This workshop will gather an interdisciplinary group of experts and early career researchers to make progress in understanding what efforts are, how they relate to issues of value, and the morality of efforts.
Talks
(See talk abstracts below)
Gwen Bradford (Rice U): Failure
Bastien Gauchot (U Neuchâtel): The definition of effort
Malte Hendrickx (U Michigan): The normativity of difficulty: more than an effort
Olivier Massin (U Neuchâtel): The force-based theory of efforts
Benjamin Pageaux (U Montréal): Perception of effort: current knowledge and perspectives
Amitai Shenhav (Brown U): Weighing the costs and benefits of mental effort
Kerstin Brinkmann (U Geneva): Do achievement-motivated individuals invest more effort? Evidence from cardiovascular and physical resource mobilization
James Steele (Solent U): Actual effort in cognitive tasks: can item response theory help with operationalisation?
Lead discussant: Elisabeth Pacherie (Jean Nicod)
Failure
Gwen Bradford (Rice)
In Achievement, I suggest that failures can be just as good as achievements. Achievements are valuable because of their effort and competence, and some failures have these features too, and are therefore valuable for the same reasons. While that may be true, surely it’s also true that failures are, or can be, genuinely bad – not merely a privation of the good of achievement, but themselves intrinsically bad. As is the case for many bads, it is surprisingly difficult to give an account that is not merely privative: viewed one way, a failure is simply a privation of attaining an end. This challenge is compounded by perfectionist theory of value, which may yield the most plausible account of achievement, but traditionally only offers an account of bads as privative. In this paper, I develop an account of failure as a robust bad by appealing to contrastive ends and the framework of tripartite perfectionism.
Do achievement-motivated individuals invest more effort? Evidence from cardiovascular and physical resource mobilization
Kerstin Brinkmann (Geneva)
Theory and empirical findings on the need for achievement suggest that highly achievement-motivated individuals perform better than lowly achievement-motivated individuals in achievement-arousing situations. This raises the question of whether highly achievement-motivated individuals generally invest more effort in such situations. Based on motivational intensity theory (Brehm & Self, 1989), it is plausible to assume that high achievement motivation has a direct influence on effort only in tasks with unclear difficulty. For tasks with clear difficulty, effort should depend on subjective difficulty, and the achievement motive should exert only an indirect influence. In this talk, I will present several studies that systematically tested these theoretical predictions for both cognitive and physical effort. In cognitive tasks, effort was operationalized by means of sympathetic activity at the myocardium (pre-ejection period, PEP). In physical tasks, exerted force (in Newtons) was measured in a hand grip task. Consistent with predictions, results show that PEP reactivity or hand force is low and independent of the need for achievement when working on an easy task, whereas in a difficult or unclear task, highly achievement-motivated individuals show a greater increase in PEP reactivity or hand force than lowly achievement-motivated individuals. The results thus support the postulated interactive influence of the achievement motive and task difficulty on effort. (Work coauthored with Florence Mazères and Michael Richter.)
The definition of effort
Bastien Gauchot (Neuchâtel)
Effort is a central notion to numerous kinds of research activities, but it remains unclear what common definition they might share. This leads to the worry that effort, far from being a natural class or at least a complex phenomenon unified under some generic definition, might just be a word from ordinary language conflating many different things under one label. Tackling that worry, I argue for a definition of effort which preserves its intuitive unity without overlooking the diversity of methods that researchers have been using and the various aspects of the phenomenon they have identified. An effort is simply, I contend, the exercise, by an agent, of a power to overcome a resistance in order to bring about some result. This resistance-based definition fares better than its cost-based rival, and is generic enough as to not presuppose specific answers to these three fundamental questions: are there different species of effort? What is the relation between effort and its experience? What is the connection between effort and action? I finish with a map of the different answers, showing that they are compatible with the proposed definition of effort, and arguing in favour of the answers I believe to be true.
The normativity of difficulty: more than an effort
Malte Hendrickx (Michigan)
It seems natural to explain difficulty directly in terms of effort. But in this talk, I do two things to suggest their relationship is more complex than standardly understood. First, I highlight problems for three leading accounts of effort (due to Bradford, Bermudez, and Massin). In particular, I provide problem cases for each view in accounting for instances of effort. I then show a more general problem: these views cannot provide fully domain-general accounts of effort, making it challenging for them to underpin a correspondingly general account of difficulty. Second, I propose an alternative picture. Rather than using effort to explain difficulty, I introduce a third concept, executive processing, to explain both effort and difficulty. Importantly, this view says effort differs sharply from difficulty in that the latter is fundamentally a normative notion. Effort is a function of how executive processing is deployed by an agent, whereas difficulty is a function of how executive processing should be deployed by an agent in order to achieve a target level of success.
