Is Laziness Contagious? How the Behaviour of Those Around You Impacts Your Effort

People are lazy. Although there are important exceptions, we prefer to exert less rather than more effort to gain the same reward. People are also social, and we often exert effort with others around, for example at the office, library, or cafe. Here, we ask if human laziness is shaped by those around us. Are we less lazy when we’re around hard-workers? Are we more lazy when we’re around slackers? Across eight studies (N = 1473), we gave people a demand-selection task where they repeatedly chose between a hard or easy task. Our results revealed that participants exerted significantly more effort after learning that previous participants consistently chose the harder task, compared to a control group who received no information about others' choices. Interestingly, participants who were told that others typically opted for the easier task, did not exert less effort than the control group. These results indicate that while others can help us resist laziness and inspire us to work harder, there appears to be a limit to our laziness. We might be effort misers, but this miserliness has a ceiling.