8.3 Motivation: Getting Moved

Leonardo is a robot, so he does what he is programmed to do, but nothing more. Because he doesn’t have wants and urges–doesn’t crave friendship or desire chocolate or hate homework–he doesn’t initiate his own behavior. He can learn, but he cannot yearn, and thus he isn’t motivated to act in the same way that we are. Motivation refers to the purpose for or psychological cause of an action, and it is no coincidence that the words emotion and motivation share a common linguistic root that means “to move.” Unlike robots, human beings act because their emotions move them, and emotions do this in two different ways: First, emotions provide people with information about the world; and second, emotions are the objectives toward which people strive. Let’s examine each of these in turn.

The Function of Emotion

In 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, little Jimmy Grimaldi tells the nurse and the doctor that his mother has been replaced by a replica. Their response? Chill him out with drugs and send him home to be eaten by aliens.

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In the old sci-fi film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a young couple suspects that most of the people they know have been kidnapped by aliens and replaced with replicas. This sort of bizarre belief is a common story device in bad movies, but it is also the primary symptom of Capgras syndrome (see FIGURE 8.12). People who suffer from this syndrome typically believe that one or more of their family members are imposters. As one Capgras sufferer told her doctor, “He looks exactly like my father, but he really isn’t. He’s a nice guy, but he isn’t my father…. Maybe my father employed him to take care of me, paid him some money so he could pay my bills” (Hirstein & Ramachandran, 1997, p. 438).

Figure 8.12: Capgras Syndrome This graph shows the emotional responses (as measured by skin conductance) of a patient with Capgras syndrome and a group of control participants to a set of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Although the controls have stronger emotional responses to the familiar than to the unfamiliar faces, the Capgras patient has similar emotional responses to both (Hirstein & Ramachandran, 1997).

This woman’s dad had not been body-snatched, of course, nor had he hired his own stunt double. Rather, this woman sustained damage to the neural connections between her temporal lobe (where faces are identified) and her limbic system (where emotions are generated). As a result, when she saw her father’s face, she recognized it, but because this information was not transmitted to her limbic system, she didn’t feel the warm emotions that her father’s face should have produced. Her father “looked right” but didn’t “feel right,” so she concluded that the man before her was an imposter (see Figure 8.12).

People with Capgras syndrome use their emotional experience as information about the world, and as it turns out, so do the rest of us. For example, people report having better lives when they are asked about their lives on a sunny day rather than a rainy day. Why? Because people naturally feel happier on sunny days, and they use their happiness as information about the quality of their lives (Schwarz & Clore, 1983). People who are in good moods believe that they have a higher probability of winning a lottery than do people who are in bad moods. Why? Because people use their moods as information about the likelihood of succeeding at a task (Isen & Patrick, 1983). We all know that satisfying lives and bright futures make us feel good–so when we feel good, we conclude that our lives must be satisfying and our futures must be bright. Because the world influences our emotions, our emotions can provide information about the world (Schwarz, Mannheim, & Clore, 1988). Indeed, recent research suggests that people who trust their feelings to provide this kind of information tend to make more accurate predictions and better decisions than people who don’t (Mikels, Maglio, Reed, & Kaplowitz, 2011; Pham, Lee, & Stephen, 2012).

When we try to make a decision, we often ask how we “feel” about it. If we couldn’t feel, then we wouldn’t know which alternative to choose. Without emotions, Rihanna would just stand there until someone gave her a Grammy for Best Hot Pink Stiletto.

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The information we get from our emotions is so useful that we can actually be lost without it. When neurologist Antonio Damasio was asked to examine a patient with an unusual form of brain damage, he asked the patient to choose between two dates for an appointment. It sounds like a simple decision, but for the next half hour, the patient enumerated reasons for and against each of the two possible dates, completely unable to decide in favor of one option or the other (Damasio, 1994). The problem wasn’t any impairment of the patient’s ability to think or reason. On the contrary, he could think and reason all too well. What he couldn’t do was feel. The patient’s injury had left him unable to experience emotion, so when he entertained one option (“If I come next Tuesday, I’ll have to cancel my lunch with Fred”), he didn’t feel any better or any worse than when he entertained another (“If I come next Wednesday, I’ll have to get up early to catch the bus”). And because he felt nothing when he thought about his options, he couldn’t decide which one was best. Studies show that when individuals with this particular form of brain damage are given the opportunity to gamble, they make a lot of reckless bets because they don’t feel the twinge of anxiety that tells them they are about to do something stupid. On the other hand, under certain conditions, such individuals make excellent investors, precisely because they are willing to take risks that most of us would not (Shiv et al., 2005).

