Life Lessons from Psychological Research

In 2017, I started my postdoctoral training in Amitai Shenhav's lab at Brown University. Amitai is probably best known for his work on the expected value of control (although he also has a TEDx Talk on a slightly different topic now). Why am I telling you this? Well, learning about and working on the expected value of control theory has changed my life, not only because it probably is why I now have a faculty position, but also because it has introduced me to a way of thinking that I continue to employ to make my life better. Wanna know more? Buckle up!

What is the expected value of control theory? It's a theory of how people make decisions about mental effort (which will be considered synonymous with control here). The theory says that people will invest the amount and kind of mental effort that will give them the biggest bang for their buck, so to speak. You probably have experience with this: When something requires thinking hard about stuff, or keeping a lot of things in mind simultaneously to figure something out,  or really focusing on a thing while there's a lot of other things going on, then we really don't like it. I actually find myself frequently trading physical for cognitive effort. When I moved to Birmingham I walked 50 minutes each way to and from work because I couldn't be bothered to figure out how public transport works here (I cycle now and I also take the train sometimes when i's too icy to cycle). The key takeaway is that I'm in good company for not wanting to exert mental effort (see the blog post below for more on this).  The expected value of control theory builds on earlier work and proposes that people decide how much and which type of mental effort to exert by weighing the cost of each type and amount against its expected benefit.  

Let's unpack this piece by piece. We will start with the costs and benefits. It is unclear what that cost actually is. There are ongoing scientific debates about what exactly makes effort costly and we really don't know. For now let's sidestep this problem and just go with inherent unpleasantness based on the work showing that people avoid it when they can. The benefits are the outcome you achieve, which could be solving a problem or winning a competition or impressing people with your mad memory skills... anything you want and value, really. We generally assume that the more effort you invest, the greater the cost, and (most of the time) the greater the benefits. 

However, a greater amount of effort will not always give a better result. For instance, working super hard on a very easy task doesn't make sense because the outcome won't change - you won't do better if you work harder. Thus, for an easy task, you will invest a little effort, just enough to get it right (maximizing benefit) while incurring the lowest possible (i.e., minimizing) cost. In expected value of control theory words, you have just optimized the expected value of control.  As the task gets harder, you will need to up your game a little bit to still get it right, and the easy task effort will no longer cut it. The expected benefit of the easy task effort will be low (you'll get it wrong) and the new higher 'medium task' effort's benefit will be higher (you'll get it right). As long as that improvement is worth more than or equal to the additional effort cost, the expected value of control for that medium task effort will be higher and you'll go ahead and do that. Now, if we increase the task difficulty further, so that you really cannot do it, no matter how much effort you put in, then the expected benefit of maximum effort will be to fail, just like that of medium task and easy task effort will be to fail. These will be met with super high effort costs for maximum effort, medium costs for medium task effort, and low effort costs for easy task effort. I think you see where I'm going with this. With these options, the least amount of effort is the best choice. 

It really matters whether your effort matters. As you could see in the example just now, changing the amount of effort in the easy or super difficult task didn't matter. The easy task you would always get right and the super hard task you would never get right, whether you changed your effort or not. Amitai and I together with other colleagues have tested the prediction that people will take into account whether their effort matters for the outcome when deciding how hard to work and invest more when it does. They do! In our experiment, we would tell people whether in the upcoming task (STROOP, responding to the ink color of a stimulus while ignoring the color word it is writing, you can try a STROOP task here) they would receive a large or a small reward and whether that reward would be based on their performance (high efficacy, effort matters) or not (low efficacy, reward doesn't matter). We made sure that they would be equally likely to be rewarded when efficacy was low compared to when it was high, so that the rewards were the same, only how they got them was different. In line with what we predicted based on the expected value of control theory, we found that people worked hardest when they could get a large reward depending on their performance. 

