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Contrary to the law of less work, individuals with high levels of need for cognition and self-control tend to choose harder tasks more often. While both traits can be integrated into a core construct of dispositional cognitive effort investment, its relation to actual cognitive effort investment remains unclear. As individuals with high levels of cognitive effort investment are characterized by a high intrinsic motivation towards effortful cognition, they would be less likely to increase their effort based on expected payoff, but rather based on increasing demand. In the present study, we measured actual effort investment on multiple dimensions, i.e., subjective load, reaction time, accuracy, early and late frontal midline theta power, N2 and P3 amplitude, and pupil dilation. In a sample of N = 148 participants, we examined the relationship of dispositional cognitive effort investment and effort indices during a flanker and an n-back task with varying demand and payoff. Exploratorily, we examined this relationship for the two subdimensions cognitive motivation and effortful-self-control as well. In both tasks, effort indices were sensitive to demand and partly to payoff. The analyses revealed a main effect of cognitive effort investment for accuracy (n-back task), interaction effects with payoff for reaction time (n-back and flanker task) and P3 amplitude (n-back task) and demand for early frontal midline theta power (flanker task). Taken together, our results partly support the notion that individuals with high levels of cognitive effort investment exert effort more efficiently. Moreover, the notion that these individuals exert effort regardless of payoff is partly supported, too. This may further our understanding of the conditions under which person-situation interactions occur, i.e. the conditions under which situations determine effort investment in goal-directed behavior more than personality, and vice versa., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Kührt et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Individuals tend to avoid cognitive demand, yet, individual differences appear to exist. Recent evidence from two studies suggests that individuals high in the personality traits Self-Control and Need for Cognition that are related to the broader construct Cognitive Effort Investment are less prone to avoid cognitive demand and show less effort discounting. These findings suggest that cost-benefit models of decision-making that integrate the costs due to effort should consider individual differences in the willingness to exert mental effort. However, to date, there are almost no replication attempts of the above findings. For the present conceptual replication, we concentrated on the avoidance of cognitive demand and used a longitudinal design and latent state-trait modeling. This approach enabled us to separate the trait-specific variance in our measures of Cognitive Effort Investment and Demand Avoidance that is due to stable, individual differences from the variance that is due to the measurement occasion, the methods used, and measurement error. Doing so allowed us to test the assumption that self-reported Cognitive Effort Investment is related to behavioral Demand Avoidance more directly by relating their trait-like features to each other. In a sample of N = 217 participants, we observed both self-reported Cognitive Effort Investment and behavioral Demand Avoidance to exhibit considerable portions of trait variance. However, these trait variances were not significantly related to each other. Thus, our results call into question previous findings of a relationship between self-reported effort investment and demand avoidance. We suggest that novel paradigms are needed to emulate real-world effortful situations and enable better mapping between self-reported measures and behavioral markers of the willingness to exert cognitive effort., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.