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

Abstract

Recent research on the conditions that facilitate cooperation is limited by a factor that has yet to be established: the accuracy of effort perception. Accuracy matters because the fitness of cooperative strategies depends not just on being able to perceive others’ effort but to perceive their true effort. In an experiment using a novel effort-tracker methodology, we calculate the accuracy of human effort perceptions and show that accuracy is boosted by more absolute effort (regardless of relative effort) and when cooperating with a “slacker” rather than an “altruist”. A formal model shows how such an effort-prober strategy is likely to be an adaptive solution because it gives would-be collaborators information on when to abort ventures that are not in their interest and opt for ones that are. This serves as a precautionary measure against systematic exploitation by extortionist strategies and a descent into uncooperativeness. As such, it is likely that humans have a bias to minimize mistakes in effort perception that would commit them to a disadvantageous effort-reward relationship. Overall we find support for the idea that humans have evolved smart effort detection systems that are made more accurate by those contexts most relevant for cooperative tasks.

The fruits of our labour: Interpersonal coordination generates commitment by signalling a willingness to adapt

“…It would therefore be important to investigate to what extent findings from research using monetary incentives generalises to contexts in which the resource that is at stake is effort. Future research should explore how contributions of effort are monitored, compared and exchanged within cooperative activities (e.g., Ibbotson et al, 2019 ). For example, investigating how providing participants with reputational incentives may increase both the effort they are willing to invest into an interaction and the extent to which they are willing to make commitments.…”

What is (perception of) effort? Objective and subjective effort during attempted task performance

“…Similarly, self-efficacy 74 has been examined and found to be related to perception of effort as a trait variable 75 (i.e. typically the greater the self-efficacy, the lower the perceived effort; Kukla, 1972;Ford and Brehm, 1987;McAuley and Courneya, 1992;Rudolph and McAuley, 1996;Pender et al, 2002;Sarrazin et al, 2002;Yoshida et al, 2002;Hu et al, 2007;Pinxten et al, 2014;Malik et al, 2020); though has sometimes been measured as a state variable which reduces in response to continued task performance (Hall et al, 2005; Wrightson et al 2019) 76 , and has also been manipulated where studies have found increasing/decreasing self-efficacy decreased/increased perception of effort (and even volitional performance) respectively (Weinberg et al, 1979;1980;Feltz and Riessinger, 1990;Fitzsimmons et al, 1991;Hockey, 1997;Kivetz and Simonson, 2003;Muraven et al, 2006;Hutchinson et al, 2008;Cameron et al, 2019;Mlynski et al, 2020) . Indeed, further highlighting the extensional equivalence between these two constructs, several studies show that fatigue and self-efficacy are also associated; though in clinical populations and looking at 'state' measures (Findley et al, 1998; Akin and Guner, 2019).…”

Perceiving others’ cognitive effort through movement: Path length, speed, and time

“…In view of the functional advantages to be gained from accurately assessing the amount of effort that others are investing in specific activities, it is no surprise that humans continuously track others' effort investment (Apps et al, 2016), and do so quite accurately (Liang et al, 2019), especially when the stakes are high (Ibbotson et al, 2019). Indeed, research by Gergely and Csibra (2003) shows that even infants as young as 12 months old rely on information about agents' effort costs to infer those agents' goals and to predict their actions.…”