It also really matters what type of effort you invest. Most problems can be solved in multiple ways. For example, to make the right decision in a STROOP task, you can focus harder on the ink color, or you can spend a bit more time to make sure you don't accidentally quickly respond to the word. My colleagues, in a project led by then PhD student Jason (Xiamin) Leng, showed that whether you do one or the other depends on the expected benefits. They cleverly manipulated the reward people could get for correct responses and  the magnitude of the punishments they would get for mistakes and then let people perform as many STROOP responses as they could in a few seconds. The more accurate responses people would do in a time window, the more rewards they could get. So, people needed to respond as quickly as they can, but, the quicker they responded, the more likely they would make mistakes and for each mistake they would lose rewards. Jason found that people did exactly what he had predicted: When they could earn greater rewards, people would focus more on the ink color and were also willing to respond a bit faster and less cautiously, so that they could give more responses and earn more large rewards. Conversely, when they were facing greater punishments, they really increased their caution and responded more slowly to make sure they don't make mistakes. Jason also found that focussing more appeared to be much more costly than just spending more time on the problem and people only did that when it was worth it.

Now, I lured you in with a way of thinking to improve your life and then I just told you about a theory. Time to make good on my promise, right? So, how did this change how I think about things? Well, it has provided me with a framework for evaluating what I am doing and making better decisions on how I approach problems and invest my effort. I ask myself about the expected consequences of doing and not doing things (e.g., if I don't focus now, how much longer will I need to stay at work to finish this or if I cannot complete this in the time I have today, how bad will this be? Will I miss a deadline? Will I need to work longer the next day?). I ask myself whether my effort matters (e.g., does anyone care if I do this well or not?). This, latter question has really helped me reign in rumination and regulate my emotions more effectively. I ask myself: Is this helping? And if it isn't, most of the time now, I go on and do something else. This framework has also helped me find more effective strategies for solving problems.  When something feels really hard now or isn't working at all, then I ask myself whether there's another way to achieve my goal. I also use this framework to find ways to overcome motivational obstacles. Can I make something more rewarding? For instance, I've had to do a long day of marking this week and marking is really not my favorite task and very easy to procrastinate on. I have increased the reward by giving myself tickboxes for each report I need to mark that I can tick, by marking together with colleagues and high-fiving each other after every 3 marked assignments (there were also vegan pastries involved), by setting daily and hourly goals and tracking the concrete time penalties I would incur for procrastination. It got done and thanks to Sarah Beck, I actually had a pretty fun Thursday this week!

Now, I hope that you've gotten some food for thought! How could you apply what you've learned to make your life better?

If you want to learn more, you can read the articles here, here and here.  

Shenhav, A., Botvinick, M. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2013). The Expected Value of Control: An Integrative Theory of Anterior Cingulate Cortex Function. Neuron, 79(2), 217-240. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.07.007

Frömer, R., Lin, H., Dean Wolf, C. K., Inzlicht, M., & Shenhav, A. (2021). Expectations of reward and efficacy guide cognitive control allocation. Nature Communications, 12(1), 1030. doi:10.1038/s41467-021-21315-z

Leng, X., Yee, D., Ritz, H., & Shenhav, A. (2021). Dissociable influences of reward and punishment on adaptive cognitive control. Plos Computational Biology, 17(12), e1009737. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009737

May 2026, Romy

Do you know these days where you're just running around like a headless chicken and at the end of it you don't even know what you did? I just had a week like this. This entry might be the first thing I finish this week and yet, I am absolutely exhausted. Insights from psychological research can explain what happened here and helped me fix this for next week. Let's have a look!

