Applying Herrnstein's Matching Law to Influence Students' Choice to Complete Difficult Academic Tasks

Abstract In an extension of choice research and Herrnstein's matching law to a more ecologically valid setting, college students were asked to work on a control mathematics assignment containing 16 three-digit by two-digit multiplication (3 × 2) problems and an experimental assignment that contained 16 equivalent 3 × 2 problems plus six interspersed 1 × 1 problems. Afterwards, they rated the experimental assignment as less difficult and time-consuming and requiring less effort than the control assignment. Performance on 3 × 2 problems was equivalent across the control and experimental assignments. Furthermore, when given the opportunity to choose a new control-format or experimental-format assignment (each containing similar, but different, problems as the initial assignments), significantly more students chose the latter format Because these results could be explained by the novelty of the problems interspersed in the experimental assignment, another experiment that interspersed division problems was con...