Does Effort Justification Hold Up
Jonah Berger's Contagious treats hard-to-get access as a way to make people value and discuss a place. The experiments behind effort justification are split, and the cleaner result concerns work people finish themselves.
Answer to the question
Does effort justification hold up?
In part. Laboratory studies from 1959 and 1966 found that a harder initiation raised liking for a group, but a field study in real Dutch groups and a 2013 replication did not. The better supported finding concerns people finishing something themselves, where their own work was valued close to expert work.
Key takeaways
- As summarised in The Psychologist, Aronson and Mills (1959) found that 63 women who passed a severe embarrassment test rated a dull discussion group as more likeable than those who passed a mild one. Arousal, relief and contrast were not excluded.
- By the same summary, Gerard and Mathewson (1966) replicated it with electric shocks and found higher ratings only among recruits who believed they were joining a discussion club.
- Lodewijkx and Syroit (1997), in two studies of real Dutch groups with 202 and 46 participants, found support only for the companionship account. Kamau (2013), with 70 participants, did not replicate the original.
- Norton, Mochon and Ariely (2012) found that people valued their own boxes, origami and Lego close to experts' work, and that the effect disappeared when the work was destroyed or unfinished.
- Ziano and colleagues (2023), with 1,405 participants, supported one of two experiments on the effort heuristic, the belief that work which took more effort is better.
The usual question is whether hard-won things are worth more. The research splits instead by who spent the effort, and whether the work was finished.
Effort justification is the claim that people raise their opinion of something they suffered or worked for, so that the cost feels sensible. Jonah Berger's Contagious leans on it in the chapter on social currency, where hard-to-get access is treated as a dependable way to make people talk. What follows tests how much of that claim the experiments behind effort justification will actually carry, and which kinds of effort count.
Embarrassment, Shocks and a Dull Discussion
In the 1959 experiment by Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills, 63 women at college were told they would join a group discussion about sex. First came an embarrassment test, as summarised in The Psychologist. The severe version had them read obscene words and vivid passages aloud. The mild version used sex-related words that were not obscene. All of them then listened to a recorded discussion of a book they had not read, which was dull on purpose. Those who had passed the severe test rated the group members as more likeable. It was a single laboratory study of 63 people, run before preregistration existed.
Aronson and Mills explained it with cognitive dissonance. Having paid a high price for a poor group, the women resolved the mismatch by deciding the group was worth it. The same summary lists rival readings the design could not exclude: arousal, relief at finishing the test, and the contrast with a boring discussion.
Seven years later, by the same summary, Harold Gerard and Grover Mathewson swapped the reading for electric shocks, framed as a screening test for objectivity. Some recruits believed they were joining a discussion club and others that they were in an ordinary psychology experiment, and within each set half received severe shocks and half weak ones. Severe shocks produced higher ratings of the group and the discussion, but only among the club recruits. Telling people they had passed lowered the ratings, which weakened the relief explanation.
Where Berger's Claim Comes From
Berger's cases are vivid. Please Don't Tell is an East Village bar, never advertised, entered through a phone booth, with forty-five seats, a booking line that opens at 3 p.m. and a full book by half past. Rue La La ran twenty-four-hour flash sales, and on its founder's account items posted at 11 a.m. could be sold out by 11:03. The McRib's manufactured absence completes the set. Each is told as proof that insider access makes people value and discuss a place. The chapter's measurements are the seat count and the booking window, and there is no comparison bar and no sales figure for the bar.
The book's footnotes are more careful than its text. They say that making access difficult is different from making it impossible, that the bar's staff are trained to refuse with a "no, but", and that Rue La La later let non-members in by signing up with an email address.
The general claim sits in the main text: if something is difficult to obtain, people assume it must be worth the effort. The endnote behind it cites the 1959 experiment described above, with a volume and page range that differ from the journal's record, volume 59, issue 2, article range 177 to 181.
Hardship is read as proof of worth, and a 1959 experiment is the book's evidence for it.
Did Real Groups Bear It Out?
A laboratory is one thing and a real group is another. Hein Lodewijkx and Joseph Syroit followed real groups in the Netherlands in two longitudinal studies, with 202 and 46 participants. Their path analyses supported only a competing account, that companionship predicts how attractive a group seems whatever the severity. Severity early in the initiation went with frustration and loneliness in one study and low mood in the other, and those feelings lowered liking for the group.
