When given the choice between a difficult task and an easy task, it’s natural to expect that people will choose the easy one. In daily life and in most scientific work, effort is typically conceptualized as a cost. Brain imaging studies, for example, often look at how the brain trades off effort-related costs against reward-related benefits each time we make a choice.
This story is somewhat oversimplified though. We might normally avoid effort, but there are many examples of how we actively seek it out too. You may be the sort of person who enjoys a crossword or wants to train for a marathon or loses hours of sleep thinking about pointless philosophical questions (is that just me?). Maybe you’re even participating in the current Wordle craze?
In these examples, we exert effort purely for the fun of it. There isn’t a huge payoff waiting at the other end of crosswords or Wordles—merely the satisfaction of having completed them. And yet, we want to put the effort in.
One new study has tested whether people can be trained to prefer tasks that require higher rather than lower effort, and the results are reshaping how we think about struggle and success.
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😰 Learning to choose the hard way
In a study published this month (February 2022), researchers from the University of Vienna and TU Dresden investigated whether you can strengthen your willingness to take on a challenge. In their first study, they recruited 121 people and asked them to play a classic memory game. The game is called the N-back task, and it presents a sequence of letters—one at a time—while asking you to hit a button when a letter matches one you saw N letters ago.
The N affects how difficult the task is. A 1-back task is easy since you’re looking for the immediate repetition of a letter. If you see the letters B > D > E > E, then you immediately hit the button when the E appears right after another E.
A 3-back task is more difficult since you hit the button only when a letter is the same as the letter that appeared three letters previously. This means you need to keep more information in mind as you monitor an ongoing sequence of letters, which is a greater load on your working memory. So if you see the letters B > D > E > A > C > E, then you hit the button on the second E, since it appeared exactly three letters after the last E (if you want to try the N-back task for yourself, you can find a version of it at this link).
As participants played the N-back game at varying levels of difficulty, the researchers measured their heart activity using an electrocardiogram. They analyzed the force of heart contractions, focusing on something called the pre-ejection period (PEP), which acts as an objective marker for cognitive effort. When you’re fully engaged in a difficult round of the N-back game, you’ll exert more cognitive effort and your PEP values will be lower.
For one randomly selected group of participants (the experimental group), the researchers paid out higher cash rewards whenever participants used higher cognitive effort according to their PEP measures. Everyone else (the control group) received random rewards that weren’t linked to cognitive effort at all. So after many rounds of the N-back game, people in the experimental group adapted to an environment in which higher cognitive effort was consistently rewarded, while the control group adapted to an environment that had nothing to do with their cognitive effort.
This is where the real test began. Following the N-back task, the researchers asked people to complete a final task they called the “Math Effort Task”, but explained that there would be no more bonus payouts. The task involved quickly adding four numbers together, but the size and variability of those numbers depended on which of five difficulty levels participants freely chose to tackle. The easiest level only used numbers from 1-3, while the most difficult level used numbers from 7-35.
The experimental group (i.e. the people who trained with effort-rewarding N-back games) chose significantly more difficult math problems to solve than the control group did. Out of the five difficulty levels, the control group chose an average difficulty level of 2.87 while the experimental group chose an average difficulty level of 3.10. Similarly, within the experimental group, people who showed the highest cognitive effort overall during the N-back games also chose the most difficult math problems. The same pattern wasn’t true for the control group participants who received no rewards for their effort.
People in the experimental group therefore learned to make effortful choices even though there was no external incentive for effort in the math task. They just developed a positive habit and actively wanted to embrace tough challenges.
To look for stronger confirmatory evidence of this phenomenon, the researchers ran the same study with larger samples of participants online. Reliable heart measures became impractical in this new setup, so the researchers relied on a less direct indicator of effort, namely the level of N-back task difficulty: the more difficult the task, the more effort it requires. So the researchers rewarded people in the experimental group with higher cash bonuses whenever they faced heavier memory demands.
After combining the data from five online experiments and almost 1500 people, the researchers once again found that people in the experimental group actively sought more challenging problems in the final math task. A learning environment that rewarded effort made people more likely to seek effort later on, even when those rewards disappeared.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
Practice taking the difficult route: Like many skills in life, you can practice and boost your willingness to take on a challenge. Of course, a more difficult choice isn’t always the right choice. When you’re trying to achieve a goal, it’s generally sensible to find the quickest and easiest way to achieve it rather than adding unnecessary complexity or resources. However, sometimes your best option will be an onerous commitment, and you can build up your mettle for that tough moment by routinely embracing challenges in daily life. If there’s something intimidating you’ve always wanted to try—maybe traveling somewhere unusual, learning to play a musical instrument, or braving some kind of public performance—find a way to commit to it now, and develop the habit of enjoying a challenge.
Enjoy daily puzzles: Daily games and puzzles are a fun way to flex your effort muscles. Whether you enjoy crosswords, sudokus, or chess, occasionally bump the difficulty level one step above your comfort zone and practice getting comfortable with failure in this low-stakes environment. When a high-stakes environment then comes along, your daily practice may help to nudge you toward accepting rather than running away from an important challenge.
Embrace growth mindsets: A fixed mindset believes that skills like intelligence come down to natural talent, while a growth mindset believes that they’re easily improved by effort. While both positions have some truth to them, growth mindsets are more productive. If you want to optimize your mental strength, it’s important to reward yourself for effort rather than outcome (the same goes for your kids if you’re trying to teach them the value of hard work). That’s the essence of cultivating a growth mindset. More challenging tasks have a higher risk of failure than easy tasks, but they also involve more learning and potentially bigger rewards when you do succeed. That’s why it’s so important to reward yourself when you put the effort in, regardless of whether you ultimately succeed or fail on any single occasion.
💡 A final quote
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
~ T. S. Eliot
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👋 Until next time,
Erman Misirlisoy, PhD