On the Prospect of Knowing: Providing Solutions Can Reduce Persistence Evan F. Risko, Michelle Huh, and David McLean University of Waterloo Amanda M. Ferguson University of Toronto Our willingness to persist in problem solving is often held up as a critical component in being successful. Allied against this ability, however, are a number of situational factors that undermine our persistence. In the present investigation, the authors examine 1 such factor— knowing that the answers to a problem are easily accessible. Does having answers to a problem available reduce our willingness to persist in solving it ourselves? Across 4 experiments, participants (university students from a large Canadian University) solved multisolution anagrams and were either provided the answers after giving up (and knew they would receive the answers) or not. Results demonstrated that individuals persisted for less time in the former condition. In addition, participants did not seem to be aware of the effect that answers had on their decisions to quit. Implications for our understanding of the role that access to answers has on persistence across a number of domains (e.g., education, Internet) are discussed. Keywords: persistence, problem solving, effort “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” —Albert Einstein Perseverance in the face of challenge is often associated with success (e.g., grit; Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007; Duckworth & Gross, 2014). As such, understanding the factors that can undermine our willingness to persist in problem solving contexts represents an important goal in psychological science with wide-ranging implications. In the present investigation, we examine one kind of potentially subversive factor—the known availability of answers. Whether we are solving a brainteaser or doing math homework, our problem solving is often done knowing that at any moment we could forego the effortful pursuit of the solution and find out the answer by accessing readily accessible solutions (e.g., at the back of the book). Does such access to answers influence our willingness to persist? In the present inves- tigation, we report four experiments examining this question. On the Potential Influence of Answers The possibility that having access to answers could undermine our persistence in trying to solve a problem is supported by two relatively well-accepted ideas. First, individuals have a strong tendency to avoid effort including the kind of cognitive effort involved in problem solving (e.g., we are cognitive misers; Dunn & Risko, 2016; Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Kool, McGuire, Rosen, & Botvinick, 2010; Risko, Medimorec, Chisholm, & Kingstone, 2014; Zipf, 1949). For example, provided two options, individuals will tend to avoid the one perceived to be more cognitively effortful (e.g., Dunn & Risko, 2016; Dunn, Lutes, & Risko, 2016; Kool et al., 2010) and as a cognitive task gets more difficult the likelihood that an individual spontaneously adopts an external (i.e., noncognitive) solution increases (e.g., Risko et al., 2014; Risko & Dunn, 2015; Risko & Gilbert, 2016). When engaged in trying to solve a given problem (e.g., an anagram), the availability of the answer could represent a means of averting the cognitive effort required to generate that answer. The second idea is that not knowing an answer likely represents an aversive state and finding out represents a positive one (e.g., Kang et al., 2009; Loewenstein, 1994). For example, individuals are willing to incur a cost (i.e., time, tokens) to find out answers (i.e., to exit the aversive state of not knowing) to curiosity-provoking questions (Kang et al., 2009). The tendency to avoid cognitive effort in conjunction with the reward-like properties of satiating our curiosity could be interpreted as forces (e.g., Kruglanski et al., 2012) aligned against persisting in problem solving when the answers are provided relative to when they are not (i.e., quitting is both easy and rewarded). Of course, opposing forces exist in the context of problem solving. For example, the positive emotion associated with solving a challenging problem can represent a potent reward in and of itself (e.g., Brennan, Watson, Kingstone, & Enns, 2011; Cacioppo, Petty, Feinstein, & Jarvis, 1996; Pekrun, 2006). This reward, for example, likely buoys the market for puzzles of various kinds (e.g., crosswords, Sudoku, jumbles) and the popularity of these activities goes some way in undermining a simple “cognitive miser” notion (i.e., that cognitive effort is the only determinant of behavior; see Kool et al., 2010 for relevant discussion). From this perspective, Evan F. Risko, Michelle Huh, and David McLean, Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo; Amanda M. Ferguson, Psychological Clinical Science, University of Toronto. This research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada discovery grant, funding from the Canada Research Chairs program, and an Early Researcher Award from the Prov- ince of Ontario to Evan F. Risko. Parts of the research reported here was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behav- iour and Cognitive Science in 2016. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Evan F. Risko, Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3G1, Canada. E-mail: efrisko@ uwaterloo.ca This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General © 2017 American Psychological Association 2017, Vol. 146, No. 12, 1677–1693 0096-3445/17/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000334 1677