Why does empathy or self-control feel like hard work? Why do people spend their leisure time on social media or getting stoned?
The Work and Play Lab uses methods borrowed from social psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience to understand the nature of the mental effort we use to reach our goals and the nature of leisure activities we do for fun. The lab’s research includes projects on self-control, motivation, and empathy (work) as well as projects on digital device use, social media, and recreational cannabis use (play). The lab is committed to open and transparent science, which includes publicly posting data and materials, often preregistering studies, and regularly running replication studies.
Understanding the effort paradox can help you reshape your relationship to exertion so that you commit to those hard but truly meaningful activities
“On the one hand, effort is costly,” says Michael Inzlicht, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada. “On the other hand, it looks like we tend to value those things that we exerted effort for.” In a seminal 2018 paper, he and his colleagues dubbed this apparent conflict the “effort paradox”. Since then, psychologists have been figuring out the origins of the effort paradox and why some of us struggle with tasks that others might find easy. What they are finding is offering fresh insights not only into how you can get off the couch and into your running shoes, but also how you can learn more effectively, better empathise with others and even cultivate a more meaningful life. “[It seems] that if we can become…
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