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True grit? The perception of a partner's effort boosts cognitive control to sustain commitment in joint action
Székely, Marcell McEllin, Luke Butterfill, Stephen Michael, John
Székely, Marcell
McEllin, Luke
Butterfill, Stephen
Michael, John
Title / Series / Name
New Ideas in Psychology
Publication Volume
82
Publication Issue
Pages
Editors
Keywords
Attention
Cognitive control
Commitment
Joint action
Mental effort
Motivation
Psychology (miscellaneous)
General Psychology
Cognitive control
Commitment
Joint action
Mental effort
Motivation
Psychology (miscellaneous)
General Psychology
Files
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McEllin-Luke_2026.pdf
Adobe PDF, 929.38 KB
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/28838
Abstract
Recent research has produced evidence that the perception of a partner's effort increases people's sense of commitment to joint actions, leading to increased effort, persistence and performance on boring and effortful tasks (Székely & Michael, 2018; Chennells & Michael, 2018). However, the cognitive and motivational processes underlying these effects remain unclear. The current study was designed to test the hypothesis that the perception of a partner's effort leads to the increased engagement of executive control mechanisms (inhibitory control and supervisory attentional control) to maintain task focus and to avoid temptations and distractions. To this end, we manipulated the perception of a partner's effort using the same stimuli as in Székely & Michael (2018), and measured how participants responded to the commission of errors (post-error reaction time) on a go/no-go task. The results showed that participants decelerated more after errors in the High Perceived Effort condition than in the Low Perceived Effort condition. Insofar as deceleration after an error is a marker of increased supervisory attentional control, our findings suggest that the perception of a partner's effort may boost cognitive control to shield off the temptation to abandon the joint action.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2026-08
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1016/j.newideapsych.2026.101250