Distinct from cognitive dissonance

Distinct from cognitive dissonance and effort justification, where value is thought to accrue fromone’s previous exertion of effort, preliminary work on the martyrdom effect suggests thatvalue can also accrue from one’s anticipated future effort [91,92] and from the effort exerted byothers [92,93]. According to this work, willingness to contribute to a charitable cause increaseswhen the fundraising process is expected to be painful and effortful rather than easy andenjoyable. As a result, people donate more money to a charitable cause (e.g., a cancer charity)when fundraising involves completing a 5-mile run versus attending a picnic [91]. Similarly,when prospectively deciding how much money to give in a public goods game, people donatemore if giving requires performing some effortful and painful task (e.g., keeping handsimmersed in ice water) compared with when donations are free of effort and pain [91]. Thesefindings suggest that we are therefore able to generate positive associations with effortful actions we have not yet taken (or will not take ourselves), which raises the question of how theseeffort–value associations might be learned in the first place, and how they might generalize.