If the first function of emotion is to provide us with information about the world, then the second function is to tell us what to do with that information. The hedonic principle is the claim that people are motivated to experience pleasure and avoid pain, and this claim has a long history. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (350 BCE/1998) argued that the hedonic principle explained everything there was to know about human motivation: “It is for the sake of this that we all do all that we do.” We want many things, from peace and prosperity to health and security, but we want them for just one reason, and that is that they make us feel good. “Are these things good for any other reason except that they end in pleasure, and get rid of and avert pain?” asked Plato (380 BCE/1956). “Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good?” Plato and Aristotle were suggesting that pleasure isn’t just good: It is what good means.

According to the hedonic principle, then, our emotional experience can be thought of as a gauge that ranges from bad to good, and our primary motivation–perhaps even our sole motivation–is to keep the needle on the gauge as close to good as possible. Even when we voluntarily do things that tilt the needle in the opposite direction, such as letting the dentist drill our teeth or waking up early for a boring class, we are doing these things because we believe that they will nudge the needle toward good in the future and keep it there longer.

Instincts and Drives

If our primary motivation is to keep the needle on good, then which things push the needle in that direction and which things push it away? And where do these things get the power to push our needle around, and exactly how do they do the pushing? The answers to such questions lie in two concepts that have played an unusually important role in the history of psychology: instincts and drives.

Instincts

When a newborn baby is given a drop of sugar water, it smiles, and when it is given a check for $10,000, it acts like it couldn’t care less. By the time the baby goes to college, these responses pretty much reverse. It seems clear that nature endows us with certain motivations and that experience endows us with others. William James (1890) called the natural tendency to seek a particular goal an instinct, which he defined as “the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the performance” (p. 383). According to James, nature hardwired penguins, parrots, puppies, and people to want certain things without training and to execute the behaviors that produce these things without thinking. He and other psychologists of his time tried to make a list of what those things were.

All animals are born with instincts. In the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, no one has to teach the bulls to chase the runners, and no one has to teach the runners to flee.

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Unfortunately, they were quite successful, and in just a few decades their list of instincts had grown preposterously long and included some rather exotic entries, such as “the instinct to be secretive” and “the instinct to grind one’s teeth.” By 1924, sociologist Luther Bernard counted 5,759 instincts and concluded that after three decades of list making, the term seemed to be suffering from “a great variety of usage and the almost universal lack of critical standards” (Bernard, 1924, p. 21). Furthermore, some psychologists began to worry that attributing the tendency for people to befriend each other to an “affiliation instinct” was more of a description than an explanation (Ayres, 1921; Dunlap, 1919; Field, 1921).

By 1930, the concept of instinct had fallen out of fashion. Not only did it fail to explain anything, but it also flew in the face of American psychology’s hot new trend: behaviorism. Behaviorists rejected the concept of instinct on two grounds. First, they believed that behavior should be explained by the external stimuli that evoke it and not by the hypothetical internal states on which it presumably depends. John Watson (1913) had written that “the time seems to have come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness” (p. 163), and behaviorists saw instincts as just the sort of unnecessary “mind blather” that Watson forbade. Second, behaviorists wanted nothing to do with the notion of inherited behavior because they believed that all complex behavior was learned. Because instincts were inherited tendencies that resided inside the organism, behaviorists considered them doubly repugnant.

Drives

But within a few decades, some of Watson’s younger followers began to realize that the strict prohibition against the mention of internal states made certain phenomena difficult to explain. For example, if all behavior is a response to an external stimulus, then why does a rat that is sitting still in its cage at 9:00 a.m. start wandering around and looking for food by noon? Nothing in the cage has changed, so why has the rat’s behavior changed? What visible, measurable, external stimulus is the wandering rat responding to? The obvious answer is that the rat is responding to something inside itself, which meant that Watson’s young followers (the “new behaviorists” as they called themselves) were forced to look inside the rat to explain its wandering. How could they do that without talking about the “thoughts” and “feelings” that Watson had forbidden them to mention?

