[!todo] Seed note. A starting point, not a finished note yet.
The effort heuristic is the tendency to infer quality or worth from apparent effort when direct quality signals are missing. It was named by Justin Kruger and colleagues in a 2004 paper showing people rated a poem, a painting, and a suit of armor higher when told they took longer to produce. Andrea Morales’s 2005 estate-agent study put a number on it in a service context: a list of apartments described as nine hours of manual work was rated 36% higher than the identical list described as one hour of computer work. The heuristic is one of the two engines behind the Labor Illusion, alongside reciprocity, and it explains why visible effort can raise perceived value even when the output is unchanged. Seeded from Labor Illusion.