Did you know that there is a cost to  switching  between tasks?  Even in ridiculously simple tasks, like  judging a number by magnitude (e.g., smaller or greater than 5)  or parity (odd vs even), you will incur time and/or accuracy costs when switching between these two tasks compared to when you're repeating the same task. This is probably because each time you start a new task, you need to make sure you have all the rules in place that guide how you do it. It's similar to when you are doing work on your computer and get a text. Now you have to check who the text is from, understand what the person is telling you about, make a decision about how to respond, recall how you typically interact with this person to hit the right tone, perhaps recall relevant context etc. Then when you return to the task on your computer you need to recall what you were last doing, all the relevant context for that etc. Completely different things are relevant for these two tasks and to do either one, you need to get the information for that task, first. That takes time, and each time you have to switch, you may accidentally still have the wrong information at hand. That's why switching slows you down and makes you more error prone. Now, people can get better at task switching. For instance when they have to switch frequently, then the switching is less detrimental to their performance. Interestingly, Liu and Young found that even just expecting more frequent switches can make people more efficient. However, better doesn't mean that it's good and it certainly doesn't mean that it is desirable.

In fact, switching between tasks is so effortful, that when studying cognitive demand avoidance, Kool and colleagues gave people the option between a deck of stimuli to respond to that would demand many switches (high demand) and one that would demand few switches (low demand). They found that people would indeed avoid the more demanding frequent switch deck. They hated the task switching. This resonates. Just yesterday at lunch, a colleague told me how much he hates task switching. An hour later I caught myself thinking "I hate task switching."

Looking back at my week, this is exactly what crippled my performance and drained my energy. I was constantly hopping from one task to the next with my days being broken up by meetings on different topics, lots of different small tasks here and there, dipping in and out on the bigger things I needed to work on. In the end nothing got finished and I was still exhausted. So this morning I did what a good psychologist would do and I took a look at my next week, what I need to do, and I scheduled things in extended blocks, allowing me to finish a task before starting the next one. This is a lesson I need to revisit regularly. It is just too easy to fall into the trap, but I have gotten better over time. A few things other than scheduling help: I have notifications silenced between 9am and 6pm. The only thing that will pop up are my calendar reminders. This avoids the constant stream of interruptions that will make it so hard to get things done. On good days I also leave my phone in my bag. If it's on my desk, I will check it. Each time I do, that's another costly switch. I also get competing tasks out of my head. You know these things that will jump into your mind, like "oh, I still need to send that letter on Saturday!". This year I started scheduling these things by setting a reminder on my phone and then doing them when my phone tells me to. Guess what? This small trick has noticeably reduced the distractions my brain throws at me and thereby substantially improved my ability to focus. Maybe you knew this already. I knew this already, but when I actually acted on it, it changed everything. What about you? Can you make changes to claim back your focus, your peace of mind and maybe, maybe even your happiness? 

If you want to learn more, you can read the articles here and here. 

Kool, W., McGuire, J. T., Rosen, Z. B., & Botvinick, M. M. (2010). Decision making and the avoidance of cognitive demand. J Exp Psychol Gen, 139(4), 665-682. doi:10.1037/a0020198
Liu, C., & Yeung, N. (2020). Dissociating expectancy-based and experience-based control in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 46(2), 131-154. doi:10.1037/xhp0000704

May 2026, Romy

I have a confession to make. I am terrified of being overconfident. Yet, it happens to me. All the time. Over and over again, I overestimate how well I know things or how well I can do things. It is excruciating! I still remember the first time I became aware of this. It was in primary school, I drastically overestimated my ability to roller skate as "pro-level" (I could skate backwards!!! And I could do circles that were almost pirouettes!! - I was not a pro-level roller skater, for the record) and faced my friends' ridicule as a consequence. Decades later, I felt a bit better when I learned that this is actually quite normal. People think they understand complicated things better than they do and they think they do better than they do. This is of course a gross oversimplification. Let's have a look!

Kruger and Dunning explain my roller skating humiliation as follows: Because I was not in fact a great roller skater, I also didn't have the ability to judge what it means to be a great roller skater, and therefore I was unable to recognize the ways in which my roller skating was actually sub par. In their words: "overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it." 

