The effort paradox: Exploring effort's costs and benefits

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Cognitive control allows people to restrain their hearts, bodies, and minds away from the temptations of everyday life and toward safer and healthier ambitions. Although it can be assessed by seemingly trivial tasks (e.g., color naming), cognitive control predicts an impressive variety of behaviors of both personal and societal significance, including weight gain, university grades, problem gambling, and addiction. Given its far reach, the study of cognitive control is of great importance not only to cognitive scientists, but also to economists and other policy makers. The proposed program of research builds on my past work on the basic processes underlying cognitive control, especially my research on the emotional and neural foundations of cognitive control. By studying the phenomenology of control, I have confirmed not only that control feels unpleasant, characterized by feelings of anxiety, frustration, and effort, I have also examined how this unpleasant emotion corresponds with evoked brain potentials, neural oscillations, pupil dilation, and facial muscle movements. Given these emotions and attendant physiological and neurological states, my research has contributed to the view that the effort required for control is unpleasant and that people avoid it. The primary objective of the proposed program of hypothesis-driven research is to explore this effort avoidance to offer clues about how to overcome it. In specific, I examine the neural processes underlying the costs of control by asking not only when effortful control is costly, but also how it might be valued. As part of this program, I will explore how to increase the value of effortful control so that people become more willing to engage it. In contrast to the dominant view in cognitive neuroscience and economics, I have recently proposed the existence of an effort paradox: effort, I suggested, is not only costly, but also valued. Sometimes humans view the same outcomes as more rewarding if more (not less) effort was used to attain them (e.g., running a marathon). Effort can even be experienced as valuable or rewarding in its own right, when high effort is repeatedly paired with high reward. Although there is a convergence of evidence supporting the effort paradox, some aspects of my framework need further empirical support, especially at the level of the human brain. Here, I attempt to integrate the rich evidence that effort can add value with dominant models of effort in neuroscience and economics. In sum, by investigating the effort paradox, I can advance effort theorizing and its widespread applications. I specifically explore how effort adds value retrospectively to the products of our past efforts; but also, how effort adds value prospectively, becoming a secondary reinforcer and rewarding by itself. Given the evidence that effort can add value prospectively, I also examine if I can increase effort willingness by training and rewarding effort.