Task Experience and Attitudes Toward Delaying Reward

This study examines the relationship between task experience and attitudes. Specifically tested is the effect of performing a task in which waiting for rewards produces the greatest payoff on attitudes toward delaying reward. High school students were hired to work on a door-to-door selling task; the task was designed so that delaying a sale produced a larger sales commission. Those subjects who recognized and selected a delayed strategy in the task shifted toward a preference for delaying reward. The use of a natural controlled experimental design and the social implications of the study are discussed. Sociologists and psychologists have been much interested in the formation and modification of attitudes and value orientations. Drawing most heavily on the traditions in the sociology of knowledge, Breer and Locke (1965) have speculated that task or work experience is a possible source of attitudes and value orientations. They argue that tasks vary in their intrinsic instrumental characteristics (i.e., elements which will produce success in the task). When presented with a task, an individual identifies the instrumental characteristics, behaves in accordance with them, and as a result of success in the task develops a positive orientation toward these instrumental behaviors. For example, when presented with a task where working alone promotes success, an individual should identify and adopt an individual approach in the performance of this task and subsequently develop preferences for working alone. When placed in other task situations, the individual should generalize these preferences for working alone to similar tasks and to more abstract attitudinal levels (e.g., working alone is desirable not only in specific tasks, but it is preferable in general). The Breer and Locke framework, then, fixes on task or work experience as a determinant of attitude formation and change. Some empirical support for the effect of differential task experience on attitude change and the subprocesses of lateral and vertical generalization is presented by Breer and Locke (1965), Goodman and Baloff (1968), and Theodore (1965). Yet we have little evidence on the generalizability of the theory. To test the generalizability of the theory the following changes were introduced in this study. First, a new attitude dimension-preference for delaying reward-is employed. The most conclusive experiments used to validate the Breer and Locke theory have been designed around interpersonal relations (e.g., working alone vs. working together). By introducing a new dimension, one which does not focus on interpersonal relations, one can better assess the theory's generalizability. A second means of extending the generalizability of the theory is by testing it in a natural rather than a laboratory setting. All but one of the experiments bearing on this theory have been conducted in a laboratory setting with college students. The exception (Theodore, 1967), a field experiment, yielded inconclusive results. Therefore, it is important to determine if the hypothesized relationships do extend to a natural setting and whether previous findings are a function of the laboratory setting. The development of task theory parallels early research in the instrumental conditioning * Partial support for this research was received from the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago and through an NSF-COSIP Grant awarded through the Department of Sociology, Hollins College.