The "Dunning-Kruger effect" is quite famous. What people often don't know is that the opposite tends to happen, too. People who are highly skilled will underestimate how well they do. Some of this can be explained by the way people judge their performance. Jansen and colleagues tested whether a simple explanation for the finding could be that people bias their judgments to the mean when they are not so sure. If you don't know how well you are doing what you should do is guess that you are average, because that is the best guess if all judgments are equally likely. So when in doubt, one should assume they are average. When one experiences one's own performance and maybe it doesn't feel so great, then one can update a little bit downwards. If people who do poorly do that and people who do really well only update a little bit upwards, one would find exactly what Kruger and Dunning found. People wouldn't even need to be robbed of the metacognitive ability to realize they are unskilled. This possibility was contrasted with the alternative that people who are unskilled are indeed also very bad at noticing when they are doing poorly. What Jansen and colleagues found was that indeed, there was not just the completely rational bias to the mean, but on the lower end, people indeed had trouble noticing their errors, too. 

Another important misinterpretation that people often have is that they think it's only certain people who are unskilled and overconfident all the time. That's not the case. We all are like this sometimes, specifically when we are doing new things that we are not good at - yet! And perhaps that's not so bad. It is a lot less demotivating when learning a new thing, to feel like it's not that hard and you're nailing it, blissfully unaware of all the flaws. 

So what do we do with this? These posts are supposed to be helpful, aren't they?! Well, I'll tell you what I did with this. First, I remind myself that I could use some humility when I feel like something I'm just getting into feels easy to me. I maybe get some external evaluation from someone with more experience. That will help me avoid the shame of realizing later that I had been overconfident. Second, and the more important lesson for me was that everybody is overconfident sometimes and that most likely, when I find someone being overconfident, all that tells me is that they haven't learned much about this particular thing yet, that they are overconfident about. It does not mean they are an overconfident person. That is important. I don't know about you, but I will interact very differently with someone who hasn't learned much about a specific thing yet, than with someone who is generally overconfident. Someone who is overconfident in that one thing they haven't learned yet, can be a very reliable narrator in other domains, and therefore be trusted. Somebody who is always overconfident is someone whose opinion I would rather not know. On the flipside, especially when teaching people something new, I remind myself, that they almost have to be overconfident because they don't have the knowledge yet to identify their mistakes and correct themselves. Knowing this, I am prepared to step in and provide corrections fore them. How about you? How can you use this knowledge to work better with yourself and others?

If you want to learn more, you can read the articles here and here. 

Jansen, R. A., Rafferty, A. N., & Griffiths, T. L. (2021). A rational model of the Dunning-Kruger effect supports insensitivity to evidence in low performers. Nat Hum Behav. doi:10.1038/s41562-021-01057-0

Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. J Pers Soc Psychol, 77(6), 1121-1134. 

March 2026, Romy

This lesson I really learned from Lisa Feldman Barrett's excellent book "Seven and a half lessons about the brain". I had never previously heard about emotion contagion, the concept that we pick up on and align with the emotions of the people around us and they with ours. This really made me re-evaluate my perspective on some of my behaviors and it helped me understand some patterns and regulate my emotions better, but let's take a step back!

According to very influential work by Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson, in the 90s, people can "catch" other people's emotions. Lots of work has been done on this since, outlining how this occurs and expanding the concept to our digital world. Amit Goldenberg and James Gross for instance summarised research on emotion contagion through social media. The take-away is that other people's emotions shape ours, whether in person or online, and conversely ours shape theirs.

This insight really changed my mind. When I was younger, I was of the opinion that me being grumpy around my family (all the time, I was such a terrible teenager!) didn't really hurt anyone. I wasn't saying or doing anything, so that was fine, right? I could just exist and be left alone in my dark cloud of doom and gloom and it was nobody's business, right? That was my explicit stance at least and I would communicate that stance in strong words if necessary, which was frequently the case as my poor mother tried to stop me from poisoning the air. It was only when I learned about emotion contagion many, many years (decades... it was decades) later, that I understood that actually, I was doing harm. 

