This has been a banner week for “The Monkey Cage” in terms of bringing political science research and newly available data to bear on emerging issues and situations — the core function of this blog. Ever the counter-cyclist (but usually in the direction of posting more frivolity than my fellow denizens of the cage), I’m going to step away from this focus on what’s been going on in recent days to consider an age-old issue: “What do people want to feel and why?”
bq. People want to maximize immediate pleasure. Therefore, they want to feel pleasant emotions and avoid unpleasant ones.
That’s from a short piece by Maya Tamir in the latest issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science (abstract here).
So far, so good. But as Tamir continues, bowing toward Bentham:
bq. People also want to maximize utility (i.e., long-term pleasure). Therefore, they may also want to feel emotions that are useful (not merely pleasurable) and avoid harmful ones. …When immediate benefits (i.e., immediate pleasure) outweigh long-term benefits (i.e., delayed pleasure derived from successful goal pursuit), people should prefer pleasant emotions. When long-term benefits outweigh immediate ones, people should prefer useful emotions.
For example, “by activating the sympathetic nervous system and promoting attention to threat, fear can promote successful avoidance. In fact, fear may be more useful for avoidance than any one specific behavior (e.g., being vigilant), because it triggers many goal-related processes. Because emotions provide both pleasure and utility, people may want to feel an emotion to maximize immediate pleasure, utility, or both.” And the pursuit of “instrumental” goals (goals intended to secure delayed rather than immediate reinforcement) may lead people to forgo immediate pleasure in order to maximize utility. From this perspective, “people may want to experience [unpleasnt emotions] when pursuing a goal that unpleasant emotions can promote.”
That’s not Tamir’s entire argument, but the part of what I’ve just summarized shines a somewhat different light than I had previously seen on how to think about goal-oriented behavior and its emotional bases and implications.
We now return you to political science research and, inevitably, to some more frivolity.