ArticleNature human behaviour2024
An experimental manipulation of the value of effort.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 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
14 citing papers in PubMed, 31 citations in OpenAlex.
- Individualized Cognitive Effort to Failure Does Not Affect Subsequent Strenuous Physical Performance.Medicine and science in sports and exercise · 2025Trial
- Cognitive control training with domain-general response inhibition does not change children's brains or behavior.Nature neuroscience · 2024Trial
- Executive functions as a transdiagnostic endophenotype in developmental psychopathology.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Review
- Intact delay discounting but more optimal reward-based decisions in anorexia nervosa during an experiential task.Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences · 2026Article
- Adaptive habits: understanding executive function and its development.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Shared and distinct features of common effort-based decision-making paradigms and their relation to brain structure and neuropsychiatric conditions: An integrated narrative review.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- An 8-week jump training did not boost effort value or the willingness to exert effort in a student sample.PloS one · 2026Article
- A minute can only be spent once: Validating a behavioral paradigm to study societally relevant time allocation conflicts.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Effortful leisure is a source of meaning in everyday life.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Limited effectiveness of psychological inoculation against misinformation in a social media feed.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- The pleasure of effort: Cognitive challenges trigger hedonic physiological responses.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Monitoring-Based Rewards Enhance Both Learning Performance and Metacognitive Monitoring Accuracy.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Exaggerated frontoparietal control over cognitive effort-based decision-making in young women with anorexia nervosa.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- People reward others based on their willingness to exert effort.Journal of experimental social psychology · 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
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
People who take on challenges and persevere longer are more likely to succeed in life. But individuals often avoid exerting effort, and there is limited experimental research investigating whether we can learn to value effort. We developed a paradigm to test the hypothesis that people can learn to value effort and will seek effortful challenges if directly incentivized to do so. We also dissociate the effects of rewarding people for choosing effortful challenges and performing well. The results provide limited evidence that rewarding effort increased people's willingness to choose harder tasks when rewards were no longer offered (near transfer). There was also mixed evidence that rewarding effort increased willingness to choose harder tasks in another unrelated and unrewarded task (far transfer). These heterogeneous results highlight the need for further research to understand when this paradigm may be the most effective for increasing and generalizing the value of effort.
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What OpenQuestion holds
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.