Now that I knew that my emotional responses really affected the people around me, I had a choice. I could let myself slip and be negative and let anxiety and anger spiral for myself and others, or I could try to be aware of my emotional responses and take care of myself, to my own benefit and that of the people around me. I'm not going to pretend that I am always successful, but I now much more often choose the latter. 

This concept has also helped me understand the influence that other people, media and, yes, even movies and tv shows have on me. I am now much more selective in the types of interactions and content I engage with and I understand why some people draw me in whereas others chase me off, they literally make me feel good versus bad! Now, what were your thoughts when learning about emotion contagion? How can you use this information to make your life and/or that of others a little better? 

If you want to learn more, you can read the articles here and here. And you can of course also read "Seven and a half lessons about the brain", available everywhere where you can buy or rent books.

Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1993). Emotional Contagion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2(3), 96-99. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20182211

Goldenberg, A., & Gross, J. J. (2020). Digital Emotion Contagion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(4), 316-328. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2020.01.009

March 2026, Romy

When I was doing my PhD,  a conference talk introduced me to a concept that changed my life. This concept is the growth vs fixed mindset. I learned that people with a fixed mindset believed that things like talent and intelligence were innate and couldn't be changed, whereas people with a growth mindset were people who believed that you could always improve these things. I'm not going to lie, I was pretty firmly in the fixed mindset camp and I still think that there are genuine differences between people in how quickly they are able to pick things up, but my perspective has shifted nonetheless, and I will tell you why. 

What Carol Dweck's theory proposed was that that these beliefs fundamentally changed how we learn from feedback, how much effort we are willing to invest in our skill development and performance, and therefore, ultimately, how successful we are in life. Pretty big deal, huh? That's what I thought, too! I will add another thing that maybe is less emphasised in much of that work: This will also very much change how you feel when you get feedback. Let's take a step back and unpack. 

The key idea is that if you think that you just have certain abilities that cannot change (fixed mindset), then when you get feedback, what you will learn about is your ability for the thing you are currently trying to do. When I was a kid, I learned to play the piano. I thought I had some talent and indeed in the beginning I was just breezing through the classes and needed little rehearsal at home to do pretty well (none, actually). That confirmed my belief that I had musical talent. All was well. Eventually however, I hit a level where just showing up wouldn't do. I had to actually put in work. I did not do that (except when my mom bribed me with little smurf figurines - we'll talk about intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation another time - and even then I would do the bare minimum to clear the smurf bar). Instead, I did what a good fixed mindset person would do and I declared defeat. Clearly, if this was hard for me then I just wasn't talented enough. I quit the piano soon. I showed a similar pattern in many other domains. If I didn't excel naturally, I concluded it wasn't for me and I should just do something else. I left a lot of potential on the table.  

I experienced the power of a growth mindset years later when I started implementing what I had learned in that talk. Unlike a fixed mindset person, a growth mindset person believes that change is possible. That turns out to be essential for... well, change. With a growth mindset, feedback is primarily information that you can use to get better, not a judgment on your ability. Effort is a means to achieving improvement, not a signal that you just don't have it. See where I'm going with this? Once I understood these crucial differences, I changed my approach. I started working on the things that were hard and I focused on how I could use the feedback rather than avoiding it because it would just make me feel bad. I have learned so many things since I changed my perspective this way. I have learned programming, I have improved my figures and my writing. I have worked on improving my personal life (I ran my first marathon last year!). I just cannot get enough learning now! I'm even back to practicing piano (working on a daily practice)!

The science is a bit mixed still as to whether we can teach growth mindsets and whether (or whom) it helps. It seems that trainings are most effective for people who face lots of challenges and in environments that support growth mindsets. It's also not as black and white as I described above - I still fall back into fixed mindset thinking sometimes and then need to remind myself that it would be much more helpful if I didn't use feedback to judge myself, but to learn, and if I didn't take effort as evidence of poor ability, but as the means to improving it. It does get easier, though, and it turns out, if you interpret negative feedback not as revealing constraints, but as opening up possibilities, then instead of feeling down, you feel excited and motivated. Sounds great, right? How about you give it a try? 