Aristotle claimed that water had “gravity” and fire had “levity” and that these properties made them go downward and upward, respectively. It now seems obvious that Aristotle was merely describing the motion of these elements and not really explaining it–much as William James did when he attributed behavior to instinct. By the way, that’s Plato and Aristotle standing together under the arch in Raphael’s 1509 masterpiece The School of Athens.

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They began by noting that bodies are a bit like thermostats. When thermostats detect that the room is too cold, they send signals that initiate corrective actions such as turning on a furnace. Similarly, when bodies detect that they are underfed, they send signals that initiate corrective actions such as eating. Homeostasis is the tendency for a system to take action to keep itself in a particular state, and two of the new behaviorists, Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence, suggested that rats, people, and thermostats are all homeostatic mechanisms. To survive, an organism needs to maintain precise levels of nutrition, warmth, and so on, and when these levels depart from an optimal point, the organism receives a signal to take corrective action. That signal is called a drive, which is an internal state caused by physiological needs. According to Hull and Spence, it isn’t food per se that organisms find rewarding; it is the reduction of the drive for food. Hunger is a drive, a drive is an internal state, and when organisms eat, they are attempting to change their internal state.

Although the words instinct and drive are no longer widely used in psychology, both concepts have something to teach us. The concept of instinct reminds us that nature endows organisms with a tendency to seek certain things, and the concept of drive reminds us that this seeking is initiated by an internal state. The psychologist William McDougall (1930) called the study of motivation hormic psychology, which is a term derived from the Greek word for “urge,” and people clearly do have urges–some of which they acquire through experience and some of which they do not–that motivate them to take certain actions. What kinds of urges do we have, and what kinds of actions do we take to satisfy them?

What the Body Wants

Abraham Maslow (1954) attempted to organize the list of human urges (or, as he called them, needs) in a meaningful way (see FIGURE 8.13). He noted that some needs (such as the need to eat) must be satisfied before others (such as the need to have friends), and he built a hierarchy of needs that had the most immediate needs at the bottom and the most deferrable needs at the top. Maslow suggested that, as a rule, people are more likely to experience a need when the needs below it are met. So when people are hungry or thirsty or exhausted, they are less likely to seek intellectual fulfillment or moral clarity (see FIGURE 8.14). According to Maslow, the needs that take precedence are typically those we share with other animals. For example, because all animals must survive and reproduce, all animals need to eat and mate. Human beings have these needs as well, but as you are about to see, they are more powerful and more complicated than most of us imagine (Kenrick et al., 2010).

Figure 8.13: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Human beings are motivated to satisfy a variety of needs. Psychologist Abraham Maslow thought these needs formed a hierarchy, with physiological needs forming a base and self-actualization needs forming a pinnacle. He suggested that people don’t experience higher needs until the needs below them have been met.

Survival: The Motivation for Food

Figure 8.14: When Do Higher Needs Matter? Maslow was right. A recent study of 77,000 people in the world’s 51 poorest nations (Martin & Hill, 2012) showed that if people have their basic needs met, then autonomy (i.e., freedom to make their own decisions) increases their satisfaction with their lives. But when people do not have their basic needs met, autonomy makes little difference.

Animals convert matter into energy by eating, and they are driven to do this by an internal state called hunger. But what is hunger and where does it come from? At every moment, your body is sending signals to your brain about its current energy state. If your body needs energy, it sends an orexigenic signal to tell your brain to switch hunger on, and if your body has sufficient energy, it sends an anorexigenic signal to tell your brain to switch hunger off (Gropp et al., 2005). No one knows precisely what these signals are or how they are sent and received, but research has identified a variety of candidates.

Figure 8.15: Hunger, Satiety, and the Hypothalamus The hypothalamus comprises many parts. In general, the lateral hypothalamus receives the signals that turn hunger on and the ventromedial hypothalamus receives the signals that turn hunger off.

