How hard was that? Context effects on judgments of effort

Abstract

How do individuals make judgments of effort? Despite cognitive effort being a central construct in scholarship, as well as an influential concept in day-to-day life, we have a limited understanding of how individuals determine the effort associated with cognitive acts. Recent work has demonstrated that judgments of effort can be influenced by the context in which they are made (i.e., the judgment context). I employed a reading task and stimulus set that has produced a reliable dissociation between judgments of effort and cognitive demand to further investigate contextual influences on effort judgments. Specifically, I manipulated the context (i.e., the evaluation context) in which individuals read and judged the stimuli; collected individuals’ reasons for their effort judgments; and measured objective demand (i.e., reading times, error counts). In Experiments 1-4, I determined that this context manipulation did not seem to eliminate the dissociation between judgments of effort and objective demand; however, I revealed that evaluation context has a robust effect on judgments of effort. Furthermore, individuals’ reasons varied just as markedly across evaluation contexts. In Experiments 5-7, I extended this work by manipulating the context in which individuals read the stimuli (i.e., the stimulus context) while holding the judgment context constant. Individuals’ reasons for judgment suggested that the cues used to make effort judgments are influenced by the stimulus context, with both judgments and reasons exhibiting notable changes across stimulus contexts. Implications of these results, including how they guide our understanding of the effort judgment process, are discussed.