It’s not just your students -- people across the globe really don’t like to think.
At least that’s what the findings of a new study suggest. Published in Psychological Bulletin, the study examined data from 170 previous studies looking at motivation, which together had thousands of participants from different cultures.
“Overall, mental effort felt aversive in different types of tasks (e.g., tasks with and without feedback), in different types of populations (e.g., university-educated populations and non-university-educated populations), and on different continents,” the study authors write. “Supporting theories that conceptualize effort as a cost, we suggest that mental effort is inherently aversive.”
You probably don’t want to think any more about this, but if you’re willing to undergo the effort, two of the study's co-authors discuss how the research was conducted and what its implications are for educators.
Thinking and Motivation
The inspiration for the research was a decades-old debate in psychology about mental effort, says study co-author Erik Bijleveld, who is a psychologist and professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands.
“On the one hand, we know that people avoid mental effort when they can,” Bijleveld says. “On the other hand, psychologists also assume that people can easily learn associations between mental effort and rewards. For example, in schools and universities, students are often complimented after they have exerted mental effort. So, in life, there are plenty of opportunities to learn that mental effort is linked to reward. If this is true, people may well be able to learn to enjoy mental effort.”
Thinking Is Even More Unpleasant Than We Think
Bijleveld and his co-authors were surprised by just how thinking-adverse people are and how little rewards seemed to do to change that. “Even in tasks that have game-like features, such as performance feedback, it turns out that mental effort still feels very unpleasant,” Bijleveld says. “Even people who likely had been rewarded for their mental effort many times in their past, like people with a university education, still experience mental effort as unpleasant.”
He adds that he and his colleagues found that mental effort feels unpleasant in a wide range of settings and contexts. "We really looked hard for possible exceptions—maybe effort feels nice just in some tasks, or just for some people—but we found no compelling evidence for this,” he says.
What Does This All Mean For Educators
Louise David, a co-author of the study, says the research has many implications for educators.
“Since learning is usually associated with mental effort, students, like other individuals, might be inclined to minimize mental effort due to the unpleasantness associated with it,” David says.
With this in mind, educators should focus on creating structured and supportive learning environments that, for example, balance challenging tasks with guided practice, scaffolding, and clear instructions, she says. Incorporating gamification elements and working to connect students more deeply with the material might also help. “Tasks that provide meaning, responsibility, and feedback could reduce the aversive nature of mental effort,” David says.
Another important step might be to recognize student effort rather than merely the results. “Learning is not always fun and does not always feel good,” David says. “By recognizing and rewarding students’ effort, not just learning outcomes, educators may encourage a more positive association with effortful cognitive activities.”
Of Course, Mental Effort Isn't All Bad
Educators and their students may also want to remember that the aversion they feel to some difficult tasks is not unique to them and not always a bad thing. Just like feeling tired while exercising can be a good sign for someone getting in shape.
“In the case of mental effort, the unpleasantness may serve a purpose. For example, there is this effect called ‘the IKEA effect,’ named after the furniture store,” Bijleveld says. “The idea is that if people invest more effort into making or creating something, this increases the extent to which they value the product of their work. So, if people invested effort into something, this does tell them that that something is very meaningful or valuable to them. After all, why would they have endured the unpleasantness of effort?”
He adds that in this sense, “The unpleasantness of mental effort may serve as a compass to people, giving them direction regarding what they care about, and by extension, who they are as a person.”
