Are You Among the "Effort Averse"?

Results of an experiment suggest that more than one-fifth of participants preferred the boring but easy task of watching visitors in an art gallery to the more engaging but demanding tasks of escorting performers and cleaning up at a cultural festival, even though they had predicted that they would enjoy the engaging tasks more. These participants' willingness to accept lower wages to work at the gallery job reveals a phenomenon the researchers, David A. Comerford and Peter Ubel of Duke University, call "effort aversion." The reasons for it aren't clear; the researchers speculate that because attention is a scarce resource, people may reject effortful tasks without thinking about how enjoyable they might be.