Whether it’s a complex puzzle game or a soon-to-be-due term paper, life can sometimes persuade us to hunker down and put on our proverbial thinking caps. It’s not fun, and science can prove it.
“We mainly do Sudoku puzzles or play chess or Candy Crush because of the reward, not because we enjoy it so much,” psychologist Erik Bijleveld told Radbound University. But countless people play puzzle games and challenge themselves intellectually, so what gives?
Bijleveld and his fellow Radboud researchers studied the “unpleasantness of thinking,” and their findings were recently published in the journal Psychological Bulletin. What the researchers discovered is that many hard thinkers are reward motivated, rather than enjoying the cognitive toil in real time.
“We know that people avoid thinking hard, if they can,” Bijleveld said. “But there are also researchers who say that some people actually seek out mental effort because they associate it with reward: at school, for instance, children learn that mental effort can lead to higher grades and other positive feedback.”
Bijleveld and his colleagues reviewed 170 cognitive studies published between 2019 and 2020. Together, they included 4,670 participants from 29 countries and a wide range of backgrounds. From seeing how subjects would learn new technologies to how they would practice their golf swings, scientists tested participants in more than 350 brain tasks.
“The findings were really striking,” Bijleveld said. “It doesn’t matter where you live or what job you have: everyone finds brainwork annoying.”
The study did, however, discover that some people do find mental effort more daunting than others. Participants in Asian countries were less burdened by cognitive tasks than those from Europe or North America, for instance.
Still, the review’s results showed a commonality: Mental work is hard, but sometimes rewarding.
“For example, why do millions of people play chess?” Bijleveld asked. “People may learn that exerting mental effort in some specific activities is likely to lead to reward. If the benefits of chess outweigh the costs, people may choose to play chess, and even self-report that they enjoy chess.”
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