Although people often value the challenge and mastery of performing an activity, their satisfaction may suffer when the tasks comprising the activity are perceived as difficult. Thus, it is important to understand the factors that influence subjective judgments of difficulty. In this research, we introduce an easily actionable and effective tactic to reduce perceptions of the overall difficulty of an activity: We find that concluding a sequence of difficult tasks with a few easy tasks can decrease perceived difficulty of the aggregate activity. While appending extra tasks to a constant sequence should increase the objective amount of effort necessary to complete all the tasks, we find that more tasks can paradoxically be perceived as less effortful. We coin this phenomenon the easy addendum effect and demonstrate that it is less likely to occur when an overall activity is conceptualized as consisting of a single category rather than two distinct categories-that is, a set of difficult tasks followed by a set of easy tasks. We further show downstream consequences of this effect-through lower perceived difficulty, the easy addendum effect can lead to greater satisfaction, persistence, and more tasks performed overall. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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简单的附录效应：当做得更多时似乎不那么费力。


尽管人们通常重视执行某项活动的挑战和掌握，但当该活动所包含的任务被认为很困难时，他们的满意度可能会受到影响。因此，了解影响主观难度判断的因素很重要。在这项研究中，我们引入了一种易于操作且有效的策略来减少对活动整体难度的感知：我们发现用一些简单的任务来完成一系列困难的任务可以降低总体活动的感知难度。虽然将额外的任务附加到一个恒定的序列中应该会增加完成所有任务所需的客观工作量，但我们发现，自相矛盾的是，更多的任务可能会被认为不那么费力。我们将这种现象称为简单附录效应，并证明当整体活动被概念化为由单个类别而不是两个不同类别组成时（即一组困难任务后面跟着一组简单任务），这种现象不太可能发生。我们进一步展示了这种效应的下游后果——通过降低感知难度，简单的附录效应可以带来更大的满意度、持久性和整体执行的更多任务。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。