Against intuition, a set of “desirable difficulties” has been touted as a way in which to improve learning and lengthen retention. This includes, for instance, varying the conditions of learning to allow for more active, effortful, or challenging, contexts. In the current paper, we introduce data that show that, on the contrary, learning to know when to take the easy road may be crucial when it comes to avoiding “laboring in vain.” We presented participants with prior problems – either easy or difficult – followed by choices of selecting an easy or a difficult current problem. Our primary goal was to examine the notion that past failures (which are more likely on the difficult prior items) may be a basis for allowing learners to then choose the easy rather than the difficult current problem. In other words, if one has labored in vain already, the easier items may now be more desirable. In addition, we compare the selections that are made between incremental and entity perspectives, given their fundamentally opposing views on effort. Our results showed that, interestingly, incremental theorists, who generally are proponents of effort, were more likely to select the easy problems, but only when they had experienced failure on prior, and similar, difficult tasks. We interpret these data to suggest that those holding an incremental view may be more in tune with their past efforts, resulting in a Metacognition-by-Experience, or ME strategy, and also hint at its generalizability through cross-cultural comparisons.

与直觉相反，一系列“理想的困难”被吹捧为改善学习和延长记忆力的一种方式。例如，这包括改变学习条件，以适应更积极、更努力或更具挑战性的环境。在本文中，我们介绍的数据表明，相反，学会知道何时走捷径对于避免“白费力气”可能至关重要。我们向参与者展示了先前的问题（简单或困难），然后选择简单或困难的当前问题。我们的主要目标是检验这样一个概念：过去的失败（更有可能是在困难的先前项目上）可能是让学习者选择简单而不是困难的当前问题的基础。换句话说，如果一个人的努力已经白费了，那么现在可能更容易获得更容易的东西。此外，我们还比较了增量观点和实体观点之间的选择，因为它们对努力的看法根本相反。有趣的是，我们的结果表明，渐进理论家通常是努力的支持者，他们更有可能选择简单的问题，但前提是他们在之前的类似困难任务上经历过失败。我们对这些数据的解释表明，那些持有渐进观点的人可能更符合他们过去的努力，从而产生了经验元认知（ME）策略，并通过跨文化比较暗示了其普遍性。