The Paradox of Hard Work

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To say that long-distance runners embrace difficulty is to say the obvious. When you watch many thousands of people happily push themselves through a race that they might not even be allowed to finish, though, you start to get the hint that something deeply human is going on. People like things that are really hard. In fact, the enormity of a task often is why people pursue it in the first place. This is a puzzling phenomenon, when you stop and think about it. It violates all sorts of assumptions about rational action and evolutionary selection and economic theory. Psychologists call it the Effort Paradox.

The term was introduced in 2018 by a University of Toronto social psychologist named Michael Inzlicht, along with colleagues at Brown and Carnegie Mellon.

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