For example, ghrelin is a hormone that is produced in the stomach and appears to be a signal that tells the brain to switch hunger on (Inui, 2001; Nakazato et al., 2001). When people are injected with ghrelin, they become intensely hungry and eat about 30% more than usual (Wren et al., 2001). Interestingly, ghrelin also binds to neurons in the hippocampus and temporarily improves learning and memory (Diano et al., 2006) so that we become just a little bit better at locating food when our bodies need it most. Leptin is a chemical secreted by fat cells, and it appears to be a signal that tells the brain to switch hunger off. It seems to do this by making food less rewarding (Farooqi et al., 2007). People who are born with a leptin deficiency have trouble controlling their appetites (Montague et al., 1997). For example, in 2002, medical researchers reported on the case of a 9-year-old girl who weighed 200 pounds, but after just a few leptin injections, she reduced her food intake by 84% and attained normal weight (Farooqi et al., 2002). Some researchers think the idea that chemicals turn hunger on and off is far too simple, and they argue that there is no general state called hunger, but rather that there are many different hungers, each of which is a response to a unique nutritional deficit and each of which is switched on by a unique chemical messenger (Rozin & Kalat, 1971). For example, rats that are deprived of protein will seek proteins while turning down fats and carbohydrates, suggesting that they are experiencing a specific “protein hunger” and not a general hunger (Rozin, 1968).

Whether hunger is one signal or many, the primary receiver of these signals is the hypothalamus. Different parts of the hypothalamus receive different signals (see FIGURE 8.15). The lateral hypothalamus receives orexigenic signals, and when it is destroyed, animals sitting in a cage full of food will starve themselves to death. The ventromedial hypothalamus receives anorexigenic signals, and when it is destroyed, animals will gorge themselves to the point of illness and obesity (Miller, 1960; Steinbaum & Miller, 1965). These two structures were once thought to be the “hunger center” and “satiety center” of the brain, but it turns out that this view is far too simple (Woods et al., 1998). Hypothalamic structures play an important role in turning hunger on and off, but the precise way in which they execute these functions is complex and poorly understood (Stellar & Stellar, 1985).

Eating Disorders

Feelings of hunger tell us when to eat and when to stop. But for the 10 to 30 million Americans who have eating disorders, eating is a much more complicated affair (Hoek & van Hoeken, 2003). For instance, bulimia nervosa is an eating disorder characterized by binge eating followed by purging. People with bulimia typically ingest large quantities of food in a relatively short period and then take laxatives or induce vomiting to purge the food from their bodies. These people are caught in a cycle: They eat to ease negative emotions such as sadness and anxiety, but then concern about weight gain leads them to experience negative emotions such as guilt and self-loathing, and these emotions then lead them to purge (Sherry & Hall, 2009; cf. Haedt-Matt & Keel, 2011).

Bar Refaeili is Israel’s best known supermodel. In 2012, Israel enacted a law banning models whose body mass index is under 18.5 from appearing in advertisements. So a 5’ 8” model must weigh at least 119 pounds.

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Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder characterized by an intense fear of being fat and severe restriction of food intake. People with anorexia tend to have a distorted body image that leads them to believe they are fat when they are actually emaciated, and they tend to be high-achieving perfectionists who see their severe control of eating as a triumph of will over impulse. Contrary to what you might expect, people with anorexia have extremely high levels of ghrelin in their blood, which suggests that their bodies are trying desperately to switch hunger on but that hunger’s call is being suppressed, ignored, or overridden (Ariyasu et al., 2001). Like most eating disorders, anorexia strikes more women than men, and 40% of newly identified cases of anorexia are among women 15 to 19 years old.

Anorexia may have both cultural and biological causes (Klump & Culbert, 2007). For example, women with anorexia typically believe that thinness equals beauty, and it isn’t hard to understand why. The average American woman is 5′ 4″ tall and weighs 140 pounds, but the average American fashion model is 5’ 11” tall and weighs 117 pounds. Indeed, most college-age women report wanting to be thinner than they are (Rozin, Trachtenberg, & Cohen, 2001), and nearly 1 in 5 reports being embarrassed to be seen buying a chocolate bar (Rozin, Bauer, & Catanese, 2003). But anorexia is not just “vanity run amok” (Striegel-Moore & Bulik, 2007). Many researchers believe that there are as-yet-undiscovered biological and/or genetic components to the illness as well. For example, although anorexia primarily affects women, men have a sharply increased risk of becoming anorexic if they have a female twin who has the disorder (Procopio & Marriott, 2007), suggesting that anorexia may have something to do with prenatal exposure to female hormones.

Bulimia and anorexia are problems for many people. But America’s most pervasive eating-related problem is obesity. Since 1999, Americans have collectively gained more than a billion pounds (Kolbert, 2009). The average American man is now 17 pounds heavier and the average American woman is now 19 pounds heavier than they were in the 1970s. The proportion of overweight children has doubled, the proportion of overweight teens has tripled, and a full 40% of American women are now too heavy to enlist in the military. In 1991, no state had an obesity rate higher than 20%. In 2012, only one state (Colorado) had an obesity rate lower than 20% (see FIGURE 8.16).

