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When reaching goals, organisms must simultaneously meet the overarching goal of conserving energy. According to the law of least effort , organisms will select the means associated with the least effort. The mechanisms underlying this bias remain unknown. One hypothesis is that organisms come to avoid situations associated with unnecessary effort by generating a negative valence toward the stimuli associated with such situations.
When reaching goals by acting upon the world, organisms must simultaneously strive to meet the overarching goal of conserving energy. The actual mechanisms giving rise to this strong and most basic of human biases remain unknown.
One possibility is that we explicitly assess how much effort is associated with each means of reaching a goal and then select the one associated with the least amount of effort. Such an algorithm for selecting the path of least resistance would be computationally challenging, potentially requiring episodic memory and simulations of actions and their consequences Arkin ; Schacter and Addis Alternatively, it has been hypothesized that an organism comes to avoid situations associated with the expenditure of effort in a more reflexive mannerβby automatically generating a negative valence toward the stimuli associated with such situations Botvinick ; Hull ; Lewin This valence from effort hypothesis addresses a basic aspect of the human condition, one that predicts and explains action selection across a wide variety of contexts.
The hypothesis predicts both conscious and unconscious Bargh and Morsella ; Morsella and Bargh in press preferences toward cognitive and behavioral tasks featuring little effort, over those tasks that are needlessly effortful.
