Anyone who has tried to restrict their eating knows that physiological influences are powerful. Their strength was vividly demonstrated when Ancel Keys and his research team (1950) studied semistarvation among wartime conscientious objectors. After three months of normal eating, they cut in half the food intake of 36 men selected from 200 volunteers. The semistarved men became listless and apathetic as their bodies conserved energy. Eventually, their body weights stabilized at about 25 percent below their starting weights.

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Consistent with Abraham Maslow’s idea of a needs hierarchy, the men became food obsessed. They talked food. They daydreamed food. They collected recipes, read cookbooks, and feasted their eyes on delectable forbidden food. Preoccupied with their unmet basic need, they lost interest in sex and social activities. As one man reported, “If we see a show, the most interesting part of it is contained in scenes where people are eating. I couldn’t laugh at the funniest picture in the world, and love scenes are completely dull.”

The semistarved men’s preoccupations illustrate how powerful motives can hijack our consciousness. When we’re hungry, thirsty, fatigued, or sexually aroused, little else seems to matter. When we’re not, food, water, sleep, or sex just don’t seem like such big things in life, now or ever.

In studies, people in a motivational “hot” state (from fatigue, hunger, or sexual arousal) have easily recalled such feelings in their own past and have perceived them as driving forces in others’ behavior (Nordgren et al., 2006, 2007). (Interestingly, there is a parallel effect of our current good or bad mood on our memories.) People in another experiment were given $4 cash they could keep or draw from to bid for foods. Hungry people overbid for a snack they would eat later when sated, and sated people underbid for a snack they would eat later when hungry (Fisher & Rangel, 2014). Grocery shop with an empty stomach and you are more likely to see those jelly-filled doughnuts as just what you’ve always loved and will be wanting tomorrow. Motives matter mightily.