Most of the students did cheat. However, the students who had previously been required to solve difficult anagrams cheated less than the others. Rewarded high performance on preliminary tasks reduced the number of anagrams that students falsely claimed to solve. These results suggest that an individual's honesty is influenced by the generalized effects of rewarded high effort. For instance, preadolescent students who were rewarded for reading with high accuracy subsequently produced more accurate drawings and stories than did those who had been rewarded for reading with high speed or for the mere completion of the reading task.
Creativity involves the generation of novel behavior that meets a standard of quality or utility.
Because daily experience rewards various types of conventional performance more frequently than novel responding, people promised reward for carrying out tasks, without a clear indication that creativity is required, may respond conventifinally rather than creatively. Preliminary reward for creativity caused the children to interpret the subsequent promise of reward for unspecified performance as an indication that novelty was needed to obtain the reward, causing the children to increase their creativity. These results suggest that reward for creative performance produces a generalized increase in creativity. Conclusion The individual's decision concerning how much effort to exert in goal-directed behavior is influenced by the generalized efforts of prior reward for low or high effort. The occurrence of learned individual differences in industriousness is shown by a variety of studies both with lower animals and humans.