ArticleScientific reports2022
Cognitive effort for self, strangers, and charities.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- The neurocomputational mechanisms underlying the impact of social comparison on effort investment.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Delaying rewards reduces egoism bias during prosocial acts.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Deciding for others diminishes model-based decision-making but depends on individual prosociality.NPJ science of learning · 2026Article
- Effort and time costs influence motivational asymmetries in self-benefitting vs pro-environmental decisions.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Avoiding Pain to Others Motivates Effortful Prosocial Behavior.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Effort Expenditure Reduces Prosocial Decision-Making: Computational Principles and Neural Mechanisms.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Harming In Order To Help: An Empirical Characterization of Prosocial Aggression.Motivation science · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Effort is aversive and often avoided, even when earning benefits for oneself. Yet, people sometimes work hard for others. How do people decide who is worth their effort? Prior work shows people avoid physical effort for strangers relative to themselves, but invest more physical effort for charity. Here, we find that people avoid cognitive effort for others relative to themselves, even when the cause is a personally meaningful charity. In two studies, participants repeatedly decided whether to invest cognitive effort to gain financial rewards for themselves and others. In Study 1, participants (N = 51; 150 choices) were less willing to invest cognitive effort for a charity than themselves. In Study 2, participants (N = 47; 225 choices) were more willing to work cognitively for a charity than an intragroup stranger, but again preferred cognitive exertion that benefited themselves. Computational modeling suggests that, unlike prior physical effort findings, cognitive effort discounted the subjective value of rewards linearly. Exploratory machine learning analyses suggest that people who represented others more similarly to themselves were more willing to invest effort on their behalf, opening up new avenues for future research.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.