Decision Making and the Avoidance of Cognitive Demand

Behavioral and economic, theories have ion maintained that actions are chosen so is to minimize demands for exertion or work a principle sometimes referred to as the law of less work The data supporting this idea pertain almost entirely to demands for physical effort However the same minimization principle has often been assumed also to apply to cognitive demand The authors set out to evaluate the validity of this assumption In 6 behavioral experiments participants chose freely between courses of action associated with different levels of demand for controlled information processing Together the results of these experiments revealed a bus in favor of the less demanding course of action The bias was obtained across a nine of choice settings and demand manipulations and was not wholly attributable to strategic avoidance of errors minimization of time on task or maximization of the rate of goal achievement It is remarkable that the effect also did not depend on awareness of the demand manipulation Consistent with a motivational account avoidance of demand displayed sensitivity to task incentives and covaried with individual differences in the efficacy of executive control The findings reported together with convergent neuroscientific evidence lend support to the idea that anticipated cognitive demand plays a significant role in behavioral decision making