A vivid demonstration of the supremacy of physiological needs came 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.

More dramatic were the psychological effects. Consistent with Abraham Maslow’s idea of a hierarchy of needs, the men became food obsessed. They talked food. They daydreamed food. They collected recipes, read cookbooks, and feasted their eyes on delectable forbidden foods. Preoccupied with their unfulfilled basic need, they lost interest in sex and social activities. As one participant 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 you are hungry, thirsty, fatigued, or sexually aroused, little else may seem to matter. When you’re not, food, water, sleep, or sex just don’t seem like such big things in your life, now or ever.

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In University of Amsterdam studies, Loran Nordgren and his colleagues (2006, 2007) found that people in a motivational “hot” state (from fatigue, hunger, or sexual arousal) easily recalled such feelings in their own past and perceived them as driving forces in others’ behavior. (Interestingly, there is a parallel effect of our current good or bad mood on our memories.) In another experiment, people 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). Likewise, when sexually motivated, men more often perceive a smile as flirtation rather than simple friendliness (Howell et al., 2012). 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.