Effects of praise and “easy” feedback on children’s persistence and self-evaluations

Abstract

Praise is thought to affect children’s responses to failure, yet other potentially impactful messages about effort have been rarely studied. We experimentally investigated the effects of praise and “easy” feedback after success on children’s persistence and self-evaluations after failure. Children (N = 150; M_age = 7.97 years, SD = 0.58) from the mid-Atlantic region of the United States (73 girls; 79% White) heard one of five types of feedback from an experimenter after success on online tangram puzzles: process praise (“You must have worked hard on that puzzle”), person praise (“You must be good at puzzles”), process-easy feedback (“It must have been easy to rotate and fit those pieces together”), person-easy feedback (“It must have been an easy puzzle for you”), or a control. Next, children failed to complete a harder tangram puzzle. Preregistered primary analyses revealed no differences in persistence and self-evaluation between person and process praise or between person-easy and process-easy feedback. Exploratory analyses showed that hearing process praise led to greater persistence after failure than the control condition (d = .61) and that process-easy feedback led to greater strategy generation than the control condition. The effects of adult feedback after success may be more context dependent than previously thought.