In 2013 Caroline Kamau repeated the Aronson and Mills design with 70 participants, who underwent a severe or a mild initiation, and gave about half of them an extrinsic reward afterwards. A severe initiation did not produce more group identity than a mild one, so the original was not replicated. A mild initiation followed by a reward gave more identity than a severe one followed by a reward. The same Psychologist piece argues that Kamau's initiation task, mathematical subtraction, was not representative of real initiations.
| Study | Who spent the effort | What was found |
|---|---|---|
| Aronson and Mills, 1959 | 63 women, reading aloud | Severe group rated more likeable |
| Gerard and Mathewson, 1966 | Recruits given electric shocks | Higher ratings, club recruits only |
| Lodewijkx and Syroit, 1997 | Members of real Dutch groups, 202 and 46 | Only the companionship account held |
| Kamau, 2013 | 70 participants | Severe no higher than mild |
| Norton, Mochon and Ariely, 2012 | People who built things themselves | Own work valued near expert work, unless unfinished |
Does Effort Pay Off for a Brand?
A second line of work looks like effort justification and behaves differently. Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely had people assemble IKEA boxes, fold origami and build Lego sets. Participants valued their own amateur creations close to those made by experts, and expected others to agree. The effect disappeared when the creations were destroyed or left unfinished. It also appeared in people who did not say they enjoyed do-it-yourself projects. [Why You Love the Thing You Assembled](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/why-you-love-the-thing-you-assembled) covers it as a design lever.
A third kind concerns effort that somebody else visibly spent. Justin Kruger and colleagues reported in 2004 that people rate a piece of work more highly when told more effort went into it. Two preregistered replications by Ignazio Ziano and colleagues in 2023, with 1,405 participants in all, supported one of the original's two experiments and not the other. [What Showing the Work Actually Does](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/what-showing-the-work-actually-does) takes that line up in full.
The dissonance reading of effort justification after a purchase gets its own hearing in [Why You Defend What You Just Bought](https://thewhyweproject.com/articles/why-you-defend-what-you-just-bought). The three lines share the word effort and measure different things: suffering done to join, labour finished by the person, and labour shown by a maker.
Berger's cases ask the visitor for a phone call at 3 p.m. or a seat among forty-five. The laboratory versions of effort justification asked for something large, reading obscene passages aloud or taking electric shocks, and the studies that followed them are split: one laboratory replication, one field study that favoured companionship, one failed replication.
The result with the cleanest commercial reading comes from the other line of work. For a brand the design question is whether the customer's effort ends in something finished, such as a configured product or a completed build, rather than in a queue.
The strongest return on effort in this literature goes to the person who finished something with their own hands, and a booking line or a rope across a door asks for no such thing.
Common questions
Does effort justification hold up?
In part. Laboratory studies from 1959 and 1966 found that a harder initiation raised liking for a group, but a field study in real Dutch groups and a 2013 replication did not. The better supported finding concerns people finishing something themselves, where their own work was valued close to expert work.
Does a hard initiation make people like a group more?
Sometimes, in the laboratory. Aronson and Mills (1959) and Gerard and Mathewson (1966) found it, with a severe test raising liking. Lodewijkx and Syroit (1997) found frustration and lower liking in real groups, and Kamau (2013) did not replicate the original design.
Is the IKEA effect the same as effort justification?
No. The IKEA effect concerns valuing something you built and completed, and it vanished when the work was destroyed or left unfinished. Effort justification, as Aronson and Mills framed it, concerns revising your opinion of a group or goal you suffered to reach.
Sources
Berger, J. (2013). Contagious: Why Things Catch On. New York: Simon & Schuster. Seed book; vault hub Books/Contagious.
Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). 'The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group.' The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(2), 177-181. doi:10.1037/h0047195.
Gerard, H. B., & Mathewson, G. C. (1966). 'The effects of severity of initiation on liking for a group: A replication.' Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2(3), 278-287. doi:10.1016/0022-1031(66)90084-9.
Lodewijkx, H. F. M., & Syroit, J. E. M. M. (1997). 'Severity of initiation revisited: Does severity of initiation increase attractiveness in real groups?' European Journal of Social Psychology, 27(3), 275-300. doi:10.1002/(sici)1099-0992(199705)27:3<275::aid-ejsp822>3.0.co;2-s.
Kamau, C. (2013). 'What does being initiated severely into a group do? The role of rewards.' International Journal of Psychology, 48(3), 399-406. doi:10.1080/00207594.2012.663957.
Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2012). 'The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love.' Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 453-460. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2011.08.002.
Kruger, J., Wirtz, D., Van Boven, L., & Altermatt, T. W. (2004). 'The effort heuristic.' Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40(1), 91-98. doi:10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00065-9.
Ziano, I., Yeung, S. K., Lee, C. S., Shi, J., & Feldman, G. (2023). '"The Effort Heuristic" Revisited: Mixed Results for Replications of Kruger et al. (2004)'s Experiments 1 and 2.' Collabra: Psychology, 9(1), 87489. doi:10.1525/collabra.87489.
The Psychologist (British Psychological Society). 'Initiation ceremony experiments.' Magazine feature on Aronson and Mills (1959), Gerard and Mathewson (1966) and Kamau (2013), the source for the first two designs. https://bps.org.uk/psychologist/initiation-ceremony-experiments