Thinking is effortful, but is it unpleasant? Here the evidence is somewhat mixed. On the one hand, we tend to require rewards to pursue more effortful thinking which suggests that the effort of thinking may not be rewarding in and of itself. On the other hand, research on the “need for cognition” suggests that there is variation in how people seek out and engage with cognitive activities. Research in this area has found that people who score higher in “need for cognition” tend to rate cognitive tasks as more enjoyable (6).
To better understand the relationship between mental effort and negative affect, David, Vassena, and Bijleveld conducted a meta-analysis of 170 studies of mental effort (1). They looked at a number of moderators to see what factors have an effect on this relationship. Does education level matter? Maybe people who have attained a higher degree of education have a higher need for cognition and don’t find it unpleasant. Does experience or skill matter? Maybe people have learned to enjoy effortful tasks over time. Does feedback matter? Many tasks have been “gamified” such that you can monitor your progress or points on a task to make it more like leveling up in a game. Maybe that makes demanding tasks more enjoyable. In total the authors looked at 15 different moderators.
Somewhat surprisingly, of the 15 different moderators only one had a significant effect: whether the study was conducted in Asia or in North America/Europe. Nothing else mattered. Not education level, not experience, not even gamification. Across all of the studies they found a strong relationship between mental effort and negative affect: on average, for every point increase in effort there was a .85 increase in negative affect (1). We really don’t like thinking. However, that effort was perceived as more unpleasant by people in North American or European countries than in Asian countries. The interpretation of this result highlights some of the complexities of cultural psychology. It could be that exposure to mental effort and the value placed on that mental effort are different in Asian countries compared to North American and European countries. For example, the authors highlight the hours that high school students spend on school work in China and the prevalence of cram schools in Japan. It is also possible that words like “effort” and “annoyed” have different connotations when translated into those languages which influenced survey responses (all studies included in the meta-analysis used the same survey to measure mental effort, including translated versions). However, while the size of the effect is somewhat smaller in Asian countries, people still found mental effort to be aversive.
