People who take on challenges and persevere longer are more likely to succeed in life. But individuals often avoid exerting effort, and there is limited experimental research investigating whether we can learn to value effort. We developed a paradigm to test the hypothesis that people can learn to value effort and will seek effortful challenges if directly incentivized to do so. We also dissociate the effects of rewarding people for choosing effortful challenges and performing well. The results provide limited evidence that rewarding effort increased people’s willingness to choose harder tasks when rewards were no longer offered (near transfer). There was also mixed evidence that rewarding effort increased willingness to choose harder tasks in another unrelated and unrewarded task (far transfer). These heterogeneous results highlight the need for further research to understand when this paradigm may be the most effective for increasing and generalizing the value of effort.

接受挑战并坚持更长时间的人更有可能在生活中取得成功。但人们常常避免付出努力，而且关于我们是否能够学会重视努力的实验研究也很有限。我们开发了一个范式来检验这样一个假设：人们可以学会重视努力，并且如果受到直接激励，就会寻求努力的挑战。我们还将奖励人们选择努力挑战和表现良好的效果分开。结果提供了有限的证据，表明当不再提供奖励（接近转移）时，奖励努力会增加人们选择更困难任务的意愿。还有混合的证据表明，奖励努力会增加在另一项不相关且无奖励的任务（远转移）中选择更困难的任务的意愿。这些异质性结果强调需要进一步研究，以了解这种范式何时对于增加和推广努力的价值最有效。