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effort_heuristic
The tendency to assign greater value to things that required more effort to produce, regardless of the actual quality of the output. This bias confuses the cost of production with the value of the result.
A painting that took 200 hours is valued more highly than an equally beautiful painting that took 20 minutes, simply because of the perceived effort.
A consultant charges $50,000 for a strategic recommendation that took her team three weeks to produce. A rival firm delivers the same recommendation in two days using advanced software, but clients perceive it as less valuable and push back on the price — even though the output is identical.
A home baker sells handmade cookies at a farmers market for $6 each, telling customers each batch takes four hours to prepare. A nearby stall with equally delicious machine-assisted cookies priced at $2 each sells far fewer, because shoppers associate the lower price and faster production with inferior quality.
Binary (yes/no) questions an LLM must answer to identify this aspect:
Is the quality or value of a product, work, or outcome being assessed?
Type: binaryIs the perceived value influenced by the amount of effort believed to have gone into producing it?
Type: binaryWould the same output be valued differently if the perceived effort were different?
Type: binaryThe tendency to assign greater value to things that required more effort to produce, regardless of the actual quality of the output. This bias confuses the cost of production with the value of the result.
Effort serves as a heuristic proxy for quality in many everyday situations, and this association is overgeneralized to contexts where it does not hold.
Evaluate the output independently of the process. Judge the painting, not the hours. Focus on quality and utility rather than production cost.
Art valuation, software development estimation, academic grading, and consultant billing.
Use these tools to detect, analyze, or train this aspect.