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Goal orientation theory identifies mastery-oriented people as adaptive and highly persistent when pursuing a goal. Performance-oriented people are described as being less persistent, and tend to show more maladaptive responses. However, previous works that have studied persistence have not always found that performance-oriented participants show the least persistence. In addition, it is not easy to conclude if the persistence measured in the studies implies a stubborn response and therefore if it is a maladaptive response. In this work, we classify participants as mastery- or performance-oriented using an objective test and we employ a behavioral task to study persistence defined as stubbornness. When studying response patterns, we found that performance-oriented students were more stubborn. The behavioral analysis performed in this work offers complement and rich information and provides empirical support for the goal orientation theory.

El presente trabajo tiene por objeto diseñar una prueba objetiva para la evaluación de la persistencia como variable de personalidad. Se analizan las condiciones para la evaluación de la persistencia en el comportamiento de acuerdo con los conceptos de persistencia motivacional, persistencia obcecación y persistencia exploración. Se propone como posible contexto para la evaluación de la persistencia un procedimiento de condicionamiento operante libre con fases de adquisición y extinción. Los resultados muestran que la prueba diseñada permite medir en la muestra estudiada las tres variables de persistencia. Los índices de consistencia interna son .928, para persistencia motivacional, .683 y .580 para los dos indicadores de persistencia obcecación y .905 para persistencia exploración. Las relaciones de cada una de las variables de persistencia con la motivación inicial de los participantes en la prueba son coherentes con la literatura. The aim of the present study was to design an objective task to assess persistence as a personality variable. The conditions for assessing behavioral persistence were analyzed according to the concepts of motivational persistence, obstinate persistence and exploratory persistence. A free operant procedure with an acquisition and an extinction phase was used as a possible context for assessing persistence. The results show that the designed task enabled the measurement of the three variables of persistence in the sample studied. Internal consistency indexes were .928 for motivational persistence, .683 and .580 for the two indicators of obstinate persistence, and .905 for exploratory persistence. The relationships between each persistence variable and the initial motivation of the participants are consistent with those described in the literature.