Of great art and untalented artists: Effort information and the flexible construction of judgmental heuristics

Abstract

Past research (Kruger, Wirtz, Van Boven, & Altermatt, 2004) proposed that people use the effort of the producer as a heuristic for the quality of the product. In contrast, two experiments show that consumers' inferences from effort information are highly malleable. Participants were either explicitly exposed to one of two applicable naive theories ("good-art-takes-effort" vs. "good-art-takes-talent") or the order of judgment was reversed (quality judgment first vs. talent judgment first) to activate different naive theories more subtly. In both cases, participants only inferred high quality from high effort when an "effort" theory was rendered accessible, but not when a "talent" theory was rendered accessible. We conclude that judgment tasks prime naive theories that can serve as inference rules, illustrating that heuristics can be constructed on the spot.

Some goals just feel easier: Self-concordance leads to goal progress through subjective ease, not effort

“…Although both subjective ease and effort were significantly related to greater goal progress, self-concordance was not associated with increased effort. One potential explanation for this discrepancy is that in some studies, effort and goal progress were assessed at the same time points (e.g., Sheldon & Elliot, 1999), making it possible that participants used progress as a heuristic for the amount of effort that they exerted, subsequently producing an error in judgement (e.g., Cho & Schwarz, 2008;Kruger, Wirtz, Van Boven, & Altermatt, 2004). For example, if a person sees that they made a lot of progress on their goal, this may bias their perception so that they believe they put in more effort than they actually did (i.e., if I made progress, I must have tried hard).…”

When and how aesthetics influences financial decisions

“…Higher ratings for companies with better looking annual reports could then be explained by the rational preference for companies that apparently have more capital. Evidence for such lay theories comes from research showing that artwork valuations vary with apparent production effort (Cho & Schwarz, 2008). If this holds for financial documents, then the effect should persist regardless of whether respondents are first asked about the influence of aesthetics on their judgments.…”

Pièces de Résistance? Core and Casual Consumers’ Valuations of Aesthetically Incongruent Artworks

“…Cho and Schwarz () demonstrated that consumer judgments of artistic quality are malleable. In their study, they primed consumers with different naïve theories, such as “good art takes talent” or “good art takes effort.” They found that exactly the same information about production times led to very different quality and value assessments depending on which naïve theory was presented (i.e., less time was associated either with higher quality and value, following the talent theory, or lower quality and value, following the effort theory).…”

“…Hence, participants were asked to indicate how much they thought the set of paintings would bring if put on sale simultaneously at an auction (on a 10‐point scale from 1 = below 100,000 to 10 = over 100 million; cf. Cho & Schwarz, ). Creativity was measured as the extent to which participants believed that the set of paintings demonstrated “imagination, originality, and intellectual inventiveness” (on a 10‐point scale from 1 = very low to 10 = very high; cf.…”