“Make life harder” is a strange rallying cry. However, in January, journalist Kathryn Jezer-Morton of Cut went viral to boast maximum friction. “Stop using ChatGPT completely,” she wrote. “No, it doesn’t have any good ideas for meal planning. Buy a cookbook. Text your friends for advice. Go to Trader Joe’s. Come over on.”
Jezer-Morton may be right, social science research suggests. Letting chatbots write emails or provide emotional support simplifies be a thinking and social beingthe researchers wrote in February in Communication psychology. But doing difficult things or entertaining the frictions of life, while often frustrating in the moment, is vital to experiencing pleasure and cultivating purpose.
“We give a lot of meaning to work and what we do every day,” says Emily Zohar, an experimental social psychologist at the University of Toronto. “If you give all your tasks to AI, you don’t get that personal fulfillment.”
However, how to balance the pride of navigating friction with our desire to relieve ourselves remains elusive.
Brains prefer easy. That’s not the whole story
Finding this balance is about more than just managing AI. Social scientists have studied friction in various forms for about a century. Classic research from the early 1930s showed that rats placed in a T-shaped maze with one long arm and one short arm, each connected to a tasty morsel, quickly began to preferring the shorter arm.
“It’s just very computationally expensive to [the] the brain and the body to do things,” says social and computational scientist Hause Lin of MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
This is why social scientists often recommend remove obstacles to achieve the objectives. Want to go to the gym in the morning? Break out your workout clothes the night before or just sleep in them. Likewise, Zohar and his co-authors acknowledge, few people would happily part with washing machines, spell check or power steering.
Computational costs affect both body and mindthe researchers noted in the book 2025 Advances in experimental social psychology. Humans, for example, create mental shortcuts to understand large amounts of information, often at the expense of accuracy.
In recent decades, many social scientists have turned to studying the “effort paradox,” or why humans do difficult things, often for fun. In a study carried out in 2012 in the Journal of Consumer Psychologyresearchers reported that people place more importance on objects they have made themselves than on prefabricated objects – a phenomenon they called Ikea effect.
Subsequent work has clearly shown that working toward a goal gives people a sense of mastery, meaning, and purpose: key ingredients for a beautiful life.
Here’s why AI hacks friction to the next level
What degree of friction is then optimal? The answer is complex, in part because certain societal forces today devalue hard work.
Consider the app TaskRabbit, says social psychologist Haesung “Annie” Jung of Texas Tech University in Lubbock. This made it easy for people to hire someone for almost any job. However, Jung’s work, published in 2025 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Generalshows that people also get joy from it and meaning of daily tasks.
Chatbots are taking outsourcing to dangerous new heights, Jung says. “With AI, you now even delegate your way of thinking.”
Previous technologies greatly simplified physical and visible tasks. People know when they replaced washing dishes by hand with putting them in the dishwasher. But they don’t always know when they lost their thoughts to an algorithm.
This lack of awareness can appear in cases where users seek relationship advice from “Sycophantic” chatbotsnoted psychologist Anat Perry in a March perspective in Science. People may not consider others’ perspectives when robots simply validate their experiences. Yet overcoming these social frictions is necessary for a healthy society, says Perry, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Sometimes we need to hear that we are wrong…That’s how we grow.” »
People can overcome the flaw of laziness
It is promising that people can be trained to resist the siren call of the slothLin and colleagues reported in 2024 in Human behavior.
They asked more than 750 people to choose between difficult and easy tasks. Some people received more points for selecting more difficult tasks, while others received more points for completing one or another task correctly as quickly as possible. Then the researchers stopped awarding points so they could see which participants chose a more difficult task simply because they could. On average, participants rewarded for correct answers continued to choose easier problems; those who were rewarded for their efforts went on to tackle more difficult problems.
Lin has observed this phenomenon at MIT, where freshmen are given pass or fail grades to encourage them to avoid switching to courses where they can get easy A’s. This emphasis on difficult things persists, so older students often tease classmates who take easy classes, Lin says.
It remains to be seen how AI tools work against people’s competing desires for ease and effort. Some researchers are less concerned about chatbots eliminating friction than about their tendency to dole out questionable answers with absolute certainty. “When I look at our children’s generation, I’m not worried that their lives are too easy. I’m worried that their lives are too hard,” says motivational expert Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Others say the rapid societal penetration of chatbots means people should consider protecting their brains. The Industrial Revolution removed manual labor from many workers’ lives, Lin notes. Today, people whose ancestors probably supported their physical needs through agriculture are sweating it out in gyms and other exercise rooms.
“What’s being removed isn’t physical now. It’s cognitive,” Lin says. “Are we going to have versions of cognitive gyms? »
