Is it good to think hard?

We’re in the doldrums of the school year right now.  Winter break is behind us, and the school year still has a few months to go.  It is the time of years when there is still a lot of good learning to go before classes start to focus on reviewing for end-of-year tests.

Invariably, when a student is faced with new topics, some of them are fairly easy while others are a challenge.  A particular concept in math may click, and a student breezes right through a worksheet.  That same day, a science assignment may require some real effort.  How does the amount of effort required to complete something influence whether kids (or adults for that matter) think they understand the material when they finish?

This question was examined in a paper by David Miele and Dan Molden in the August, 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology:  General.

They begin by rooting their work in a theory by Carol Dweck that I have discussed before in this blog.  Dweck has pointed out that for many psychological characteristics, people may hold one of two mindsets.  They may believe that a particular characteristic is fixed and unchangeable or they may believe that a particular characteristic can be changed with experience and practice.

In this case, Miele and Molden focus on people’s beliefs about intelligence.  Some people believe that intelligence is fairly fixed and cannot be changed.  Others believe that intelligence is a skill that can be acquired with practice.

In these studies, the authors did a variety of manipulations of text passages that made them feel harder to read.  In some cases, the easy text was well written, while the hard text used bad sentence structure to make the same points.  In other cases, the text for each version was identical, but the font used for the text was made easy or hard to read. 

In each study, the authors looked at how well people believed they understood the material.  Of interest, the people who believe that intelligence is a skill tended to think they understood the material reasonably well regardless of whether the text was easy or effortful to read.  In fact, in some of the studies in this paper, people who believe that intelligence is a skill actually felt as though they understood a text better when it required effort to read than when it was easy to read.

The people who believe that intelligence is fixed showed a different pattern.  They judged that they understood the passages better when they were easy to read than when they were hard to read.  That is, for this group, putting in effort to read something was a sign that they did not understand the passage well.

Of interest, the judgments of how well people understood a passage were not explained by actual comprehension (as measured by tests of understanding).   Passages that were hard to read, were often comprehended more poorly than passages that were easy to read for all groups.  So, people’s beliefs about how well they understood a passage were not always accurate.

Why does this matter?

Effort in school determines performance in school.  Eventually, everyone runs into a task in school that is hard.  For years, a child may find assignments in language arts and English classes to be easy, and then suddenly she may find that the assignments are difficult. 

If that child assumes that intelligence is fixed, then when she reaches the difficult assignment, she will assume she did not understand what she read.  Effort is taken as a sign that she has reached her limits.  Eventually, this effort saps motivation, and leads to poor performance in school, and worse yet slowed new learning.

If that child assumes that intelligence is a skill, then when she reaches the difficult assignment, she will assume that she has to work harder to complete this assignment.  In this case, effort signals that it is time to learn something new.  This effort can lead to good performance in school and lots of new learning.

Happily, there is also evidence that people’s attitudes toward psychological factors like intelligence can be changed.  Many studies (including this one) have conditions in which they manipulate people’s beliefs about intelligence by giving them articles to read.  In one experiment in this paper, people acted as though they believed that intelligence was relatively fixed if they had just read a paper suggesting that intelligence is fixed and they acted as though they believed that intelligence was a skill if they just read a paper suggesting that intelligence is a skill.

The success of these manipulations suggests that we can help children to recognize that intelligence is a skill by reinforcing that belief in the classroom.  In that way, we can help students to realize that effort has real value in the classroom.

Well, that wasn’t worth it: Effort discounting in the brain

Most of us have a complicated relationship with the effort required to get things done.  On the one hand, we generally prefer to do things in the easiest possible way.  On the other hand, there are times when the effort we put in to accomplish a goal becomes part of the reward itself.

From a biological standpoint, though, for most situations we are probably best off finding the least effortful way to achieve a goal.  That is, an animal that routinely puts in a lot of effort to get some reward (say, food) will be at a disadvantage relative to some other animal that puts in less effort to get the same reward.  So, we might expect that humans would have mechanisms that allow the amount of effort we expend to achieve a reward to affect the value we give to that reward.  

This question was examined in a 2009 paper in Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience by Matthew Botvinick, Stacy Huffstetler, and Joseph McGuire.  They explored a phenomenon called effort discounting, which is just a fancy way of saying that the more effort that you put into something, the less valuable the reward associated with the effort. 

They had people do two simple tasks in an fMRI scanner.  On each trial, they saw a numeral (0 and 5 were never shown).  If the numeral was yellow, they judged whether the numeral was odd or even.  If it was blue, they judged whether it was greater or less than 5.  Sometimes, the study required low effort.  In low effort blocks, people did a series of trials on only one of the tasks.  Sometimes, the study required high effort.  In high effort blocks, the two trials were randomly mixed together.  It is hard for people to switch back and forth between judgments, and so these blocks were much more difficult than the blocks that all involved the same judgment. 

After each block of trials, people were told whether they received a one dollar reward.  They were told that the computer would decide randomly whether they got the reward and that the reward was not based on their speed or accuracy in doing the task.  They were also told that the level of difficulty of the task would not affect whether they got the reward. 

The authors measured blood flow in the brain (which is related to brain activity).  They were particularly interested in a brain structure called the Nucleus Accumbens.  This structure is deep in the brain in an area called the basal ganglia.  This brain area is known to be involved when people are evaluating rewards.

The authors found that this area responded much less to a cash reward when people just did a high effort set of trials than when they did a low effort set of trials.  Another brain area, the Anterior Cingulate Cortex was related to the amount of effort people put in.  And the more this area was active (signaling that people perceived higher effort), the less that the reward was valued.

There are a few important things to say about this finding.

First, the Nucleus Accumbens is a deep and evolutionarily old portion of the brain.  This means that the tendency to see rewards as less valuable when they required more effort is a central part of our psychological makeup.

Second, in general it really is a good idea for us to accomplish our goals in the simplest way.  If we always found elaborate ways to satisfy goals that could be satisfied more simply, we would spend a lot of time wasting effort and energy.

Third, in those situations where we value the effort, the journey is often more rewarding than the destination.  For example, if you remodel your own home, then you probably put in a lot more effort than you would have put in if you hired someone else to do it.  In this case, though, the process of doing the remodeling is also rewarding.  In addition, whenever you look at the final product, you will remember that effort.  Those memories can also lead to feelings of pride in your accomplishment. 

So don’t shy away from putting in effort, but remember that effort is best spent when it will lead to a great reward or when the effort itself is part of what is rewarding in the first place.