True grit? The perception of a partner's effort boosts cognitive control to sustain commitment in joint action

Recent research has produced evidence that the perception of a partner's effort increases people's sense of commitment to joint actions, leading to increased effort, persistence and performance on boring and effortful tasks (Székely & Michael, 2018; Chennells & Michael, 2018). However, the cognitive and motivational processes underlying these effects remain unclear. The current study was designed to test the hypothesis that the perception of a partner's effort leads to the increased engagement of executive control mechanisms (inhibitory control and supervisory attentional control) to maintain task focus and to avoid temptations and distractions. To this end, we manipulated the perception of a partner's effort using the same stimuli as in Székely & Michael (2018), and measured how participants responded to the commission of errors (post-error reaction time) on a go/no-go task. The results showed that participants decelerated more after errors in the High Perceived Effort condition than in the Low Perceived Effort condition. Insofar as deceleration after an error is a marker of increased supervisory attentional control, our findings suggest that the perception of a partner's effort may boost cognitive control to shield off the temptation to abandon the joint action.