Effort Reassignment Tests Persistence Transfer

This hypothesis asks whether a cultural practice persists because people remember investing effort in its lineage: credit for finished work may guide later voluntary persistence. Participants complete equal neutral work while learning two narrative-sharing lineages equally well. After a recommendation-system reset, all receive the same fixed opportunities. The comparison uses unchanged credit, transparent reassignment, relabelling, or general acknowledgement; pay, audience and material benefits stay constant. Persistence shifting toward the newly credited lineage would support a proposed source-specific mental-accounting mechanism. If ordinary accounting models predict the shift equally well, the distinct mechanism remains unproven.