Legacy, Leisure and the ‘Work Hard – Play Hard’ Hypothesis

INTRODUCTION

‘Work hard – play hard’ is a familiar slogan in popular culture. Its origin is uncertain but it can be traced to at least 1827 in Newnham [1]: "Whatever is done, it should be habitually done with earnestness; in every pursuit, exertion should be employed; work hard and play hard; always recollecting that quiescence, the stillness of inactivity is destructive to the mental welfare, and approaches very nearly to the winter of the faculties, the torpor of an hibernating animal, the unprotected state of sleep, or the complete cessation of life" (p. 602). The phrase also appears in an 1884 advertisement for Racine College (a 19^th Century Episcopal preparatory school in Racine, Wisconsin) where it is attributed to its first Warden, James deKoven within the motto "Work hard, Play hard, Pray hard." [2, p. 88]. The traditional inference, therefore, involves a work ethic, with the principal focus on virtue in hard work, and connecting this (secondarily it seems) to associated value in leisure (enjoyable free-time pursuits); apparently, mental welfare required that both be pursued with gusto (along with prayer, for the converted).

The modern inference of ‘work hard – play hard’, however, remains uncertain. Thus, we conducted an exploratory study in order to initiate interest in uncovering a deeper understanding of this popular manifesto within contemporary society. An interesting question is whether ‘work hard – play hard’ is meant as a kind of prescription for a cultural norm or lifestyle (effected through social learning) to indulge in leisure following (as an earned reward for, or to motivate additional) hard work. Perhaps it serves to extol a kind of ‘work-life’ balance or blend, thus recommending (for one’s well-being) against ‘all work and no play’ [3, 4]. Or perhaps ‘work hard, play hard’ refers to an assumed, perceived or expected association between two fundamental human penchants across a range of phenotypic variation (without any particular precedence of one necessarily needing to follow or to be evoked/triggered by the other). In other words, perhaps—interacting with effects of environment / social learning—there are deeply ingrained personality traits that drive one to work hard, and that these tend generally to be correlated with personality traits (also deeply ingrained) that drive one to play hard.

Or perhaps their alleged positive relationship is largely mythical, or weak at best. In addition to the slogan’s meaning or why it exists, even more fundamentally the question remains as to the extent that ‘working hard’ and ‘playing hard’ tend in fact to be found together in representing the interests and motivations of resident individuals within a population. Even clear anecdotal evidence is hard to find. The present study was designed to address this question with an empirical test using a large sample population of undergraduate students enrolled at a Canadian university. Our central objective was to test the prediction, according to the ‘work hard – play hard’ hypothesis, that attraction to accomplishment-based legacy/fame (‘work’) and attraction to leisure (‘play’) would be strongly correlated, consistent with the popular ‘work hard – play hard’ aphorism.

METHODS

RESULTS

Voluntary responses were received from 1,396 participants, involving 267 males and 1129 females (reflecting a strongly female biased sex ratio among resident students). The vast majority (90%) were between 18-21 years of age, and with a Canadian cultural affiliation (84%) (Table 1). About half of the participants (48%) identified themselves as having a religious affiliation, mostly Christian-based (36%), and half (52%) indicated no current religious affiliation (Table 1).

Neither the index of attraction to accomplishment, nor the index of attraction to leisure was significantly affected by question order (Group A versus Group B) (P>0.05, Mann-Whitney U). Hence there was no evidence of priming effect—in Group A, in terms of their earlier question responses regarding mortality salience / negative mood expression—on later question responses regarding attraction to accomplishment, or attraction to leisure. Males and females did not differ significantly (P>0.05, Mann-Whitney U) in terms of mortality salience index, negative mood index, attraction to leisure, or attraction to accomplishment — and ANOVAS (GLM or Kruskal-Wallis) revealed no significant (P>0.05) interaction effect with Group (A versus B), for any of the six indices. Female participants however reported significantly greater attraction to both religion (P<0.001; Mann-Whitney U) and parenthood (P<0.001, Mann-Whitney U) compared with male participants.

Pairwise plots of the six variables are shown in Fig. (1). Partial correlation coefficients were used because this evaluates a particular pairwise relationship while ‘holding constant’ the potentially confounding effects of correlations that the two variables might have with other variables in the data set at the same time. By far the strongest relationship was detected between attraction to accomplishment and attraction to leisure (Figs. 2a, 3). Attractions to parenthood and religion were also strongly correlated, and correlations of parenthood with attractions to both accomplishment and leisure were particularly significant as well (Fig. 3). Mortality salience index was negatively correlated with negative mood index (P<0.001), but positively correlated with both attraction to accomplishment (P<0.05) and attraction to leisure (P<0.01). Negative mood index was positively correlated with both attraction parenthood (P<0.001) and attraction to leisure (P<0.05), but negatively correlated with attraction to religion (P<0.05) (Fig. 3).

