Persistence - Ambition, Partial Reinforcement
Persistence reflects a heritable bias in the maintenance of behavior despite frustration, fatigue, and intermittent reinforcement. It is observed as industriousness, determination, and perfectionism. Highly Persistent people are hard-working, perserverant, and ambitious overachievers who tend to intensify their effort in response to anticipated reward and perceive frustration and fatigue as a personal challenge. High Persistence is an adaptive behavioral strategy when rewards are intermittent but contingencies remain stable. When the contingencies change rapidly, perseveration becomes maladaptive. Individuals low in Persistence are indolent, inactive, unstable, erratic; they tend to give up easily when faced with frustration, rarely strive for higher accomplishments, and manifest a low level of perseverance even in response to intermittent reward. Accordingly low Persistence is an adaptive strategy when reward contingencies change rapidly and may be maladaptive when rewards are infrequent but occur in the long run. Also, Persistance can be objectively measured by the partial reinforcement extinction effect (PREE) in which persistent individuals are more resistant to the extinction of previously intermittently rewarded behavior that other individuals who have been continuously reinforced.