For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the power of embracing challenges.
What’s the best way to encourage people to do something that’s in their best interest, especially when that something is difficult or unpleasant to do? Daphna Oyserman, a professor of psychology at USC, has been thinking about variations on that question for a number of years: how do you influence someone else (or yourself) to study hard, exercise regularly, floss, or put money in a 401k when it requires present sacrifice for a future payoff that seems distant and unlikely? In studying these questions she and her colleagues developed and tested approaches that use identity to spur motivation in several ways: by helping people feel that the future is closer; by showing that the suggested strategies are used by people like them; and by emphasizing that the difficulty of a task does not necessarily mean that the odds of success are low.
But as Oyserman piloted interventions in schools based on that theory, she began to suspect that there was another significant factor at play in whether or not people were able to tackle difficulty. At first she thought it might relate to feelings of morality — but she realized that didn’t quite fit the phenomenon she had observed. “People just feel that suffering is good for you, not because it’s the moral thing to do, but because it’s character-building and — if you’re a religious person — maybe it brings you closer to God,” Oyserman says. “What I hadn’t really thought about is that sometimes engaging in a difficult task is valuable because difficulty and suffering are ennobling.”