A study investigated persistence as a function of two variables: the disposition to be self-
attentive (called private self-consciousness) and outcome feedback on a prior task that was
described as closely related to the target task. More specifically, subjects first completed a
concealed-figures test and were told that their performances were either very good or very
poor. The second test, which ostensibly measured the same abilities, was an insolvable
design problem that is commonly used to measure persistence. Feedback concerning prior�…