Experiences of uncontrollability impair cognitive processing efficiency but the mechanisms underlying these effects remain unclear. In this research, we take a motivational perspective and test the hypothesis that uncontrollability reduces willingness to invest mental effort. In two preregistered experiments, we induced uncontrollability by providing participants tasks with action-non-contingent feedback and measured subsequent willingness to invest cognitive effort using two different tasks: a Demand Selection Task (DST; Experiment 1) and a Voluntary Task Switching procedure (VTS; Experiment 2). We found no main effects of uncontrollability manipulation on willingness to invest cognitive effort, indexed by task choice or voluntary switching rates. Additional, exploratory analyses revealed that in Experiment 1, uncontrollability reduced performance accuracy on the Demand Selection Task. In Experiment 2, uncontrollability significantly reduced voluntary switch rates in the early free-choice trials. These findings do not provide support for the hypothesis that uncontrollability results in voluntary cognitive effort avoidance. We highlight several boundary conditions under which avoidance of mental effort can occur after a lack of control experience, including cross-task transfer effects, the effort measures used, and perceived difficulty of the control manipulation task.
Bukowski et al. (2026) studied this question.