Currently reading: Campbell et al. (2025) on “Experimental evidence that exerting effort increases meaning”
“Efficiency demands that we work smarter and not harder, but is this better for our wellbeing?” That’s the question that Campbell et al. (2025) investigate in their study, and they give away the answer pretty much directly: no, since the article is called “experimental evidence that exerting effort increases meaning“.
Meaning, as Campbell et al. (2025) use is, is about actions mattering and feeling purposeful and significant, and highly related to wellbeing. Meaninglessness and lack of challenge, on the other hand, lead to boredom. In studies of cognitive dissonance, researchers find that when people put a lot of effort into getting a reward, they will retrospectively rationalise it and enhance the value of the reward to justify why they put in the effort in the first place, and thus reduce the dissonance. And a typical way to justify effort seems to be to enhance the value by ascribing more meaning to the task. This even works when looking at others (when we see someone else working hard, we think that the task must be meaningful and that they must be better people and that their effort is worth rewarding) and even products (the higher the effort in production, the higher their value). Phew!
In the six studies they present in this article, Campbell et al. (2025) try to find mechanisms that explain why effort might lead to meaning. In the first two studies, undergrad psychology students imagine either themselves or others doing an assignment with either a lot or little effort, and then judge the experience. They find that students that imagined doing the higher effort found the task less fun but more meaningful (even though students in both conditions imagined spending the same amount of time on the task). Since they didn’t actually put in any effort but just imagined it, Campbell et al. (2025) discuss that there is no need to rationalise effort, so this is probably not about reducing cognitive dissonance.
The next two studies investigate experiences of participants doing high and low level effort maths tasks (in study 3) and writing tasks (in study 4) in real life, and they find that more effort means more meaning, even when the task isn’t completed as successful as an easier task. In the writing task in study 4, the low effort condition was to write with ChatGPT, whereas in the high effort condition participants had to write themselves. The AI group thus did not get to experience competence and feeling in control of the task. They write “These findings have significant implications for workplaces as we continue to shift towards an automated world. While AI might enhance productivity, we should be wary of potential costs, specifically costs to employee wellbeing. Finding one’s work meaningful is important to prevent workplace burnout” (And just a little while ago on the bus home, I read an article about “People Training OpenAI’s AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI“, where someone is quoted saying “I felt no joy in the work or that I was contributing to society in any way.” How ironic, and they seem to be on to something here!)
In the next study, participants did the maths tasks from before, but the rewards were varied to see how cognitive dissonance plays into it. Here, they find that more effort still feels more meaningful, even when a higher compensation also makes a task feel slightly more meaningful. And high effort high reward feels less boring than the other three conditions, indicating that rewards might boost meaningfulness!
In the last study, Campbell et al. (2025) tested whether meaning increases continuously with effort, so they added two more complicated maths task conditions to the earlier setup, but they find that the tasks in the three high effort conditions are all rated as equally more meaningful than the ones in the easy condition, so there seems to be a sweet spot for optimal effort to create maximum meaning.
And why does effort generate meaning? It’s still unclear. But, as Campbell et al. (2025) write in conclusion, “it seems as though we should not take the leisurely desire path at every given opportunity. We may even come out happier when we choose to work harder, and not smarter – or at the very least people will assume we do.” So super interesting article to keep in mind!
Campbell, A. V., Wang, Y., & Inzlicht, M. (2025). Experimental evidence that exerting effort increases meaning. Cognition, 257, 106065. 10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106065
Tuesday’s very summer-y dip!
So beautiful!
