Mi3: Today, we’re discussing some research on the mechanisms of decisions, with the paper “Does decision confidence reflect effort?” We are here with Mi3 doctoral researcher Jamal Esmaily and Crowd Cognition Lab Principal Investigator and Group Director Bahador Bahrami, two of the authors on the study. This study asks the question of whether physical effort during decision-making might influence how confident we feel about those decisions. Let’s start with a very immediate question: what is this all about? What led you to explore this particular connection between effort and decision confidence?
Jamal: The link between effort and decision-making has always been a fascinating dilemma in behavioural sciences. For example, classical economics would assume that effort is like other costs: something everyone wants to avoid. Doing things with less effort is, in this view, always preferred. But every day observations tell us that we also like and value effort. People run marathons, sail around the world, or learn seven languages. The key question arising is: is there any inherent value in effort? We had one hypothesis: maybe effort increases our sense of certainty and that is partly why we value it. So we turned it into a test. That’s what the study asked: does the physical effort you invest while you’re still deciding affect your confidence in that decision, even if the effort doesn’t directly improve the decision’s accuracy?
Mi3: That’s really interesting. Can you give us a concrete example of how this might play out in a real-life situation?
Jamal: Imagine you’re trying to make a decision while doing something physically demanding—like deciding which route to take while you’re cycling uphill. The physical effort required to pedal might make you more confident in your choice of route, even though that effort doesn’t actually make the route better or worse. You’re not getting better information about the routes because you’re pedaling harder, but you might still feel more certain about the decision just because you’re putting in more effort. That’s the kind of scenario we were interested in exploring, but in a controlled lab setting.
Mi3: So, what did you find? Does physical effort during decision-making actually influence confidence?
Bahador: Interestingly, our results were a bit unexpected. We found that while physical effort did cause participants to respond slightly faster, it didn’t significantly affect their confidence or the accuracy of their decisions. This suggests that, at least in our study, the effort put in during the decision-making process didn’t translate into higher confidence. This was contrary to what we might have expected.
Mi3: So this challenges the very intuitive basis of the assumptions that motivated your study. What do you think this means for how we understand decision-making and confidence?
Bahador: Good question! If effort doesn’t affect confidence during decision-making, it could mean that confidence is influenced by other factors we didn’t account for—like the perceived (rather than the actual objective) difficulty of the task or the individual’s past experiences with similar decisions. It might also mean that in certain situations, people are able to separate the physical effort from the decision process itself, which could be a useful strategy for avoiding biased decisions.
Mi3: That’s not so bad after all then! Before we wrap up, can you tell us what you enjoyed most about working on this study?
Jamal: One of the things I enjoyed most was the challenge of designing an experiment that could isolate the effects of physical effort on decision-making. It’s not easy to create a controlled environment where you can tease apart these different influences. We worked with our Japanese colleague Nobu Hagura who is based in Osaka, Japan and leads a sensorimotor decision-making laboratory. Another highlight was the unexpected nature of our findings—it’s always exciting in science when results challenge your hypotheses, because it means there’s more to learn and explore. Publishing negative results is always a bit challenging because it is like admitting defeat. We went through a very positive review process in the journal and the editor and reviewers were particularly helpful and recognised the value of the negative results.
Mi3: It’s been a pleasure discussing your work. Thank you for sharing these insights with us!
Jamal: Thank you! I’m glad we had the chance to talk about this study.
Check out the original study and Jamal Esmaily’s and Bahador Bahrami’s profiles.
References:Hagura, N., Esmaily, J., & Bahrami, B. (2023). Does decision confidence reflect effort? PLoS ONE, 18(2): e0278617. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278617