Previous research has shown that when people engage in a joint task, they tend to minimize the total required effort. This is the case even when minimizing total effort increases the amount of effort individuals would need to expend. This tendency towards co-efficiency has previously been investigated in the motor domain. The aim of the current experiments was to investigate whether these findings extend to the sharing of mental effort. Five experiments were conducted using a multiple-object tracking task and two used a memory-based task. The first two experiments confirmed that, individually, participants prefer easier tasks. The following three experiments manipulated task difficulty for a participant and their ostensible partner and measured preferences for different difficulty combinations. Our findings provide support for egoistic effort distribution strategies, with participants mostly minimizing their own effort.

Previous research suggests that participants may be susceptible to confirmation bias after making decisions in moraldilemmas. We manipulated the type of moral dilemmas (personal or impersonal) and the framing of the question promptingparticipants to respond (emphasizing saving five people or sacrificing one person). The actors in the dilemmas were representedby a series of silhouettes. Eye tracking data revealed that both manipulations had an effect on participants’ gaze. Furtheranalysis of utilitarian choices has shown that there were no framing effects of the prompting question when the dilemmas wereimpersonal. The data suggests that participants’ subsequent gaze patterns are sensitive to both how the situation is describedand the framing of their hypothetical actions. Taken together, our results provide some support to the claim that confirmationbias may arise after making moral decisions.