A new report published by the American Psychological Association highlights that mental exertion is often associated with unpleasant feelings. The study, led by Erik Bijleveld, PhD, of Radboud University, suggests that despite the common encouragement from managers and teachers for employees and students to engage in mentally challenging activities, these individuals generally dislike mental effort.

“Managers often encourage employees, and teachers often encourage students, to exert mental effort. On the surface, this seems to work well: Employees and students do often opt for mentally challenging activities,” said Bijleveld. “From this, you may be tempted to conclude that employees and students tend to enjoy thinking hard. Our results suggest that this conclusion would be false: In general, people really dislike mental effort.”

The research was published in the journal Psychological Bulletin.

The meta-analysis reviewed 170 studies conducted between 2019 and 2020 involving 4,670 participants from various demographics such as healthcare employees, military personnel, amateur athletes, and college students across 29 countries. These studies included 358 different cognitive tasks ranging from learning new technology to playing virtual reality games. Participants reported both their level of effort and the extent of unpleasant feelings experienced during these tasks.

Across all populations and tasks analyzed, greater mental effort correlated with increased unpleasantness.

“Our findings show that mental effort feels unpleasant across a wide range of populations and tasks,” stated Bijleveld. “This is important for professionals such as engineers and educators to keep in mind when designing tasks, tools, interfaces, apps, materials or instructions. When people are required to exert substantial mental effort, you need to make sure to support or reward them for their effort.”

Bijleveld noted an interesting cultural variation: while the association between mental effort and adverse feelings was significant globally, it was less pronounced in Asian countries compared with Europe or North America. This may reflect differences in educational practices where high school students in Asian countries spend more time on schoolwork than their Western counterparts.

Despite the aversive nature of mentally challenging tasks, people still voluntarily engage in them.

“For example, why do millions of people play chess? People may learn that exerting mental effort in some specific activities is likely to lead to reward. If the benefits of chess outweigh the costs, people may choose to play chess and even self-report that they enjoy chess,” Bijleveld explained. “Yet when people choose to pursue mentally effortful activities this should not be taken as an indication that they enjoy mental effort per se. Perhaps people choose mentally effortful activities despite the effort not because of it.”

The article titled “The unpleasantness of thinking: A meta-analytic review of the association between mental effort and negative affect” was authored by Louise David (MSc), Eliana Vassena (PhD), and Erik Bijleveld (PhD) from Radboud University. It was published online on August 5th, 2024.

Erik Bijleveld can be reached via email.