Opinion · Psychology (Workplace and Consumer Behavior)
The feature was done in about an hour. It worked, and it did what the project needed. But I didn’t hand it in right away. I spent another two or three hours looking like I was still digging through options, and then I delivered the exact same result.
My manager’s reaction was different from the times I had finished fast. I got praised. Nothing about the work had changed except the time attached to it. That small office moment is a clean example of the effort heuristic: when people can’t easily judge how good something is, they judge how long it took.
The hours you see, not the hours that happened
The effort heuristic is a mental shortcut. Judging quality directly is hard, so people swap in an easier question: how much work went into this? More time and effort get read as more value.
The best-known evidence comes from a 2004 set of experiments by Justin Kruger and colleagues. In the first, people read the same poem. Some were told it took the poet 4 hours to write. Others were told 18 hours. The 18-hour group rated the poem as better and said it was worth more money.
A second study used two paintings. One was described as taking 4 hours and the other 26 hours, with the labels swapped between participants. People preferred whichever painting they thought took longer. Self-described art experts were swayed just as much as everyone else.
The finding is not bulletproof. In a 2023 replication of the poem and painting studies, Ignazio Ziano and colleagues got mixed results. The painting result held up in their first sample, but the poem result did not. A second attempt found that effort still lifted how much people liked the work and rated its quality, but not how much money they thought it was worth.
Notice what was being measured. Nobody watched the poet work, and the only thing that changed was a number in a description. People weren’t rewarding effort. They were rewarding the story of effort.
That is exactly what happened with my feature. The extra hours added nothing to the code. They only changed what my manager believed about the code.
Why the shortcut usually works
It would be easy to call this plain foolishness. I don’t think it is. In everyday life, effort and quality really do move together a lot of the time. A meal that simmered all afternoon often tastes better than one that was microwaved. A report built on a week of research is usually more reliable than one written over lunch.
So the brain learns a reasonable rule: more effort, better result. The trouble is that the rule keeps running even when effort and quality come apart.
Kruger’s team found when that happens most. In a third study, people judged images of medieval armor said to have taken either 15 or 110 hours to make. Some saw sharp images and some saw blurry ones. The effort label mattered more when the image was blurry. When people couldn’t see the quality clearly, they leaned harder on the hours.
That detail explains the office. Most managers can’t inspect every line of code, so to them the work is a blurry image. Time is the sharpest signal they have, and so time is what gets graded.
Someone else’s sweat versus your own
It helps to separate this from a close cousin. A classic 1959 study by Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills is described in the same overview of effort research. Students who went through a harsh initiation to join a discussion group later rated the group more highly than students who had a mild one. That is effort justification: people inflate the value of something because they paid for it with their own effort.
The effort heuristic works from the other side of the table. The effort belongs to someone else, a poet, a painter, a locksmith or an employee, and the observer uses it as a clue about quality. One bias protects past choices, while the other fills a gap in knowledge.
The difference matters because the fixes are different. You beat effort justification by asking whether you would still value the thing if it had been easy to get. You beat the effort heuristic by finding a better way to see the quality itself.
A locksmith, a flight search and an empty office at night
The same pattern shows up in very different settings. The details change. The logic does not.
The locksmith who got too good
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely has told the story of a locksmith who earned better tips as an apprentice. Back then, jobs took him a long time, and he sometimes broke the lock. Once he became skilled and could open a door in moments, customers started complaining about his price and stopped tipping.
This is the effort heuristic turned against the expert. Skill made the effort invisible, and invisible effort looked like overcharging.
The flight search that was slower on purpose
Ryan Buell and Michael Norton of Harvard Business School tested this online. In a 2011 paper they called “The Labor Illusion”, they ran experiments with travel and dating websites. When a site showed the work it was doing, like a running list of the airlines being searched, people valued the service more. In some cases they even preferred a longer wait over an instant result.
The authors linked this to perceived effort. Seeing the work made people feel the service had tried hard for them. Here, effort didn’t just raise value. It was staged to raise value.
The desk that is still lit at 8 p.m.
Organizational researcher Kimberly Elsbach and her colleagues studied what they call passive face time: simply being seen at work. As UC Davis Magazine summarized it, people seen during normal hours were judged as more dependable. People seen in the evenings or on weekends were judged as more committed and dedicated. The managers making these judgments were largely unaware they were doing it.
Presence became a stand-in for effort, and effort became a stand-in for value. Nobody had checked the output.
Put the locksmith, the website and the office side by side. In each case, the person judging couldn’t see quality well. In each case, visible time filled the gap.
What my one-hour feature taught me
I’ll be honest about the uncomfortable part. Stretching that task worked. I got a better reaction for the same result, and from a short-term point of view, that was a win.
But I’d argue it also shows how the incentive bends. If finishing fast earns less credit than finishing slow, people learn to finish slow. The work doesn’t get better. It just gets padded. Over time, a team can end up rewarding the look of effort while the real speed and skill go unnoticed, much like the locksmith’s customers.
One way to read my manager’s reaction is that they were doing what Kruger’s participants did with the blurry armor. When the quality is hard to see, the hours are the most visible thing on the table. The shortcut was rational from where they sat. It just measured the wrong thing.
Where the effort signal still earns its place
None of this means effort signals are always a trick. Sometimes visible effort is real information.
When I wrote about GTA 6 landing on the cover of Game Informer, the interesting part was the format. A magazine cover story takes far more preparation than a quick online trailer. That extra work tells fans the studio sweated the details, and in that case the signal and the product likely do line up. Nobody can play the game yet, so the effort is the clearest clue available.
The question is whether the effort you can see is connected to the quality you can’t. A long-simmered sauce, a carefully staged product reveal and a well-researched report can all be honest signals. Padded hours, a fake loading bar and a lit desk with nothing happening at it are not.
Before you judge work by the clock
The effort heuristic is hard to switch off, because it is right often enough to feel like common sense. A few quick checks can keep it honest:
- Can I see the result itself? If you can test, read or use the output, judge that first. Let time be a tiebreaker, not the verdict.
- Is the effort visible, or just described? “It took 18 hours” is a claim. The poem stayed the same either way.
- Would fast work get punished here? If the honest answer is yes, expect people to slow down for the wrong reasons.
- Is the waiting part of the product? A progress screen can be useful. It can also be theater.
The next time something impresses you, ask what you are actually reacting to. Is it the work, or the hours you were told went into it?
Editorial note: This piece grew out of studying a psychology concept rather than following a trending news story. The workplace example is a personal observation, not a recommendation to pad work time. The featured image is AI-generated.