If you want to learn more, you can read the article here. 

Dweck, C. S., & Yeager, D. S. (2019). Mindsets: A View From Two Eras. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(3), 481-496. doi:10.1177/1745691618804166

January 2026, Romy

One of the most profound life lessons I have learned is that many of the things we seek to cheer us up when we're down don't actually do that. That piece of chocolate is more likely to make me feel like a piece of shit in the end than to brighten my day (though, a well-timed piece of chocolate is nothing to frown at when it's eaten for its own sake and not for emotion regulation). The question then is what does help? Here, psychological research has given me a valuable pointer and at least this N of one has found this to work like a charm when applied in daily life. 

According to a study by Bastien Blain and Robb Rutledge, our momentary wellbeing is influenced by learning: 

In their study, they had participants play psychologists' version of a computer game online and answer questions about how they were feeling throughout. Then they used mathematical models of the mind to try and understand what determined how people were feeling moment to moment. Was it how much they were rewarded in the game (like we reward ourselves with chocolate)? Or was it something else these rewards provided, like information about the game and consequently how to do well at it, i.e., the stuff we need for learning? They could disentangle these possibilities by manipulating reward magnitude independently from the probability of getting a reward for a correct choice. What they found was that people's momentary happiness did not actually depend on the rewards they were given, but instead on the information about probabilities that they could leverage on subsequent trials to do better in the game. So what the rewards were teaching people was a better predictor of people's happiness than how big those rewards were!

My personal conclusion was that if this is true, then learning something every day should make me happier. This was during the pandemic when being happier was what most of us needed. So, following a global trend, I went and learned something. Specifically, I returned to practicing the piano. Lo and behold - it made me feel better. My piano practice has tanked a little bit since then, but I still try to learn something every day and throughout, I keep asking myself "What can I learn from this?".  What do you do to cheer yourself up? 

If you want to learn more, you can read the article here. 

Blain, B., & Rutledge, R. B. (2020). Momentary subjective well-being depends on learning and not reward. Elife, 9, e57977. doi:10.7554/eLife.57977

May 2025, Romy

In 2019 I heard a talk by Ida Momennejad. She was showing an algorithm that learned to navigate a grid world that had a cliff. With a regular setting, the algorithm would figure out where the cliff is, and navigate around it while pursuing a reward nearby. When the researchers cranked up the algorithms pessimism, it started to think that not only the cliff was dangerous, but that increasingly extensive areas around the cliff were also dangerous. At first, the pessimistic algorithm would just take ridiculous detours to avoid the cliff, but increasingly it would go more and more out of its way to prioritize avoiding the cliff over doing anything else. I gasped when Ida showed that ultimately the algorithm could learn to perceive the world as so terrible - an ever looming cliff - that the only way to escape the pain was to throw itself off the cliff.

I had two critical insights that day: 1) I had been operating like that algorithm and made my world smaller and smaller to avoid threats, and 2) I could change the world I inhabited.

These insights allowed me to change my life for the better. Awareness is the first requirement for change. By being mindful and recognizing when I was not doing things that would be good for me or doing things that incurred unnecessary effort to avoid potential, unlikely threats, and then choosing otherwise, I increased my world again. I restarted doing things that were fun, I began enjoying things again because I stopped focussing on the terrible things that could happen and aligning everything with avoiding them. I changed the world I inhabited by changing which aspects I looked at. Suddenly there were opportunities and blessings where before all there was was threats and fear. 

What world do you choose to live in? Do you regularly not go places because something bad might happen? Do you regularly work around people because you don't trust that they will respond well to things you bring up? Do you regularly overprepare and overthink or abandon plans altogether because they seem too daunting? 

You can read the published article here. Maybe it changes your life, too. 

Zorowitz, S., Momennejad, I., & Daw, N. D. (2020). Anxiety, Avoidance, and Sequential Evaluation. Computational Psychiatry. doi:10.1162/CPSY_a_00026

April 2025, Romy