Latent profiles of effort roles and their impact on task experience and behavior

The experience of effort is a decisive factor for engagement and behavior. However, exerting effort can yield vastly diverse experiences. We posit that these differences are due to distinct configurations of different roles of effort for self-regulation (instrument, reward, adding value to an outcome), and are influenced by task context (entertaining/learning). Furthermore, we investigate how these profiles of effort roles affect the decision to exert further effort. In our online study, 471 participants (51% female, 48% male, Mage = 41.1 ± 11.9) were given an instructional framing (entertainment/learning game) and reported their anticipated strength of effort roles regarding the upcoming task. Participants then had the opportunity to play Tetris. Given that successfully playing Tetris requires constant attention and a certain amount of exertion, and it can be easily framed as either an entertainment or learning game, it serves as an appealing effort task for this study. Subsequently, participants indicated their task experience and their willingness to engage in further gameplay. A latent profile analysis identified four configurations of effort roles. These effort profiles significantly differed in the experience of positive and negative affect, boredom, perceived exertion in gaming, and willingness to engage in further gameplay. The impact of task framing was limited to negative affect and RPE. Our findings underscore the critical role of effort’s roles in task experience and behavioral decisions.