If at first you don't succeed, try again Does grit—the combination of perseverance and passion popularized in the media—differ from conscientiousness? Personality traits are embedded early in life and remain relatively stable, whereas grit (at least the passion component) may come and go and thus be malleable. Leonard et al. show that infants can learn from adults to persist through failure at arduous tasks (see the Perspective by Butler). Infants who had observed adults struggle for half a minute before activating a toy persisted when given their own complicated toy to play with, in contrast to the lesser grit displayed by infants who had seen only rapid and effortless adult successes. Science, this issue p. 1290; see also p. 1236 Infants go beyond imitating the actions of adults to imitating the amount of effort expended. Persistence, above and beyond IQ, is associated with long-term academic outcomes. To look at the effect of adult models on infants’ persistence, we conducted an experiment in which 15-month-olds were assigned to one of three conditions: an Effort condition in which they saw an adult try repeatedly, using various methods, to achieve each of two different goals; a No Effort condition in which the adult achieved the goals effortlessly; or a Baseline condition. Infants were then given a difficult, novel task. Across an initial study and two preregistered experiments (N = 262), infants in the Effort condition made more attempts to achieve the goal than did infants in the other conditions. Pedagogical cues modulated the effect. The results suggest that adult models causally affect infants’ persistence and that infants can generalize the value of persistence to novel tasks.

中文翻译：

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当婴儿看到成年人坚持不懈时，他们会更多地尝试实现目标

如果一开始你没有成功，再试一次 毅力——在媒体中流行的毅力和激情的结合——和认真有区别吗？性格特征在生命早期就根深蒂固并保持相对稳定，而勇气（至少是激情部分）可能来来去去，因此具有可塑性。伦纳德等人。表明婴儿可以向成年人学习在艰巨的任务中失败后坚持下去（参见巴特勒的观点）。观察到成年人在激活玩具前挣扎了半分钟的婴儿在给他们自己的复杂玩具玩时仍然坚持，而那些只看到成人快速和轻松成功的婴儿表现出的勇气较小。科学，这个问题 p。1290; 另见第。1236 婴儿不仅仅是模仿成年人的动作，还可以模仿付出的努力。坚持，超越智商，与长期的学术成果有关。为了观察成人模型对婴儿持久性的影响，我们进行了一项实验，其中 15 个月大的婴儿被分配到以下三种条件之一： 努力条件，他们看到成人使用各种方法反复尝试，以达到两个不同的目标中的每一个；成人毫不费力地实现目标的“无需努力”条件；或基线条件。然后给婴儿一个困难的、新奇的任务。在初步研究和两个预先注册的实验（N = 262）中，努力条件下的婴儿比其他条件下的婴儿为实现目标做出了更多的尝试。教学提示调节了效果。