Subjective (dis)utility of effort: mentally and physically demanding tasks

Abstract

Effort as a concept, whether momentary, sustained, or as a function of different task conditions, is of critical importance to resource theories of attention, fatigue/boredom, workplace motivation, career selection, performance, job incentives, and other applied psychology concerns. Various models of motivation suggest that there is an inverted-U-shaped function describing the personal utility of effort, but there are expected to be individual differences in the optimal levels of effort that also are related to specific domain preferences. The current study assessed the disutility of effort for 125 different tasks/activities and also explored individual differences correlates of task preferences, in a sample of 77 undergraduate participants. The participants rated each activity in terms of the amount of compensation they would require to perform the task for a period of 4 h. They also completed paired comparisons for a subset of 24 items, followed by a set of preference judgments. Multidimensional scaling and preference scaling techniques were used to determine individual differences in task preference. Personality, motivation, and interest traits were shown to be substantially related to task preferences. Implications for understanding which individuals are oriented toward or away from tasks with different effort demands are discussed, along with considerations for the dynamics of attentional effort allocations during task performance. Significance A fundamental problem of applied psychology relates to generalizing laboratory-based studies of attention and effort to real-world situations, such as classroom learning or job performance-essentially an issue of the ecological validity of laboratory research (Brunswik, 1943). Although researchers often obtain high levels of effort from study participants in the laboratory when there is a direct compensation of course credit or monetary rewards (or the researchers discard the data from participants who do not maintain an acceptable level of effort during the study), effort fluctuations are often pronounced when individuals are in a classroom or reading for homework. The current study attempts to bridge this gap by examining the underlying subjective perceptions of effortful tasks, and exploring individual differences in task preferences, as a function of select personality and interest traits. From the results, we confirm the hypothesis of motivation theorists that average subjective preferences have an inverted-U-shaped function with level of mental effort demanded by tasks. In addition, there are substantial individual differences in the types of tasks that are viewed as aversive, which in turn are correlated with personality and interest variables. An important implication of this work is that conflicting results of the effects of task performance over extended time-on-task (e.g., fatigue, boredom, vigilance) may be at least partially resolved by attention to individual and group differences in the subjective disutility of effort on different tasks.

A Primer on the Role of Boredom in Self-Controlled Sports and Exercise Behavior

“…It is important to note that applying self-control seems to carry an intrinsic cost ( Kool and Botvinick, 2013 ; Ackerman et al, 2020 ) whose origin is still subject to debate ( Shenhav et al, 2017 ). Attesting to this costliness, the application of self-control is tightly coupled with the sensation of effort that people normally try to avoid ( Shenhav et al, 2017 ).…”

A primer on the role of boredom in self-controlled sports and exercise behavior

“…It is important to note that applying self-control carries an intrinsic disutility 6,7 -whose origins are still subject to debate 8 -and is tightly coupled with the sensation of effort that people normally try to avoid 8 . Accordingly, a large body of research indicates that the application of self-control in one task will lead to impaired performance in a subsequent self-control demanding task 4,5,9 .…”