Effort and performance in a cooperative activity are boosted by perception of a partner’s effort

Abstract

In everyday life, people must often determine how much time and effort to allocate to cooperative activities. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that the perception of others’ effort investment in a cooperative activity may elicit a sense of commitment, leading people to allocate more time and effort to the activity themselves. We developed an effortful task in which participants were required to move an increasingly difficult bar slider on a screen while simultaneously reacting to the appearance of virtual coins and earn points to share between themselves and their partner. This design allowed us to operationalize commitment in terms of participants’ investment of time and effort. Crucially, the cooperative activity could only be performed after a partner had completed a complementary activity which we manipulated to be either easy (Low Effort condition) or difficult (High Effort condition). Our results revealed participants invested more effort, persisted longer and performed better in the High Effort condition, i.e. when they perceived their partner to have invested more effort. These results support the hypothesis that the perception of a partner’s effort boosts one’s own sense of commitment to a cooperative activity, and consequently also one’s willingness to invest time and effort.

Effort Perception is Made More Accurate with More Effort and When Cooperating with Slackers

“…Overall, we find support for the idea that humans have evolved accurate effort detection systems, heightened by those contexts most relevant for cooperative tasks 24 . Accuracy of effort, and not just perception of effort 22,23 , matters because increased metabolic expenditure in cooperative tasks is regulated by the true nature of the effort not by perceived effort.…”

“…Recently, attention has turned to the circumstances under which people are willing to invest effort. For example, it has recently been shown that people are likely to persist longer, are more committed and perform better in a cooperative task when they perceive their partner to have invested more effort 22,23 . While perceptions are important, the significance of these findings is limited by a underlying factor that has not been investigated: the accuracy of effort perception.…”

Feeling committed to a robot: why, what, when and how?

“…[26,27]). In a related strand of research, one recent study [28] found evidence in support of the hypothesis that the perception of a partner's effort elicits a sense of commitment to joint action, leading to increased persistence in the face of a temptation to disengage (see also [29]).…”

“…For cognitive effort, for instance, one might feasibly take some measure of an interactor's cognitive load over the course of a task. This is because [28,29,38] cognitive effort investment [29,38] directly sustains an agent's motivation to contribute to a joint action retail shops autopilot systems [37] increases predictability of an increase in one's cognitive effort should presuppose an increase in cognitive load. This presents a complication because one of the principal ways in which cognitive load is measured is through pupillometry [71][72][73][74], which is a difficult variable to measure in conditions that are not very tightly controlled.…”

Does sensorimotor communication stabilize commitment in joint action?

“…upon recognising my effort investment, you may feel committed to reciprocating. We make this suggestion in light of recent studies suggesting that one agent's investment of effort in a joint action is sufficient to elicit a sense of commitment on the part of their partner: an agent will persist for longer on a boring or effortful task if they believe that their partner has invested a high degree of effort in that task (Székely & Michael, 2018;Chennells & Michael, 2018;Bonalumi, Isella, & Michael, forthcoming). Indeed, this suggestion is also consistent with a hypothesis that has recently been offered with respect to the mechanisms by which prosocial attitudes and behaviour are boosted by a particular form of coordination, namely sensorimotor synchronization (Repp 2005;Repp & Su, 2013): by synchronizing with me, a partner indicates her willingness to invest effort in adapting to me (Mills et al 2018), which may elicit a sense of commitment to reward that effort investment by acting in that partner's interests (Green, McEllin, Felber, & Michael, in prep.…”