A helping hand is hard at work: Help-seekers' underestimation of helpers' effort

•Help-seekers significantly underestimate the effort helpers expend.•Discomfort drives the effort helpers put into their assistance.•In particular, discomfort about leaving help-seekers in a bad situation.•Help-seekers underestimate this discomfort and, as a result, helper effort.

Whether people seek help depends on their estimations of both the likelihood and the value of getting it. Although past research has carefully examined how accurately help-seekers predict whether their help requests will be granted, it has failed to examine how accurately help-seekers predict the value of that help, should they receive it. In this paper, we focus on how accurately help-seekers predict a key determinant of help value, namely, helper effort. In four studies, we find that (a) helpers put more effort into helping than help-seekers expect (Studies 1-4); (b) people do not underestimate the effort others will expend in general, but rather only the effort others will expend helping them (Study 2); and (c) this underestimation of help effort stems from help-seekers' failure to appreciate the discomfort-in particular, the guilt-that helpers would experience if they did not do enough to help (Studies 3 & 4).