The Effort Heuristic

By Justin Kruger, Derrick Wirtz, L. Van Boven, T. Altermatt. 2004

389 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Economics and Econometrics, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9841ff0f93cfd5d3db2bad07ec9aaf9fdba767c

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Citations in the corpus

Metacognitive Experiences in Consumer Judgment and Decision Making (2004, background): “Thus, the initial judgments of high quality observed by Kruger et al. (2004) can reverse the outcome.”
When environmental messages should be assertive: examining the moderating role of effort investment (2015, background): “A substantial body of research has acknowledged the importance of effort investment in determining motivation changes (e.g., Kivetz, Ueminsky, and Zheng 2006; Kruger et al. 2004; Zhang et al. 2011).”
Doing it the hard way: How low control drives preferences for high-effort products and services (2014, background): “…effort (e.g., Aronson and Mills 1959; Kim and Labroo 2011; Kivetz and Simonson 2002; Nielsen and Escalas 2010; Norton, Mochon, and Ariely 2012), especially in the context of gift giving (Moreau, Bonney, and Herd 2011), or after others have invested effort (e.g., Kruger et al. 2004; Morales 2005).”
How Naive Theories Drive Opposing Inferences from the Same Information (2013, positive): “Specifically, individuals may assume that great artists can produce masterpieces quickly and with relatively little effort, or they may assume that creating great art requires considerable time and effort (Kruger et al. 2004).”
Giving Firms an “E” for Effort: Consumer Responses to High-Effort Firms (2005, background): “However, past research has focused predominantly on effort in interpersonal exchanges, and the few examining effort in a consumer context have looked at cases where the effort improves the perceived quality of the products and services or when actual quality is ambiguous (Kirmani and Wright 1989; Kr”
Heuristics made easy: an effort-reduction framework. (2008, methodology): “The effort heuristic ( Kruger, Wirtz, Van Boven, & Altermatt, 2004 ) suggests that people will judge objects that took a long time to produce to be of high value.”
Some goals just feel easier: Self-concordance leads to goal progress through subjective ease, not effort ☆ (2016, methodology): “Given that we took an idiographic approach to goals, we were limited to using self-report measures of goal progress, which, like effort, can be influenced by heuristics (Kruger et al., 2004) and participant recall bias (Hassan, 2005).”
It’s Too Pretty to Use! When and How Enhanced Product Aesthetics Discourage Usage and Lower Consumption Enjoyment (2017, background): “The “effort heuristic” (Kruger et al. 2004) describes how increases in the perceived production time and effort of a given item enhance ratings of quality and liking.”
Regulating Risk or Risking Regulation? Construal Levels and Depletion Effects in the Processing of Health Messages (2009, background): “, the initial task) to infer their goals regarding the amount of effort to be expended on the second task (Kruger et al. 2004; Wan and Sternthal 2008).”
Art and the science of generative AI (2023, background): “As mentioned above, viewers often engage in “intention guessing,” and the presence of human intention leads to enhanced perceptions of creativity and creative value [53,54,55,56].”
Moral Identity and Judgments of Charitable Behaviors (2007, background): “…that a common attribution (assuming that no other information is salient to undermine this inference) is that effort implies confidence in a cause/product (Kirmani 1990; Kirmani and Wright 1989), especially under conditions of indeterminable or ambiguous product quality (Kruger et al. 2004).”
Credibility and trust of information in online environments: The use of cognitive heuristics (2013, background): “The expectancy-violation heuristic is likely underpinned in part by the ''effort heuristic'' (Kruger et al., 2004), which is the human tendency to value objects based on how much effort went into producing them.”