Beliefs About Willpower Affect Whether You Try Hard Tasks

Source: Image AI-generated with Midjourney 9/10/26

Think about the people in your life. Some of them always seem to look for the easiest path through a situation. They avoid challenges. Others seek challenges out. They test their mental and physical limits, even when that isn’t required.

Recent Exploration of the Roots of Challenge-Seeking Behavior

What might drive this difference?

This question was explored in a 2026 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Christopher Mlynski, Georgia Clay, Julia Jankowski, and Veronika Job.

These researchers suggested that the tendency to select hard tasks may be related to people’s beliefs about willpower. If you choose to do something difficult, then you must be willing to stick with it until it is completed. It takes willpower to do that.

Research suggests that some people believe that willpower is a limited resource and that if you spend it on one task, it stops you from spending it on another. Other people believe that when you do difficult things, it is energizing. So, you can actually build up the momentum to do difficult things by challenging yourself. The authors of this paper suggested that people who believe that difficult tasks are energizing would be more likely to choose difficult tasks than those who think willpower is a limited resource.

In three studies, the authors looked at the correlation between a measure of beliefs about willpower and a measure of people’s willingness to select difficult tasks. The willpower measurement was a questionnaire that explored whether a given person tends to believe in willpower as a limited resource or as an unlimited resource people can tap into.

The task difficulty measurement involved having people do five trials of a task in which they had to add several numbers in their head. After practicing the task and being exposed to the levels of difficulty, participants could select the difficulty of the task from one of five levels for sets of five trials across a number of blocks. The difficulty level involved larger numbers that participants had to add in their heads. Participants also rated their math ability.

Correlation of Willpower Belief With Challenge Preference

In these correlational studies, the more strongly a person believed that willpower is a limited resource, the more likely they were to select an easier version of the math task. People’s beliefs about their math ability did not predict the difficulty of the task people selected. The reason why the authors measured people’s estimates of their math ability as well was to rule out the possibility that differences in the difficulty of the problems people chose were actually a reflection of people choosing a task that was most suitable to their math ability.

In a final experiment, the authors manipulated beliefs about willpower through the questionnaire they used. One version had questions that consistently used examples focusing on willpower as limited, while the other version had questions that consistently used examples of willpower as unlimited. This manipulation led to a small difference between groups in their responses on the questionnaire. The limited resource examples led to more of a belief that willpower is limited than the unlimited resource examples. Then, when participants did the math task, those who were induced to think of willpower as a limited resource were more likely to select harder versions of the task than those who were induced to think of willpower as an unlimited resource.

There are several interesting implications of these findings. This work suggests that there really is a stable individual difference in the tendency to seek challenge. The more that people find difficult tasks to be energizing, the more likely they are to look for ways to be challenged. This work also suggests that this difference may be malleable—at least to some degree. These studies did not look to see whether a simple manipulation led to a persistent difference in people’s beliefs about willpower. Presumably, though, a more extensive education program about willpower might lead to a long-lasting belief that might ultimately lead people to seek challenges.