What is it about?
Everyone is familiar with the negative feeling associated with mental effort. Whether that be filing taxes, studying for an exam, or even counting the number of syllables in this sentence. Researchers however don't yet have a thorough understanding of why mental effort feels costly. The current works investigates a popular theory, the opportunity cost theory, which argues that how effortful a task feels depends on the alternatives you could be doing. For example, how hard it feels to file your taxes should depend on whether you're missing out on a friend's party that night, or avoiding your turn to take out the trash. Despite the popularity of the theory, we find little evidence in favour of it. Instead , we find that people tend to avoid tasks which they perform poorly at and outline a few directions both experimenters and theorists should further consider in future work.
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Why is it important?
Mental fatigue and effort aversion are ubiquitous. If we can develop better theories of what causes mental effort aversion and mental fatigue, then we can develop strategies or redesign systems in order to minimise these so-called effort costs. Aside from simply 'feeling better', reductions in cognitive costs and fatigue may also lead to increased efficiency in the workplace and economy at large.
Perspectives
The opportunity cost theory of effort is neat—I wish it were true. But the more evidence we gather the less it appears to account for why people find thinking costly.
Jake Embrey
University of Chicago
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: On-task errors drive effort avoidance more than opportunity costs., Journal of Experimental Psychology General, April 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/xge0001752.
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