Ambition and risk-taking have been heralded as important ways for marginalized communities to get out of cycles of poverty. As a result, educational messaging often encourages individuals to strengthen their personal resolve and develop characteristics such as discipline and grit to succeed in ambitious ends. However, recent work in philosophy and sociology highlights that this messaging often does more harm than good for students in these situations. We study similar questions using a different epistemic approach and in simple theoretical models -- we provide a quantitative model of decision-making between stable and risky choices in the improving multi-armed bandits framework. We use this model to first study how individuals' "strategies" are affected by their level of grittiness and how this affects their accrued rewards. Then, we study the impact of various interventions, such as increasing grit or providing a financial safety net. Our investigation of rational decision making involves two different formal models of rationality, the competitive ratio between the accrued reward and the optimal reward and Bayesian quantification of uncertainty.

翻译：雄心与冒险精神常被视为边缘化群体摆脱贫困循环的重要途径。因此，教育宣传往往鼓励个体增强个人决心，培养自律与坚韧等品质，以期在远大目标上取得成功。然而，哲学与社会学的最新研究表明，此类宣传对身处此境的学生往往弊大于利。我们采用不同的认知方法，通过简洁的理论模型研究类似问题——我们在改进型多臂老虎机框架下，提出了一个在稳定选择与风险选择之间进行决策的量化模型。利用该模型，我们首先研究了个体的"策略"如何受其坚韧程度影响，以及这种影响如何作用于其累积收益。随后，我们考察了多种干预措施（如提升坚韧性、提供财务安全网）的影响效果。我们对理性决策的研究涉及两种不同的形式化理性模型：累积收益与最优收益间的竞争比，以及不确定性的贝叶斯量化。