Figure 8.16: The Geography of Obesity This 2013 map of U.S. obesity rates shows that obesity is a problem everywhere, but especially in the Southeast.

© 2010 Gallup, Inc. All rights reserved. The content is used with permission. Gallup retains all rights of republication.

Obesity is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or greater. TABLE 8.1 allows you to compute your BMI, and the odds are that you won’t like what you learn. Although BMI is a better predictor of mortality for some people than for others (Romero-Corral et al., 2006; van Dis et al., 2009), most researchers agree that an extremely high BMI is unhealthy. Every year, obesity-related illnesses cost our nation about $147 billion (Finkelstein et al., 2009) and about 3 million lives (Allison et al., 1999). In addition to these physical risks, obese people tend to be viewed negatively by others, have lower self-esteem, and have a lower quality of life (Hebl & Heatherton, 1997; Kolotkin, Meter, & Williams, 2001). Obese women earn about 7% less than their non-obese counterparts (Lempert, 2007), and the stigma of obesity is so powerful that average-weight people are viewed negatively if they even have a relationship with someone who is obese (Hebl & Mannix, 2003). All of this is terribly unfair, of course. As one scientist noted, we need to declare “a war on obesity, not the obese” (Friedman, 2003).

Times have changed. People today are often astonished to see that ads once promised to help young women gain weight to become popular.

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Obesity has many causes. For example, obesity is highly heritable (Allison et al., 1996) and may have a genetic component, which may explain why a disproportionate amount of the weight gained by Americans in the past few decades has been gained by those who were already the heaviest (Flegal & Troiano, 2000). Some studies suggest that “obesogenic” toxins in the environment can disrupt the functioning of the endocrine system and predispose people to obesity (Grün & Blumberg, 2006; Newbold et al., 2005), whereas other studies suggest that obesity can be caused by a dearth of “good bacteria” in the gut (Liou et al., 2013). Whatever the cause, obese people are often leptin-resistant (i.e., their brains do not respond to the chemical message that shuts hunger off) and even leptin injections don’t seem to help (Friedman & Halaas, 1998; Heymsfield et al., 1999).

Genes, pollutants, and bacteria have all been implicated in the tendency toward obesity. But in most cases the cause of obesity isn’t such a mystery: We simply eat too much. We eat when we are hungry, of course, but we also eat when we are sad or anxious, or when everyone else is eating (Herman, Roth, & Polivy 2003). Sometimes we eat simply because the clock tells us to, which is why people with amnesia will happily eat a second lunch shortly after finishing an unremembered first one (Rozin et al., 1998; see the Real World box). Why does this happen? After all, most of us don’t breathe ourselves sick or sleep ourselves sick, so why do we eat ourselves sick?

Blame the design. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the main food-related problem facing our ancestors was starvation, and humans evolved two strategies to avoid it. First, we developed a strong attraction to foods that provide large amounts of energy per bite (in other words, foods that are calorically rich), which is why most of us prefer hamburgers and milkshakes to celery and water. Second, we developed an ability to store excess food energy in the form of fat, which enabled us to eat more than we needed when food was plentiful and then live off our reserves when food was scarce. We are beautifully engineered for a world in which high calorie foods are scarce, and the problem is that we don’t live in that world anymore. Instead, we live in a world in which the fatty miracles of modern technology–from chocolate cupcakes to sausage pizzas–are inexpensive and readily available. As two researchers recently wrote, “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa; we now live in Candyland” (Power & Schulkin, 2009). To make matters worse, many of Candyland’s foods tend to be high in saturated fat, which has the paradoxical effect of making the brain less sensitive to some of the chemical messengers that tell us to stop eating (Benoit et al., 2009).

THE REAL WORLD: Jeet Jet?

In 1923, a reporter for the New York Times asked the British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. Mallory replied: “Because it’s there.”

Researcher Brian Wansink and his bottomless bowl of soup.

