Higher inhibitory control is required to escape the innate attraction to effort minimization

Recent evidence suggests humans have an automatic attraction to effort minimization. Yet, how this attraction is associated with response inhibition is still unclear. Here, we used go/no-go tasks to capture inhibitory control in response to stimuli depicting physical activity versus physical inactivity in 59 healthy young individuals. Higher commission errors (i.e., failure to refrain a response to a “no-go” stimulus) were used as a measure for inhibitory control. Based on the energetic cost minimization theory, we hypothesized that participants would exhibit higher commission errors when responding to stimuli depicting physical inactivity stimuli rather than physical activity stimuli. As expected, mixed effects models showed that, compared to physical activity stimuli, participants exhibited higher commission errors when responding to stimuli depicting physical inactivity (odds ratio = 1.59, 95% Confidence Interval [95%CI] = 1.18 to 2.16, p = .003). These results suggest that physical inactivity stimuli might require high response inhibition. This study lends support for the hypothesis that an attraction to effort minimization might affect inhibitory processes in the presence of stimuli related to this minimization. The study pre-registration form can be found at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/RKYHB