- We assume that employees and students opt in for mentally effortful activities. We might assume that students readily learn to enjoy mental effort. But the truth is that mental effort feels unpleasant across a wide range of populations and tasks. - Across scientific disciplines, people are assumed to be effort avoiders. In psychology, we call this the "law of less work" - people minimise their expenditure of effort. In neuroscience and economics, effort is often modeled as cost. - Heuristics are also well established and show another reason to believe that people avoid effort. They use heuristics to make reasonable decisions so they can avoid effort. - Motivational Intensity Theory - People only exert effort when the rewards at stake are attainable and sufficiently valuable. When they do exert effort, they expend no more effort than is demanded by the task. - Recent studies show that mental effort is associated with tension in the corrugator supercilii, a facial muscle known to be linked to negative affect. Under some conditions, people even choose to endure physical pain rather than to expend mental effort. - There is counter evidence as well, though. Many studies have shown how mental effort can also be perceived as pleasant. Expenditure of effort also is something valued in many cultures and religions. If mental effort is inherently aversive, why do so many people play chess or do a crossword? - This paper aims to better understand this paradox by analysing literature. - Learned industriousness - the idea that people who are repeatedly rewarded for exerting effort develop a tendency to exert greater effort in the future. - Some tasks are more pleasant than the others, so that had to be controlled. The theory they used was an occupational psychology theory that looks at six features - Variety of different activities and skills (skill variety) - Clear start and finish (task identity) - Has meaningful consequences (task significance) - Involves some autonomy (control) - Provides feedback on the consequences of actions (monitoring feedback) - Provides feedback on performance (monitoring feedback) - The result of the meta analysis showed that mental effort is strongly associated with negative affect across populations and tasks. The results hold regardless of task, continent, gender, education etc. - The paper suggests that people do activities that involve mental effort (such as playing chess) because they get rewards in other ways. Not because of the mental effort it takes. - A general challenge for this future research is that it may be hard to empirically distinguish the (decreased) aversiveness of mental effort from the (increased) experience of reward associated with the task. --- David, Louise, Eliana Vassena, and Erik Bijleveld. "The unpleasantness of thinking: A meta-analytic review of the association between mental effort and negative affect." _Psychological Bulletin_ (2024) - [Link](https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-bul0000443.pdf)