Exploring the hardship of ease: Subjective and objective effortin the ease-of-processing paradigm

摘要

Numerous studies examined the role of pro-cessing effort in judgments using the "ease-of-processing"paradigm in which participants generate or retrieve few ormany issue-relevant thoughts. Because earlier studies onlyassessed the subjective effort, it is unclear if this paradigmalso mobilizes objective effort, and how such effort relatesto subjective effort. These questions were addressed in twoexperiments modeled on standard tasks from the processingeffort literature: "ease of argument generation" (Study 1)and "ease of retrieval" (Study 2). In both experiments wesimultaneously measured subjective effort (via self-report)and objective effort (via cardiovascular reactivity). Theresults showed that processing ease manipulations (gener-ation or retrieval of few vs. many exemplars) influence notonly subjective effort, but also objective effort, as reflectedespecially by increases of systolic blood pressure in themany exemplars condition. However, only subjective effortwas related to judgment. In the discussion, we consider therole of various forms of effort and other relevant variablesin "processing ease" effects.