Restraining forces include: competing goals (can’t do everything at the same time), the demands of the task, and the tendency to conserve mental resources. This in turn is a function of the importance of the task’s goal, and the amount of mental resources potentially available to the task. The former is the maximum amount of cognitive energy an individual is potentially willing to apply to a task. In sum, they posit that purposeful behaviour is conatively controlled by a potential driving force and a restraining force, which work in opposition to each other. J., Chen, X., Köpetz, C., Pierro, A., & Mannetti, L.

However, Kruglanski and colleagues recently supplied a starting point in Kruglanski, A. (Compare also Kurt Lewin’s Field theory). Mental energy has been out of fashion in psychology for decades, perhaps as a result of Sigmund Freud’s failed attempts to develop a theory about it. Minimizing cognitive work calls for a concept of cognitive energy. Efficiency and Cognitive MiserlinessĪ concept in the neighbourhood of Galef’s target is efficiency. More generally, while one has to understand existing concepts and hence folk psychology, one cannot adequately fill these terminological and conceptual gaps without reference to theories developed from the designer stance. I will return to this (hopefully briefly) below. This calls for conceptual analysis, exploring logical topography, and exploring the space of possible mental designs. (In Section 3.3.3, “Cognitive miserliness and its antagonists”, of Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective, and elsewhere in that book, I pointed several of them out.)

More interestingly, there are several conceptual gaps in the logical topography of “conative-cognitive” theory. It’s not just a terminological gap, however. I agree there with her that there’s a gap. She acknowledges that “connotation creep” is a hard problem. She argues that we need a non-judgmental term for wanting to minimize work. She assumes it’s a perfectly legitimate preference to be “lazy”, i.e., to dislike work. In sum, Galef takes a relativistic utilitarian moral view: that a rational life is one in which one pursues one’s preferences. As this touches upon a key concept of my theory of meta-effectiveness, I thought I should write a quick response. On her blog and Twitter, one of my favourite podcast hosts, Julia Galef, argued that we need a non-judgmental term for “lazy”.

Reddit julia galef