Who is satisfied with effort? The role of inter-individual differences in valuing choice outcomes

Irena Domachowska is interested in self-regulation, i.e. how people regulate their actions, cognitions and emotions. Recently, she has been investigating the role of willpower beliefs, i.e. whether people believe that willpower is a limited or a nonlimited resource and its effects on effort and satisfaction.

Project description
Before choosing to pursue a rewarding action, we make estimates about the effort required to receive a given payoff. If the effort is too high, we are less motivated to pursue this action and might even dismiss the value of the reward. This is known as effort discounting and is an important factor in decision-making. This may also appear with different levels of satisfaction with the reward after already exerting the effort to obtain it. In the current project we will investigate how individual differences affect reward valuation before and after exerting the effort. This project will build on findings that clearly demonstrate how satisfaction differs between individuals, and what impacts this has on behaviour and decision-making.