BOB FILA/CHICAGO TRIBUNE/NEWSCOM

Apparently, that’s also the reason why we eat. Brian Wansink and colleagues (2005) wondered whether the amount of food people eat is influenced by the amount of food they see in front of them. So they invited participants to their laboratory, sat them down in front of a large bowl of tomato soup, and told them to eat as much as they wanted. In one condition of the study, a server came to the table and refilled the participant’s bowl whenever it got down to about a quarter full. In another condition, the bowl was not refilled by a server. Rather, unbeknownst to the participants, the bottom of the bowl was connected by a long tube to a large vat of soup, so whenever the participant ate from the bowl it would slowly and almost imperceptibly refill itself.

What the researchers found was sobering. Participants who unknowingly ate from a “bottomless bowl” consumed a whopping 73% more soup than those who ate from normal bowls–and yet, they didn’t think they had consumed more and they didn’t report feeling any more full.

It seems that we find it easier to keep track of what we are eating than how much, and this can cause us to overeat even when we are trying our best to do just the opposite. For instance, one study showed that diners at an Italian restaurant often chose to eat butter on their bread rather than dipping it in olive oil because they thought that doing so would reduce the number of calories per slice. And they were right. What they didn’t realize, however, is that they would unconsciously compensate for this reduction in calories by eating 23% more bread during the meal (Wansink & Linder, 2003).

This and other research suggests that one of the best ways to reduce our waists is simply to count our bites.

Idris Lewis and his wife both fit into the pants he used to wear in 2009 when he weighed 364 pounds. Unfortunately, dieting rarely works. Most people who lose significant amounts of weight regain most or all of it within a year (Polivy & Herman, 2002).

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It is all too easy to overeat and become overweight or obese, and it is all too difficult to reverse course. The human body resists weight loss in two ways. First, when we gain weight, we experience an increase in both the size and the number of fat cells in our bodies (usually in our abdomens if we are male and in our thighs and buttocks if we are female). But when we lose weight, we experience a decrease in the size of our fat cells but no decrease in their number. Once our bodies have added a fat cell, that cell is pretty much there to stay. It may become thinner when we diet, but it is unlikely to die.

Second, our bodies respond to dieting by decreasing our metabolism, which is the rate at which energy is used by the body. When our bodies sense that we are living through a famine (which is what they conclude when we refuse to feed them), they find more efficient ways to turn food into fat: a great trick for our ancestors but a real nuisance for us. Indeed, when rats are overfed, then put on diets, then overfed again and put on diets again, they gain weight faster and lose it more slowly the second time around, which suggests that with each round of dieting, their bodies become increasingly efficient at converting food to fat (Brownell et al., 1986). The bottom line is that avoiding obesity is easier than overcoming it (Casazza et al., 2013).

And avoiding it isn’t as difficult as you might think. For instance, just by placing hard-boiled eggs 10 inches away from the more healthful ingredients in a salad bar, researchers reduced the number of eggs that customers ate by about 10% (Rozin et al., 2011). Replacing the serving spoons with tongs reduced the amount by about 16%. In one study, snacking students ate fewer Pringles when every seventh chip was colored red, presumably because the color coding allowed them to keep track of how much they were eating (Geier, Wansink, & Rozin, 2012). In another study, people ate 22% less pasta with tomato sauce when they used a white plate instead of a red plate, presumably because the white plate provided a stark contrast that allowed them to see what they were eating (van Ittersum & Wansink, 2012). These and dozens of other studies show that small changes in our environments can prevent big changes in our waistlines.

One reason why obesity rates are rising is that “normal portions” keep getting larger. When researchers analyzed 52 depictions of The Last Supper that were painted between the years 1000 and 1800, they found that the average plate size increased by 66% (Wansink & Wansink, 2010).

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Reproduction: The Motivation for Sex

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Food motivates us because it is essential to our survival. But sex is also essential to our survival (at least to the survival of our DNA) which is why evolution has ensured that a desire for sex is wired deep into the brain of almost every one of us. In some ways, that wiring scheme is simple: Glands secrete hormones that travel through the blood to the brain and stimulate sexual desire. But which hormones, which parts of the brain, and what triggers the launch in the first place?

The hormone dihydroepiandosterone (DHEA) seems to be involved in the initial onset of sexual desire. Both boys and girls begin producing this slow-acting hormone at about the age of 6, which may explain why boys and girls both experience their initial sexual interest at about the age of 10, despite the fact that boys reach puberty much later than girls. Two other hormones have more gender-specific effects. Both males and females produce testosterone and estrogen, but males produce more of the former and females produce more of the latter. As you will learn in the Development chapter, these two hormones are largely responsible for the physical and psychological changes that characterize puberty. But are they also responsible for the waxing and waning of sexual desire in adults?

