Effort is costly. It can also be rewarding, however, adding value. Here, we explore effort as a source of meaning in peoples’ lives. Across five samples (N = 1,468), we developed and tested a scale measuring the meaning individuals derive from their efforts, called the Meaningfulness of Effort Scale.
People dislike effort and avoid it when they can. Here we suggest that effort also imbues tasks with meaning. This is the case for real-life tasks, but also novel tasks devoid of true purpose. A challenge for cognitive science is to interrogate why effort feels meaningful and under which conditions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.