How do we make decisions about effort?

We encounter decisions about effort every day. Do we take the stairs, which is better for our health, or take the elevator, which is much easier? Do we enroll in a more difficult course, which will better equip us with the knowledge and skills we need, or take the easier course, which won’t require as much mental effort? Even long-term goals, like training for a marathon or getting a Ph.D, are comprised of these momentary decisions about effort.

Previous research has shown that when making decisions about effort we often avoid it when we can (e.g., Kool & Botvinick, 2010; Westbrook et al., 2019). On the other hand, we often feel good after exerting more effort, and are even willing to exert effort when the alternative is boredom (e.g., Inzlicht et al., 2018; Wu et al., 2021)! I’m interested in what influences whether we are, and are not, willing to exert effort in service of our goals, and how we can effectively nudge others and ourselves to work harder towards these goals.

My dissertation investigates how social factors like competitive and collaborative contexts can influence how we make decisions about effort, as well as prosocial effort, or our willingness to seek and exert effort for others rather than ourselves.

Competition and collaboration

How do social contexts like competition and collaboration impact our willingness to exert effort? Can manipulating the way a task is framed influence whether we seek or avoid effort? Does it matter if we like or dislike competition? This branch of my research investigates these questions.

This is a poster I presented at the Eastern Psychological Conference in 2024 about my work looking at competition and effort. Click to open it!

Results show that competition increased how much effort participants were willing to exert in a game compared to playing the game alone. Also, effort-seeking, or choosing a higher-effort task for oneself, was influenced by individual differences in competitiveness and achievement motivation. Competitive people, and people who were motivated to not perform worse than others, were more likely to seek out effort during competition trials. This suggests that if competitive people can find a way to introduce healthy competition into a task, it might motivate them to seek out more effort than they otherwise would.

Prosocial effort

We often find ourselves in situations where we can exert effort to help other people rather than ourselves. We can spend time and effort attending an event for a charity rather than doing something for ourselves, and we can dedicate an afternoon to reading and giving feedback on a colleague’s work instead of our own. We can’t exert effort on all things at once, so we often have to choose where to invest our efforts. Previous work has shown that people tend to be selfish with their effort (e.g., Depow et al., 2022; Lockwood et al., 2017); is this a universal bias, or can we counteract it by changing how the choices are presented? This branch of my research looks at ways to overcome a selfish effort bias and encourage more prosocial behavior.