If it's hard to read, it's hard to do: Processing fluency affects effort prediction and motivation
Song and Schwarz start from the point that people are more likely to engage in a behaviour the less effort it requires, and that high perceived effort is a major obstacle to behaviour change, from exercise to diet. Task type and previous experience influence the accuracy of effort predictions, but little is known about how people estimate the effort of a novel behaviour. They test whether people infer effort from how easy the instructions are to read, so that processing fluency affects effort prediction and motivation.
Song and Schwarz start from the point that people are more likely to engage in a behaviour the less effort it requires, and that high perceived effort is a major obstacle to behaviour change, from exercise to diet. Task type and previous experience influence the accuracy of effort predictions, but little is known about how people estimate the effort of a novel behaviour. They test whether people infer effort from how easy the instructions are to read, so that processing fluency affects effort prediction and motivation.
Written from the abstract as shown on the OpenAlex record, read 2026-11-04.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
Song, H., & Schwarz, N. (2008). If it's hard to read, it's hard to do: Processing fluency affects effort prediction and motivation. Psychological Science, 19(10), 986-988. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02189.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02189.x