We have presented our first paper using the data collected in Madrid at conferences and seminar series. A paper written for a Special Issue of the American Behavioral Scientist by Paula Apascaritei, Simona Demel and Jonas Radl, has been presented three times so far. First, Simona Demel presented it at the ESA 2020 Global Around-the-Clock Virtual Conference. Next, Jonas Radl presented it in the “Methods of empirical social research” section at the Congress of the German Sociological Association, and then again in the seminar series at the Institute for Analytical Sociology. We are grateful for the very helpful feedback that we received!
The main aim of the paper was to examine the capacity of prominent survey-based effort proxies (such as conscientiousness and need for cognition) to predict real effort provision. Do people who “talk the talk” of hard work also “walk the walk” and make costly effort investments? Overall, we find there is a big difference between saying and doing when it comes to effortful persistence, and this difference is even larger when there are no direct material incentives in place to reward effort provision.
