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.
Highlights
Assessment of an individual’s “subjective” effort for mentally demanding tasks is a difficult enterprise, because there are no objective physical manifestations of the engagement of an individual in the task, and there are likely individual differences in the perception of work/effort expended in an activity, depending partly on whether the individual enjoys or wishes to avoid the taskAckerman et al Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications
The goals of the study were as follows: (1) Explore the mean subjective disutility for a variety of mentally demanding and physically demanding tasks/activities; (2) determine whether the subjective Effort-Utility function conforms to an inverted-U shape; (3) evaluate the dimensionality of perceptual space of tasks/activities to better understand how subjective disutility judgments are made and to evaluate the similarities and differences among perceptions of different tasks/activities; (4) determine whether individual differences in effort preferences within the multidimensional task/activity space are best represented by vector or ideal point models; and (5) evaluate whether individual differences in key personality and motivational traits are related to differences in the subjective disutility of effort and task preferences
Evidence for the subjective value of expending physical effort suggests that there is a parabolic relationship between effort and subjective disutility such that as physical effort increases from 0 to 100% of capability, subjective disutility increases (Hartmann, Hager, Hartmann, Hager, Tobler, & Kaiser, 2013)
Summary
Assessment of an individual’s “subjective” effort for mentally demanding tasks is a difficult enterprise, because there are no objective physical manifestations of the engagement of an individual in the task, and there are likely individual differences in the perception of work/effort expended in an activity, depending partly on whether the individual enjoys or wishes to avoid the taskAckerman et al Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications (e.g., reading for pleasure vs. reading an assigned textbook for a test—see Dodge, 1913 for a discussion). The goals of the study were as follows: (1) Explore the mean subjective disutility for a variety of mentally demanding and physically demanding tasks/activities; (2) determine whether the subjective Effort-Utility function conforms to an inverted-U shape; (3) evaluate the dimensionality of perceptual space of tasks/activities to better understand how subjective disutility judgments are made and to evaluate the similarities and differences among perceptions of different tasks/activities; (4) determine whether individual differences in effort preferences within the multidimensional task/activity space are best represented by vector (more is better) or ideal point models; and (5) evaluate whether individual differences in key personality and motivational traits are related to differences in the subjective disutility of effort and task preferences. It could be that tasks similar in physical effort result in varying levels of subjective utility if they differ on other domains (i.e., attractiveness-aversiveness). The authors did not measure individual trait differences that may have influenced perceptions of disutility
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