How students’ perceptions of the source of effort influence their ability evaluations of other students.

The goal of the present studies was to examine whether students’ reasoning about the relation between levels of effort and ability is influenced by the perceived source of an individual’s effort. Two sources of others’ effort were examined: task-elicited effort, or effort due primarily to the subjective difficulty of the task, and self-initiated effort, or effort determined by students’ own motivation. In 3 studies, undergraduate participants...