The effort paradox: Exploring effort's costs and benefits

努力悖论：探索努力的成本和收益

• 批准号: RGPIN-2019-05280
• 负责人: Inzlicht, Michael
• 金额: $ 1.6万
• 依托单位: University of Toronto
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2020-01-01 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=715443
• 关键词: effort; paradox; Exploring; costs; benefits

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.

认知控制使人们能够控制自己的心灵、身体和思想，远离日常生活的诱惑，朝着更安全、更健康的目标前进。虽然它可以通过看似微不足道的任务（例如，颜色命名）来评估，但认知控制预测了各种令人印象深刻的个人和社会意义行为，包括体重增加，大学成绩，问题赌博和成瘾。鉴于认知控制的广泛影响，它的研究不仅对认知科学家，而且对经济学家和其他政策制定者都具有重要意义。