It is difficult however to do exploratory data analyses on 6-dimensional data. The multivariate structure of the data is thus better accounted for in the ordination analyses, where we are seeking to reduce the dimensionality. This involved two approaches. In the first — classical MDS (equivalent to Principal Components Analysis (PCA) — the first two components explain 60% of the variation in the original data (Table 2). Looking at the loadings (equivalent to coefficients of the linear transformation used to create each component), the first component appears to be strongly associated with both religion and parenthood — that is, people who have either large values for both religion and parenthood or small values for both religion and parenthood (Table 2). The second component appears to be strongly associated with people who have large values for parenthood but small values for religion, or vice-versa. The second component also suggests that those with lower religion scores and higher parenthood scores are attracted to both accomplishment and leisure. The third component is associated with a negative relationship between mortality salience and parenthood, but explains only 15% of the total variation. The fourth component is associated with a contrast between parenthood and mortality salience, and accomplishment and leisure, but explains only 12% of the total variation. The standard way to decide on the number of components to use is to look at the variance explained by each component (using a Scree Plot) and choose the number where the plot bends (i.e. just before it levels off). In our data, this occurs at 2.

The second approach then involved non-metric MDS, allowing a monotonic transformation of the dissimilarities before ordination and display in two-dimensional space. Thus, only the rank of the dissimilarities is important. This makes non-metric ordination more robust to differences in scale both between and within variables. The two dimensional non-metric MDS representation has a boomerang shape (Fig. 4a) suggesting that there are three groups present, which we distinguished using k-means clustering [13], with two groups making up the ‘arms’ of the ‘boomerang’, and the third group, the ‘elbow" (Fig. 4b). Each individual in the data set is thus classified here as one of three types. Mapping these onto the pairwise scatterplot shows that the types can be characterized by their index scores (Fig. 5), and also appear to agree more or less with the structure suggested by the principal components analysis. Most obviously, the three types are associated with: (1; red) low religion / low parenthood scores; (2; green) high religion / high parenthood scores; and (3; blue) low religion / high parenthood scores (Fig. 5, top left panels).

DISCUSSION

Our results provide strong empirical support for the ‘work hard – play hard’ hypothesis; i.e. there is a conspicuous association between desire to work hard (reflected by our index of attraction to accomplishment) and desire to play hard (reflected by our index of attraction to leisure) for a Canadian university undergraduate student population (Fig. 2). Moreover, this correlation was much stronger than any other pairwise correlation for the 6 indices (Fig. 3). The ‘work hard – play hard’ connection, therefore, is clearly not just mythical or ideological; it actually displays as a particular pattern of co-variation in motivations / personalities — at least for our sample of university undergraduate students.

The MDS analyses allows us to explore post-hoc hypotheses as potential inspiration for future research, pointing to preliminary evidence suggesting that attraction to parenthood and religion—interacting with attraction to legacy and leisure—may also be diagnostic in representing motivational types. In particular, the results suggest a classification of participants into three more or less distinct clusters based on attractions to Religion and Parenthood (Fig. 4, Fig. 5, top left panels): In terms of the ‘work hard – play hard’ scale, type (1; red)—distinguished by low attraction to both parenthood and religion—tend to align themselves with low attraction also to both accomplishment and leisure (essentially an ‘apathetic type’) (Fig. 2b). Type (2; green)—distinguished by high attraction to both parenthood and religion—distribute themselves nearly evenly in terms of moderate attraction to both accomplishment and leisure (essentially a ‘religious, family-oriented type’). And Type (3; blue)—distinguished by high attraction to parenthood (and low attraction to religion)—tend to align themselves with high attraction also to both accomplishment and leisure (essentially a secular ‘go-getter type’) (Fig. 2b).

Many previously published references to the ‘work hard – play hard’ slogan seem at best clichéd, based not so much on empirical evidence, but serving as a motto for group bonding/solidarity in some professional (e.g. engineering) cultures [14], or as an organizational manifesto for motivating employees, engendering a ‘team spirit’, or for attracting a particular type of employee [15]. In these contexts, ‘work hard – play hard’ serves to legitimate that work predominates; it “… encompasses much of an image of the ethic of high achievement—long hours in the office followed by champagne-drinking evenings” [16, p. 584]; “... the party image supports the notion of the hard-working, dedicated engineer who meets the heavy demands of his or her profession and unwinds with intensity and energy” [14, p. 679].

