When deciding if something is worth the effort, whether you’ve already exerted yourself or face the prospect of work changes your calculus. That’s what we found in our new research, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
When you consider a future effort, more work makes the outcome less appealing. But once you’ve completed the work, more effort makes the outcome seem more valuable. We also discovered that hiding behind this general principle of timing there are individual differences in how future and past effort shapes people’s value for the fruits of their labor.
What’s it worth to you?
In our experiment, we gave participants a choice between a fixed amount of money and a household item – a mug – that they could take home if they exerted some amount of physical effort, roughly equivalent to walking up one, two or three flights of stairs.
This setup allowed us to determine the value each person placed on the effort – did it add to or subtract from the value of the item? For instance, if putting in a little more effort made someone switch their decision and decide to go with the cash instead of the mug, we could tell that they valued the mug plus that amount of effort less than that sum of money.
We also manipulated the time aspect of effort. When the effort was in the future, participants decided whether they wanted to go with the cash or get the mug with some effort. When the effort was in the past, participants decided whether they wanted to cash in the mug they had already earned with effort.
As we had expected, future effort generally detracted from the value of the mug, but the past effort generally increased it.
But these general trends do not tell the whole story. Not everyone responds to effort the same way. Our study also uncovered striking individual differences. Four distinct patterns emerged:
For some people, extra effort always subtracted value.
Others consistently preferred items with more work.
Many showed mixed patterns, where moderate effort increased value but excessive effort decreased it.
Some experienced the opposite: initially disliking effort, then finding greater value at higher levels.
These changing patterns show that one’s relationship with effort isn’t simple. For many people, there’s a sweet spot – a little effort might make something more valuable, but push too far and the value drops. It’s like enjoying a 30-minute workout but dreading a 2-hour session, or conversely, feeling that a 5-minute workout isn’t worth changing clothes for, but a 45-minute session feels satisfying.
Our paper offers a mathematical model that accounts for these individual differences by proposing that your mind flexibly computes costs and benefits of effort.
Why violate the ‘law of less work?’
Why should timing even matter for effort? It seems obvious that reason and nature would teach you to always avoid and dislike effort.
