Verified by 
Stress is a big part of many people’s daily lives. Students are anxious about assignments, tests, and their workload. Employees are concerned about keeping their jobs and they work long hours to deal with the tasks they are given. This stress affects how well people work as well as the quality of their leisure and family time.
How does all of this stress affect people’s ability to stick with the tasks they are given at work? This question is important, because if stress makes it harder for people to persist with the work they are doing, then stress right now might actually create future stress.
This issue was addressed in a paper by Jamil Bhanji, Eunbin Kim, and Mauricio Delgado in a paper in the March, 2016 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Participants in their study were given a stress manipulation prior to doing a task that measured persistence. In the stress manipulation, some people were asked to place one hand in a bucket of very cold water for 2 minutes by an experimenter wearing a lab coat while their responses were videotaped for later analysis. This manipulation has been shown in previous studies to lead to increased stress as measured by increases in the stress hormone cortisol in saliva. A second group held their hand in a bucket of warm water for 2 minutes by an experimenter not wearing a lab coat, and there was no video taken.
After this stress manipulation, participants played a persistence game on a computer. They were asked to select one of three “degrees” to pursue. Achieving a degree would get them a certain number of points. Along the way in this game, some participants had to take ‘exams’ that involved selecting the correct button from a set. If they gave the wrong answer, they were sent back to the beginning of the game and were asked to select a degree to pursue. Participants could learn which button had the correct answer for a particular degree, and that button was always correct for that degree. So, the failures in this task were controllable.
A second group did a similar task, but the failures were uncontrollable. For this group, as they pursued a degree courses they would be asked to select a button to determine whether a course they were taken had been cancelled. When a course was cancelled, they were sent back to the start of the task. The course cancellations were random, which is what made the failures uncontrollable.
The experimenters were interested in how often people would select the same degree program again rather than trying a different one. They also measured how upset people were by the failures in the task.
When the failures were uncontrollable (that is, they were random cancellations of classes), then participants who were stressed were much less likely to select the same degree program again than the participants who were not stressed. So, stress affected persistence when the failures were not controllable.
When the failures were controllable (because participants could learn which button gave correct exam answers), then stress did not affect persistence. Participants in this condition were equally likely to persist regardless of their stress level.
The participants who were stressed were much more upset by uncontrollable failures than by controllable failures.
This research suggests that background stress can influence whether people persist on tasks in the face of failure. A critical component of this effect is whether the failure reflects something people believe they can control. When the situation is one that feels like it falls outside of someone’s control, then stress leads them to give up more easily than when the situation feels like it is within their control.
This finding is important, because many workplace situations feel like they are being controlled by someone else. Teachers often select the assignments and exams that students take. Supervisors and managers often influence the workload of employees. Thus, the stress felt by students and employees may actually make it harder for them to stick to the tasks they are given. Thus, it may be useful to help people under stress to feel more control over their situation as a way of improving persistence.
Follow me on Twitter.
And on Facebook and on Google+.
Check out my book Smart Change.
And my books Smart Thinking and Habits of Leadership
Listen to my radio show on KUT radio in Austin Two Guys on Your Head and follow 2GoYH on Twitter and on Facebook. The show is available on iTunes and Stitcher.
