Is Mental Effort Exertion Contagious? A Replication Study
Alessandro Mazza; Ellen Voorrips; Gethin Hughes; Kobe Desender; Eva Van den Bussche; Hans Stuyck · 2025 · Journal of Cognition
WASTE classifies this as Negative / Null Result Report · AI classification, approximate
The study found no significant effect — useful as a negative control or null benchmark for your own design.
Abstract
Daily, we perform activities in the presence of others (e.g., office work). While it’s well-established that the mere presence of others can influence our performance, it is less clear whether others’ performance, rather than just their presence, influences us. To address this, we replicated Desender et al.’s (2016) study, Is mental effort contagious?, and conducted a second experiment to follow up on our failure to replicate their findings. Desender et al. (2016) used a modified joint Simon task where two participants performed side by side. The manipulated participant completed an easy (most
Abstract by Alessandro Mazza; Ellen Voorrips; Gethin Hughes; Kobe Desender; Eva Van den Bussche; Hans Stuyck, Journal of Cognition (2025) — licensed CC BY 4.0.
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Metadata source: DOAJ · DOI 10.5334/joc.456