Effort Justification

Effort justification is the tendency to attribute greater value to an outcome or a goal that required considerable effort, discomfort or pain to achieve, compared with the value assigned to the identical outcome if it had been reached with less effort. The social psychologists Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills demonstrated the effect experimentally in a 1959 study, in which women who underwent an embarrassing and effortful initiation to join a discussion group rated the group and its discussion as more interesting and worthwhile afterward than women who underwent a mild or no initiation, even though all participants heard the identical, deliberately dull discussion. The effect is explained within cognitive dissonance theory as a way of resolving the psychological tension between having expended substantial effort and the possibility that the outcome was not actually worth it, by instead revising one's evaluation of the outcome upward.