Principle of Least Effort
Principle of Least Action · Cognitive Miser
People and systems naturally choose the path of least resistance and cease once acceptable results are found or achieved — holds regardless of experience or proficiency of the person or system.
Origin
First articulated by Italian philosopher Guillaume Ferrero in an 1894 article in Revue philosophique, the principle was comprehensively developed by American philologist George Kingsley Zipf at Harvard University in his 1949 book Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Zipf theorized that human behavior is governed by minimizing effort, and that people solve immediate problems while considering probable future work expenditure. His analysis also led to Zipf's law describing word frequency distributions.