# Is Mental Effort Exertion Contagious? A Replication Study

## TL;DR

This study investigates whether the mental effort of others influences our own performance, but fails to replicate previous findings, highlighting the importance of rigorous experimental design.

## Contribution

The study provides a replication attempt and identifies methodological issues that may have affected the original findings on mental effort contagion.

## Key findings

- The replication experiments failed to find evidence that others' mental effort influences one's own performance.
- Methodological issues like counterbalancing and visibility of physiological cues explain discrepancies between studies.
- Re-analysis of the original data with a more robust model showed no reliable effect of mental effort contagion.

## 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 (mostly congruent trials) and a difficult (mostly incongruent trials) block, while the neutral participant completed two neutral blocks (equal proportion of congruent and incongruent trials). They found that the neutral participant mirrored the manipulated participants’ mental effort, exerting more effort when the latter performed a difficult versus an easy task. In both Experiment 1 (exact replication; N = 176) and Experiment 2 (more demanding joint Simon task; N = 120), we failed to replicate this result even though the manipulated participants adjusted their mental effort as expected. We identified methodological explanations for this discrepancy in results, such as how conditions were counterbalanced in the original study, which likely produced carry-over effects, and limited visibility of participants’ physiological cues. Moreover, the original study’s effect vanished when re-analyzed with a more robust linear mixed model, suggesting their findings may not have been as reliable as initially thought. Our findings underscore the need for rigorous experimental designs and analyses in psychological research.