Is Motivation Always Guided by Pleasure and Pain

Psychology commonly subscribes to psychological hedonism, according to which all motivation always results from pleasure or pain. Experiment 1 introduces a single event, eating an appetizer, that increased the effort respondents exerted to obtain food (wanting), while concurrently decreasing the immediate self-reported pleasure they expected from eating it (liking). This dissociation contradicts hedonism, because the increase in wanting (motivation) could not have been caused by the decrease in pleasure. We also theorize when wanting and liking may diverge. Hedonic agency is a person’s construal that her investing effort contributes to bringing about an experience of pleasure. Hedonic agency tunes a person into experiences of wanting. In Experiment 2 participants learned to associated names with food images. When the learning procedure involved hedonic agency (agentic learning), appetized respondents learned to associate a food name with increased value (incentive value) stemming from the increased wanting that is due to appetizing. When the learning procedure did not involve hedonic agency (passive learning), appetized respondents learned to associate a food name with decreased value (hedonic value) stemming from the decreased liking that is due to appetizing. In Experiment 3 an implicit reaction time measure involved (vs. did not involve) hedonic agency, and accordingly, appetized respondents evaluated food images more (vs. less) positively, thus retrieving either incentive value or hedonic value. We conceptually replicate these results in the domain of face attractiveness. In sum, when wanting and liking diverge (e.g., after appetizing), hedonic agency tunes a person into wanting or incentive value.