Effort and Learning-Related Choices: the Impact of Sympathetic Activity and Ability Beliefs

Some students view their abilities as malleable with effort and aim to improve themselves (incremental beliefs), while others believe abilities are fixed and cannot change with effort, and aim to prove themselves (entity beliefs). Here, we investigated how such ability beliefs in undergraduates (n=115) relate to their effort investment during a challenging arithmetic task, indexed by whether they make low vs high effort learning-related choices (easy vs difficult problems), and whether this relation is influenced by 1) making mistakes and 2) sympathetic activity measured with impedance cardiography. Results show that incremental theorists chose relatively higher difficulty levels compared to entity theorists. Moreover, higher sympathetic activity was associated with subsequently choosing lower difficulty levels. This effect was stronger for entity theorists, indicating that higher sympathetic activity affected their choices more. Also, helplessness mediated the relation between ability beliefs and chosen difficulty level.