Learned Industriousness

Learned industriousness is a theory proposed by psychologist Robert Eisenberger holding that when a person's high-effort responses are reliably reinforced, the sensation of exerting high effort itself becomes secondarily rewarding, so the person carries greater persistence into later, unrelated tasks. The theory offers a contrasting account to learned helplessness: rather than the loss of motivation that follows repeated failure to control outcomes, a history of reinforced effort produces sustained willingness to work hard. Eisenberger's framework also describes an opposite pattern, learned laziness, in which repeated reinforcement for minimal effort generalizes into reduced effort on later tasks.