Effort Justification
A person's tendency to attribute a value to an outcome, which they had to put effort into achieving, greater than the objective value of the outcome.
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Origin
A form of cognitive dissonance identified by Leon Festinger in his 1957 book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. The key experiment: Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills (1959) found that people who underwent a difficult initiation to join a group rated it more favorably than those who joined easily. The harder you work for something, the more you convince yourself it was worth it.
Updated February 22, 2026