The above interpretations imply (with largely anecdotal evidence) that ‘work hard – play hard’ is a lifestyle that one may (or may not) learn from membership within a particular professional or organizational culture. And, importantly here, in virtually all cases, ‘play’ is associated with partying (commonly involving alcohol or recreational drug use) (see also [17]). In contrast, ‘play’ in our study is represented more broadly as ‘leisure’, involving engagement in many dozens of possible domains of pleasurable free-time enjoyment (Appendix 4). The participants in our study also have no particular organizational affiliation and have a broad range of career aspirations. They are all university undergraduate students (and hence mostly not yet fully engaged in the world of work), and identify as mostly female and mostly Canadian, but they were sampled broadly from across many (more or less) equally-demanding academic programs/disciplines (ranging from sciences, to social sciences and the humanities) within the school’s Faculty of Arts and Science.

Students that have self-imposing inclinations to work harder may be drawn to engage in more leisure as respite from their harder-working habits [18, 19]. However, there is no reason to expect that a higher attraction to accomplishment in our data set represents students that have higher demands placed on them by their particular academic programs. Playing hard then, rather than a ‘recovery’ from working hard, may instead be the goal that requires working hard in order to achieve or to earn; i.e. perhaps “… people work to live, and live to play” [3, p. 428]. A large literature in psychology has identified leisure as a core ingredient for happiness and overall well-being [20], but work can also be an important source of self-esteem and fulfillment in life [21].

The ‘work hard – play hard’ association then is more than just a cliché, and possibly also more than just a product of social learning. Our data suggest that it may characterize a bivariate motivational construct or personality continuum — from low intensity to high intensity (Fig. 2), where ‘working hard’ may not necessarily evoke ‘playing hard’, or vice versa. Research on personality has produced several classification schemes [22] in which elements of ‘attraction to accomplishment’ (hard working, competitive, ambitious, fame-seeking) figure prominently as a component of particular ‘types’ [23]. Desire for fame/social recognition has been shown to be associated with neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness [24], narcissism and the need to belong and feel valued by others [25], and with desire for materialism [26].

In contrast, while leisure is the subject of a large literature in sociology [27-30], ‘attraction to leisure’ or ‘play’ per se is scarcely represented as a component descriptor of specific personality types in traditional classifications. Personality however may partially influence how leisure time is spent [31-34], and the latter may map onto particular work interests [35]. Some studies, for example, have found extroversion to be positively associated with some leisure pursuits [36]. Kirkcaldy and Cooper [37] report a positive association between a particular style of leisure preference (competitive sports games) and higher scores on work-oriented competitiveness. Other studies however have shown that the amount of participation (time spent) in leisure pursuits can be negatively correlated with Type A behavior [38, 39], assertiveness [40], and with extroversion, conscientiousness, and openness [41]. But these data suggest a time trade-off constraint effect — i.e. more work leaves less time for play, and vice versa — rather than an interest/attraction/motivation trade-off (although the latter might be expected for workaholics and hedonists).

One body of research has suggested that participation in leisure activities “… broadens an individual’s perspective on the world-of-work …” and “ …facilitates the synthesizing process of vocational development.” [42, p. 244]. These earlier studies (some also involving university students) have thus shown in some cases that more engagement with leisure tends to be associated with better academic outcomes, and greater preparation and competence for exploring and deciding among work/career options [42-44].

We find our results interesting to interpret from an evolutionary function perspective [45] — i.e., to ask: do 'working hard' and 'playing hard' represent deeply ingrained motivations (conscious or unconscious), representing priorities / personalities informed at least partially by genetic inheritance, resulting from selection in the ancestral past?  We suggest that these motivations may tend to occur together because they represent components of innate human drives that routinely served to alleviate the same uniquely human limitation on the reproductive success of ancestors: self-impermanence anxiety (fear of failed legacy) associated with mortality salience [6, 46-49]. Specifically, attraction to accomplishment can be regarded as a component of ‘legacy drive’, i.e. an impulsive motivation to engage in goals that instill a delusional sense of being able to leave ‘something of oneself’ — an 'extension-of-self' — for the future, as a perception of death transcendence. Similarly, attraction to play can be regarded as a manifestation of ‘leisure drive’, also delivering self-impermanence anxiety buffers, but of a different sort — involving ‘escape-from-self’, as distractions, deployed through pleasurable free-time indulgences. Interestingly, there is an echo of this in the quotation from Newnham [1] (1827) in our Introduction: “… the stillness of inactivity is destructive to the mental welfare, and approaches very nearly to … the complete cessation of life”. 

