Moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency: a comparison between American and Chinese history

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11, Article number: 1085 (2024 ) Cite this article

In some cultures, merely exerting effort is considered virtuous, even when the effort is inefficient. Our study examines how this moral attitude towards effort (relative to efficiency) has evolved historically across two distinct sociopolitical and linguistic contexts: the People’s Republic of China and the United States, using natural language processing techniques. Specifically, two formal political corpora were used—the People’s Daily (1950–2021) and the Congressional speeches for the U.S. (1873–2011). We developed dictionaries for each concept based on pre-trained word embedding models in both languages. Moral attitudes towards effort and efficiency were calculated on a year-by-year basis as the cosine similarity between the dictionaries of these concepts and an existing dictionary of morality. We benchmarked the fluctuations of moral attitude towards inefficient effort against critical historical events in the two countries. Additional time series analysis and Granger tests revealed the association and potential directionality between the evolution of moral attitude towards inefficient effort and critical socio-cultural variables such as collectivism and cultural looseness. Our research sheds light on the historical and socio-cultural roots of moralization of effort and has implications for historical psychology research on moral attitudes.

Consider this scenario: A newspaper company recently adopted an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system capable of producing articles indistinguishable from those written by human journalists. The sale of the newspaper is unaffected after the company relies entirely on the AI system. Consequently, the two journalists employed by the company now benefit from indefinite paid time off (PTO). During this period, one journalist continues to write two articles daily as before, while the other spends their days lounging on the couch and watching TV. Who would you instinctively consider more morally praiseworthy? Recent work on moralization of inefficient effort has suggested that across multiple cultures, people tend to morally praise the individuals who exert efforts even when the efforts produce no discernible outcomes (Amos et al., 2019; Bigman and Tamir, 2016; Celniker et al., 2023; Ess and Burke, 2022; Fwu et al., 2014). In laboratory settings, individuals tend to infer positive moral attributes from a mere cue of effort (Amos et al., 2019; Celniker et al., 2023). Utilizing vignettes across various domains—including paid employment and partner choice—in different cultures, this line of research demonstrates that individuals who exert greater effort, even in tasks that appear meaningless and completely replaceable by less effortful alternatives, are perceived as more moral and deserving of higher monetary reward. Such a preference for effort has behavioral consequences. For example, the demonstration of effort exerted by fundraisers has been shown to increase participants’ willingness to donate to the charity; participants were more likely to pay higher salaries to employees who exhibited more effort, even when the actual outcome or end product remains the same (Celniker et al., 2023).

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