Everyone out there, raise your hands if you’re swimming in free time! Anyone? This would likely be the appropriate moment to cue the proverbial crickets and then, for a number of you, probably chortles at the notion of having oodles of free time. That’s why these days, a number of businesses will take tasks off your hands if you choose, freeing up your time in the process. Just to name a few examples, we’re talking about grocery shopping, picking up food from a local restaurant, making dinner, cleaning, taking your dog for a walk, or assembling furniture. Now you may be willing and able to pay someone to handle these tasks because you detest them or just don’t like them. For instance, if you hate grocery shopping, you’re far from alone. A recent poll found that Americans are divided roughly in half, with 49 percent hating it and 51 percent loving it. (Although I’m with Team Love, there’s no judgment here regardless of which side you’re on!) Let’s stick with groceries. What if you actually like grocery shopping, but you’re paying someone else to take care of that so you can acquire more time? Would that impact how you’d react to the idea of going grocery shopping yourself, or how you’d feel if you went to your local grocery store?
In a new study, a team of researchers looked at how people would feel about tasks that involved some degree of pleasure if they could pay to not do them. Now, why would this even be a relevant, productive question? One, the researchers noted that modern life offers ample chances to gain time by paying other people to do various tasks. Two, they pointed to previous scholarly work revealing that when people receive some kind of compensation, such as money, to complete certain tasks (employment would be one of the exceptions here), they tend to ascribe their impetus for doing the task to the payoff rather than to their own inherent desire. Extending this idea, the research team reasoned that if people can pay to get out of doing certain tasks that normally would feel agreeable or self-rewarding (e.g., coloring, a word game, or compassionate acts for others), this would lead them to view the task as less inherently worthwhile. As a result, folks wouldn’t like it as much.
Across four experiments, this is exactly what the researchers found. The experiments also ruled out other explanations, such as people not liking the task as much because they didn’t feel as capable, or because they concentrated so much on gaining time that they couldn’t get as much pleasure from the task. In the end, the chance to pay to bypass the task reduced its apparent merit and, by extension, people’s affinity toward it. The side effect of this is that tasks that are woven into day-to-day life, ones that can offer at minimum some degree of simple contentment (like, ahem, perusing cereals in the grocery store), could come to seem less desirable. In other words, the price of gaining time in dodging a task would be deriving less pleasure from doing it yourself. And for most of us, even if we acquire extra time by taking a pass on something like grocery shopping, can we really stave it off constantly and permanently? Probably not.
Now, does this mean that the answer is to avoid paying anyone to handle tasks for you? Absolutely not. Instead, this research invites consideration of the possible unintended effects of doing so. Moreover, the results extended to engaging in acts of compassion (i.e., being able to pay to get out of writing supportive letters to people having a tough time), which might also undermine involvement in endeavors that promote human connection. Of course, there are additional questions to follow up on from this work. For now, before paying to save time on a task, you might ask yourself: “How do I want to feel about this?”
