People Overestimate How Harshly They Are Evaluated for Disengaging from Passion Pursuit

The call to pursue one’s passion is ubiquitous advice, and prior research highlights the many upsides to doing so. To pursue one’s passion sustainably, people need to try different pursuits— and critically, drop those that are not tenable for them. However, disengaging from a passion is seemingly antithetical to the stereotypical expectations people hold of how passion should be pursued, which is commonly depicted as persevering through challenges. These expectations, we suggest, lead people to perceive disengaging from a passion as a negative event that myopically focuses their attention on the decision to disengage rather than future opportunities to (re-)engage in a new passion. As a result, when people consider giving up on a passion, we hypothesize that they overestimate how harshly their character will be judged by others, and that this occurs because others—from their distant vantage point—see disengaging from a passion as an opportunity to (re-)engage in other passions more than passion pursuers expect they will. These misperceptions, we argue, are consequential because they reduce passion pursuers’ willingness to speak-out against challenging working conditions or pursue other opportunities. We find evidence for these predictions across seven main and three supplemental studies in the lab and field (N=4,825), including samples of PhD students, nurses, and teachers. Our theory and results uncover a critical social impediment to the pursuit of passion: By overestimating how harshly they are judged for giving up, people may struggle to sustainably pursue their passion.