But why the variation in our data?  In other words, what accounts for participants who declared relatively low attractions to work (accomplishment/fame), or play, or both? A possible answer may be found in recognizing that legacy delusions can be associated with not just accomplishment, but also (or instead) with additional ‘post-self’ domains [49]: through having offspring (attraction to parenthood), and through the ‘soul’ narrative (attraction to religion) [50-53]. Thus our multivariate analysis suggests that there may be two distinguishable anxiety-buffering strategies that involve delusions of legacy: one incorporating primarily religion combined with parenthood — the ‘religious family-oriented’ type (i.e. type 2, green in Fig. (5), top left panels) — and one involving primarily accomplishment (also with parenthood), but combined strongly with leisure (P<0.001, Fig. 3) in place of religion — the secular ‘go-getter’ (type 3, blue in Figs. (2b, 5)); i.e. the ‘work hard – play hard’ type. Leisure drive here may thus serve as an effective distraction from self-impermanence anxiety, deployed especially when buffers available from belief in religion are absent.

These interpretations are congruent with a now large body of research on terror management theory, showing deployment of mortality anxiety buffers manifesting as behaviours that bolster self-esteem (meaning/purpose/redemption/value for one’s life), connected with a sense of membership in (and validation for) ‘larger than self’ cultural worldviews [54, 55]. Many of these are associated with religion, spirituality, mysticism and other supernatural conceptions [50, 56]. But in one recent study [7], students who were asked to contemplate about their own death reported higher desire for fame than did students asked to consider other unpleasant experiences. In our study, we also incorporated experimental mortality priming, and negative mood priming (by switching the order of the question series for two separate groups) to test their effects on participant responses for attraction to accomplishment and for attraction to leisure. No significant priming effects were detected but baseline expressions of mortality salience and negative mood (regardless of group), nevertheless showed several significant correlations with other indices.

Interestingly, while attractions to religion and parenthood are strongly correlated, both are independent of our assessment of base-line mortality salience (Fig. 3). Note that there was no test, in our study, of mortality priming on attraction to either religion or parenthood; and note also that we can reasonably assume that our pool of participants—undergraduate university students—has generally not (yet) had personal experience as parents. A higher attraction to religion in our data, however, is generally associated with less negative mood (P<0.05; Fig. 3), suggesting, for some participants at least, a palliative role for religion in anxiety/self-esteem management, consistent with previous studies [57, 58]. Other correlation results (Fig. 3), however, suggest that (for some participants at least): (i) those with higher negative mood scores tend to be more attracted to parenthood (especially; P<0.001) and (to a less extent) more attracted to leisure (P<0.05); (ii) those with relatively high mortality salience tend to be attracted to both accomplishment and leisure (possibly as mortality anxiety buffers — and possibly accounting in turn for the association of mortality salience with a relatively weak expression of negative mood (P<0.05).

Are there genes that inform legacy drive and leisure drive? If so, their identification awaits further research, but their postulation is plausible given recent compelling evidence for heritable genetic variation in subjective well being [59-62] and other components of personality [63]. The broad range of between-individual variation in our data (Figs. 1, 2) is thus undoubtedly a product of environmental / social learning variation, combined with genetic variation, plus their interaction. For those participants in our study toward the ‘low’ end of this variation - i.e. the ‘apathetic’ type (1; red) with relatively low attraction to everything (religion, parenthood, accomplishment, and leisure) (Fig. 5) — an interesting question is whether these represent individuals that happen not to have inherited genetic predisposition for strong legacy drive or for strong leisure drive. Alternatively, perhaps they have this inheritance but only rarely does personal experience trigger need to deploy these drives. Compared with other participants, therefore, they may tend to express relatively little attraction to these domains of legacy and leisure simply because—luckily for them—they happen to enjoy relatively low base-line mortality salience and low expression of negative mood.

CONCLUSION

Our results provide, in our view, the most convincing empirical support to date for the 'work hard – play hard' hypothesis. We are unaware of any previous research examining the question of whether inclinations for ‘working hard’ and ‘playing hard’ tend to be found together. And so while our results and conclusions are necessarily limited to inferences from questionnaire data collected from participants (university students) that are not representative of broader society, they nevertheless provide a novel starting point for informing future research. In particular, we think, they point to opportunities for new directions of study in the interpretation of evolutionary roots of human nature and culture associated with work and play.

REFERENCES