People tend to overvalue things they have worked hard for or invested heavily in — a pattern often termed "the IKEA effect."
In their recent article in the Journal of Comparative Psychologyopens in new window, Czaczkes et al. uncovered a similar effect in ants. In humans, this effect can be explained by a dislike of waste, increased emotional attachment to the product, or other complex thought processes. However, this seems unlikely in ants.
The authors suggest that overvaluing of hard-earned rewards happens because rewards improve one's mood much more when one was in a bad mood to begin with. In other words, the same cup of coffee will be more enjoyable after a long, hard day than after a lazy day of indulgence.
The finding of such an effect in ants, along with similar effects in rats and birds, may require psychologists to re-examine the causes of the IKEA effect in humans.
While studying preference in humans is relatively easy — we can simply ask — this option is not available when studying animals. Rather, researchers have to let the animals reveal their own preferences, usually by making a choice. Indeed, economists have long been using the revealed preferences of humans to study human preference, and these often do not fully match what people declare their preferences to be.
To study effort-induced preferences in ants, the researchers allowed ants to repeatedly find two types of food: one flavored with rosemary and one flavored with lemon.
The absolute value — the sweetness — of the food sources was identical. However, one of the food sources was reached after having to climb a long vertical path, which is hard work, while the other was reached after a horizontal one.
After repeated exposures to both food sources, the researchers asked the ants to choose, by presenting both odors simultaneously and seeing which odor the ant went towards. Most of the ants went towards the "hard work" odor. What is more, they laid stronger trails to the hard work reward, in essence telling their sisters that they should also choose that path.
Understanding how things are valued is key to understanding choices and behavior. Traditionally, the value of a given option was considered absolute: this option is worth X, that is worth Y, and they will always be worth those amounts. However, as psychologists began to invade the territory of economists, evidence quickly began to mount that perceived value is malleable.
Behavioral economists quickly began to amass a series of value-distorting effects. These can often be intuitively accepted, such as the feeling that something hard-earned will be worth more.
Behavioral ecologists and comparative psychologists were also quick to test the assumptions of rationality and fixed value in animals. However, researchers studying animal cognition do not have the luxury of assuming advanced cognitive abilities. This encourages them to search for less cognitively demanding explanations for their findings.
The preference for hard work has thus been explained by state-dependent learning: The enjoyable effect of rewards usually show diminishing returns. Going from a state of 10 arbitrary units to a state of 20 feels better than going from 90 to 100 of the same units. Such relative perception is a basic attribute of almost all perceptual mechanisms, in animals and in humans.
Parallel cognitive effects in humans and ants do not imply that the mechanisms at play are the same in us as in insects. However, finding such parallels puts the onus on psychologists: They now need to demonstrate that the lower-level explanations for animal behavior cannot account for human behavior.
Perhaps humans and ants share many of the same cognitive mechanisms. The question is then: Are ants smarter than we thought they are or are we not as complex as we would like to think?
Citation
- Czaczkes, T. J., Brandstetter, B., di Stefano, I., & Heinze, J. (2018). Greater effort increases perceived value in an invertebrate. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 132(2), 200–209. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/com0000109
Note: This article is in the Basic / Experimental Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Basic / Experimental Psychology topic area.