Experimental Design
The Prolific experiment will consist of two parts. In the first part, participants have to complete a survey, where information about participants’ demographics (age, gender, education, race), risk preferences, loss aversion, ambition, level of self-esteem, beliefs about their own performance, and Big-5 Personality traits will be collected. In addition, an open question (“If you think about yourself: Are you a person who is motivated by challenges or do too challenging tasks rather demotivate you? Please explain also why this is the case in your view.”) will be asked. After that, participants complete a real-effort task for 10 minutes with an opportunity to train themselves for 30 seconds before. They are not incentivized and receive only a participation fee for completing this part of the experiment.
The real-effort task follows DellaVigna and Pope (2018): Participants have to alternately press 'a' and 'b' buttons on their keyboards. For each correct sequence pressed, they get 1 point. All participants receive information about the number of gained points on their screen.
We invite participants again after approximately one week to participate in the second part of the experiment. We will only invite participants who have completed all the sections from the first part of the study. In the second part, they again have to do the same real-effort task for 10 minutes. However, before starting with the task, each of them is assigned with a goal, which is a number of points that they have to gain to receive a financial bonus. After finishing the real-effort task, participants fill out a short post-survey consisting of questions about their enjoyment of the task. At the end of the experiment, workers will be redirected to Prolific, and will receive the participation fees and bonuses (for those who reached the goal).