Effort as Person-Focused Praise: "Hard Worker" Has Negative Effects for Adults After a Failure.

Although work with children demonstrates a benefit of process-focused praise relative to person-focused praise on post-failure motivation, few studies have examined this result in adults. We tested the effect of three types of praise on adults' post-failure outcomes: person-focused intelligence ("high intelligence"), person-focused effort ("hard worker"), and process-focused effort ("worked hard") in a sample of 156 adults recruited from Amazon's MTurk. Participants completed a set of easy visual pattern recognition problems and were told that they performed better than most adults and were given one of the three types of feedback.