The Aronson and Mills Experiment: Effort Justification

  The kinds of objectives that are the hardest for us to achieve, demand considerably more energy, and that we have to fight for, are what we consider to be the most valuable. This is known as effort justification and it was studied in an experiment conducted by Aronson and Mills in 1959. In fact, their research was published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. The researchers hypothesized that there might be a cognitive bias involved. In other words, perhaps people value more something that involves more effort because they give great importance to the time and energy…