The force-based theory of efforts
Olivier Massin (Neuchâtel)
I introduce a force-based definition of physical efforts, according to which efforts are exertions of forces in order to reach some goal. I then answer two chief objections to that theory. According the the first objection, the force-based theory fails to account for the subjective difficulty of efforts. According to the second, the force-based theory fails to account for non-physical efforts.
Perception of effort: current knowledge and perspectives
Benjamin Pageaux (U Montréal)
Every day, we experience effort when we perform voluntary physical and mental tasks, such as climbing the stairs or solving complex puzzles. The perception of effort is associated with voluntary actions, contributes to the sense of agency, and provides crucial information on the perceived cost of personal actions. In the context of physical tasks, perception of effort is seemingly an intuitive variable to many. However, due to a lack of precision and consistency in the definitions as well as the measurement tools used, the neurophysiology of this perception remains poorly understood. In this presentation, we will first introduce effort and its perception and emphasize the importance of using clear definition and instructions excluding other exercise-related sensations. Then, we will present current knowledge on the neurophysiology of effort perception during physical tasks, with a specific focus on its sensory signal(s) and determinant(s). To conclude, we will provide perspectives for future research and argue the need for a multidisciplinary approach to better understand the role of effort and its perception in the regulation of our behaviour.
Weighing the costs and benefits of mental effort
Amitai Shenhav (Brown)
Most tasks demand cognitive control, but exerting this control is effortful. How do we balance these two considerations to decide how to invest our cognitive effort? I will discuss work in our lab that has sought to address this question, by modeling the cost-benefit analysis that determines how much and what kinds of control a person is willing to exert in a given situation. I will describe how these models have helped guide recent behavioral and neuroimaging research into the component processes that determine one's motivation to exert mental effort. I will also describe how this model-based approach has allowed us to formalize specific hypotheses regarding why mental effort allocation varies across contexts, individuals, and clinical populations, and how it has allowed us to disentangle different sources of such variability (e.g., differences in one's ability vs. desire to engage control processes). Collectively, this work has laid the foundation for further cross-disciplinary research into the neural circuits and computations that drive effortful thoughts and actions, and towards a better understanding of when and why they fail to do so.
Most philosophical discussions of strength of will have focused on temptation: on what is needed to resist giving in to appealing alternatives. In contrast a body of work in neuroscience has focussed on when foragers give up on an existing task, and start looking for alternatives. It might seem that that these are just two sides of a the same coin: to give up on what one is doing is to give in to a tempting alternative, and the orthodox choice framework in which preference is understood as a ranking of two alternatives, can encourage that. But phenomenologically the two seem very different. We present some provisional findings that the neural mechanisms involved in the two phenomena are actually very different, and hence that self control is not a unitary thing. We reflect on the philosophical significance.
Actual effort in cognitive tasks: can item response theory help with operationalisation?
James Steele (Solent U)
Recently I have presented conceptual definitions of both actual effort (objective) and perception of effort (subjective) as the ratio of task demands to capacity to meet task demands, both actual and perceived respectively (Steele, 2020). Clear conceptual definitions are key for determining whether a given operationalisation of those definitions (i.e., our ways of defining those variables in the context of our research) meet the necessary and sufficient conditions adequately for the theoretical unit of interest. Development and testing of a theory of effort psychophysics (i.e., the relationship between the actual effort experience and the perception of that effort) then requires valid operationalisation. For physical tasks valid operationalisation of actual effort is often fairly trivial; but, a problem arises for operationalisation of actual effort in cognitive tasks where the underlying capacity that disposes an individual to be able to attempt, and perhaps complete, the task is not directly observable nor is the demand that the task presents. However, a solution to this problem may lie in the measurement theory employed in psychometrics known as Item Response Theory (IRT). A key aspect of IRT is that it posits and estimates from data two latent constructs that I accept as being conceptually equivalent to both capacity and demands in my definition of effort; first a characteristic of the individual referred to as ability, and second a characteristic of the test or item referred to as difficulty. As such, IRT might be used to provide an operationalisation of actual effort in cognitive tasks to enable exploration of effort psychophysics. In this presentation I will explain and demonstrate application of IRT for this purpose with both simulated and real data from multiple studies employing cognitive tasks and measures of effort phenomenology.
