Despite having little economic utility, people are often motivated to seek challenges (i.e., proactively choosing to work on a more difficult task than an easier task). Although previous studies revealed various factors associated with challenge-seeking behaviours, there has been little research examining the potential effects of social cues. This thesis investigated whether observing other’s challenge-seeking behaviours had a contagious effect. Participants’ willingness to seek challenges were measured using a challenge-seeking task that differentiated challenge-seeking behaviours from similar concepts (such as mental effort or uncertainty resolution). In this task, participants’ difficult word problem selections, compared to easier alternatives, were measured before and after experimental manipulations. This way, possible changes in participants’ challenge preferences after observing challenge-seeker and challenge-avoider others were examined. Six behavioural experiments consistently showed that, while participants generally avoided challenging word problems, observing a challenge-seeker other increased their likelihood of choosing more challenging word problems. The observed shift in their challenge-seeking behaviour was not related to possible changes in participants’ perceptions of word problem difficulty or self-confidence. Individual differences in achievement goals and trait intrinsic motivation levels contributed to participants’ susceptibility to the contagious effect of observing others’ challenge-seeking behaviours. However, environmental factors such as the agent likeability did not seem to play an important role in the behavioural change. Exploratory fMRI analyses revealed increased activations in the brain regions previously linked to social cognitive processing (inferior parietal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, precuneus) and complex abstract (math-related) cognitive processing (angular gyrus). These results may be interpreted as the need for greater social processing when participants were seeking challenges whilst under the influence of challenge-seeker others. Overall, the current thesis indicated how challenge-seeking behaviours could be facilitated through social processes and discussed possible influences of individual and environmental factors in the social contagion of challenge-seeking.