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In short: The effort required to learn a text-based interface creates cognitive dissonance, which we ameliorate using effort justification.
We love text-based interfaces and we have many reasons for it. They're more efficient (sometimes), they're more powerful (usually), and they've got a retro cool factor that no GUI has.
I think some of this can be explained by Cognitive Dissonance, a psychological theory first proposed by Leon Festinginer in *A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance* (1957).
Festinger's basic proposal was that we strive for internal psychological consistency and when something threatens that consistency, we experience discomfort that we try to minimize through rationalization, etc.
I find that *Effort Justification*, an offspring of Cognitive Dissonance, explains a lot of human behavior. Effort Justification is a bias towards valuing things more when we had to work hard or suffer for them.
An early and classic study on effort justification is *The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group* by Aronson and Mills (1959). In this study, subjects were asked to read either mildly embarrassing or severely embarrassing content and then listen to a boring discussion. When asked to rate the discussion group and its members, the severe-embarrassment cohort rated them higher than the control and low-embarrassment group.
The obvious implications of this study are that rites of passage and hazing rituals may cause group members to value their membership more highly and to feel greater solidarity and loyalty to the other group members.
But this sort of increased valuing effect goes beyond group membership and extends to other things. The *IKEA effect*, for example is the cognitive bias towards valuing things that you had to at least partially construct yourself.
Most terminal applications present a sort of rite of passage: You have to learn the commands, syntax, and key combinations required. This effort, I believe causes us to value the application, and our hard-won skill at using it.
Effort justification is something I think of pretty often as a possible explanation for things that puzzle me. Why, for example, do people rate Shakespeare highly? Is it because he "understands the human condition" so well? Bullshit. That's a meaningless phrase people repeat on autopilot. Is it because the "poetry of his language" is just so great? Also bullshit. Our modern pronunciation ruins his poetry; words that rhymed in Shakespeare's time no longer do. If you think this is somehow an improvement on his works, you shouldn't give him the credit for that; he had nothing to do with it. But could much of bardolatry be explained as justifying the effort to even understand his works in the first place? I think so.
I can't remember where I read this, but I read a book that talked a population in... I want to say Africa, where this tribe had once yanked out the front teeth of children so that if they got lock-jaw, they could still eat and drink. Apparently, lock-jaw was really common at the time. The author points out that there's a general pattern with this sort of thing: to justify this for people who never get lock-jaw, people generally come up with associated health benefits, and nearly always claim that these mutilations make people more attractive. This effort justification was so strong, that even after lock-jaw wasn't much of a concern for this tribe, they continued yanking out the front teeth of their children. (Newsweek has an article about this... the book was probably *Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)*, by Aronson and Tavris)
The parallel with circumcision, which was originally promoted in the United States as a way to prevent masturbation, is undeniable. Circumcision utterly failed in its original purpose, but people justify new reasons for it: dubious health claims, and the ever-present idea that it somehow 'looks better'. I guess for many people, these justifications are more comfortable that admitting that they chopped of part of their son's dick for stupid reasons.
Aronson, E.; Mills, J. (1959). "The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group". Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. 59 (2): 177–181. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.368.1481. doi:10.1037/h0047195
Festinger, L. (1957) Cognitive dissonance. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Aronson, E. and Tavris, C. (2007). Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts. New York, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Newsweek, Psychology: Humans Will Justify Almost Anything, https://www.newsweek.com/psychology-humans-will-justify-almost-anything-101951
Wikipedia, Effort Justification, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effort_justification
Wikipedia, IKEA effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
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✍️ Last Updated: 2022-01-20