OTHER VOICES: Fat and Happy

Alice Randall is a novelist whose books include The Wind Done Gone, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, Rebel Yell, and Ada’s Rules.

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Nobody wants to be fat. At least that’s what you might think. But as the novelist Alice Randall noted, in some cultures being heavy isn’t just acceptable–it is desirable.

Four out of five black women are seriously overweight. One out of four middle-aged black women has diabetes. With $174 billion a year spent on diabetes-related illness in America and obesity quickly overtaking smoking as a cause of cancer deaths, it is past time to try something new.

What we need is a body-culture revolution in black America. Why? Because too many experts who are involved in the discussion of obesity don’t understand something crucial about black women and fat: many black women are fat because we want to be.

The black poet Lucille Clifton’s 1987 poem “Homage to My Hips” begins with the boast, “These hips are big hips.” She establishes big black hips as something a woman would want to have and a man would desire. She wasn’t the first or the only one to reflect this community knowledge. Twenty years before, in 1967, Joe Tex, a black Texan, dominated the radio airwaves across black America with a song he wrote and recorded, “Skinny Legs and All.” One of his lines haunts me to this day: “some man, somewhere who’ll take you baby, skinny legs and all.” For me, it still seems almost an impossibility.

Chemically, in its ability to promote disease, black fat may be the same as white fat. Culturally it is not.

How many white girls in the ‘60s grew up praying for fat thighs? I know I did. I asked God to give me big thighs like my dancing teacher, Diane. There was no way I wanted to look like Twiggy, the white model whose boy-like build was the dream of white girls. Not with Joe Tex ringing in my ears.

How many middle-aged white women fear their husbands will find them less attractive if their weight drops to less than 200 pounds? I have yet to meet one.

But I know many black women whose sane, handsome, successful husbands worry when their women start losing weight. My lawyer husband is one.

Another friend, a woman of color who is a tenured professor, told me that her husband, also a tenured professor and of color, begged her not to lose “the sugar down below” when she embarked on a weight-loss program….

I live in Nashville. There is an ongoing rivalry between Nashville and Memphis. In black Nashville, we like to think of ourselves as the squeaky-clean brown town best known for our colleges and churches. In contrast, black Memphis is known for its music and bars and churches. We often tease the city up the road by saying that in Nashville we have a church on every corner and in Memphis they have a church and a liquor store on every corner. Only now the saying goes, there’s a church, a liquor store and a dialysis center on every corner in black Memphis.

The billions that we are spending to treat diabetes is money that we don’t have for education reform or retirement benefits, and what’s worse, it’s estimated that the total cost of America’s obesity epidemic could reach almost $1 trillion by 2030 if we keep on doing what we have been doing.

We have to change….

Randall suggests that if we really want to solve the obesity problem, we must first understand why some people don’t see it as a problem at all. Do you agree?

Abridged version of “Black Women and Fat” from the New York Times, May 5, 2012. © 2012 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/opinion/sunday/why-black-women-are-fat.html

The answer appears to be yes–as long as those adults are rats. Testosterone increases the sexual desire of male rats by acting on a particular area of the hypothalamus, and estrogen increases the sexual desire of female rats by acting on a different area of the hypothalamus. Lesions to these areas reduce sexual motivation in the respective genders, and when testosterone or estrogen is applied to these areas, sexual motivation increases. In short, testosterone regulates sexual desire in male rats and estrogen regulates both sexual desire and fertility in female rats.

The story for human beings is far more interesting. The females of most mammalian species (e.g., dogs, cats, and rats) have little or no interest in sex except when their estrogen levels are high, which happens when they are ovulating (i.e., when they are “in estrus” or “in heat”). In other words, estrogen regulates both ovulation and sexual interest in these mammals. But female human beings can be interested in sex at any point in their monthly cycles. Although the level of estrogen in a woman’s body changes dramatically over the course of her monthly menstrual cycle, studies suggest that sexual desire changes little, if at all. Somewhere in the course of our evolution, it seems, women’s sexual interest became independent of their ovulation.

The red coloration on the female gelada’s chest (left) indicates that she is in estrus and amenable to sex. The sexual interest of a female human being (right) is not limited to a particular time in her monthly cycle.

MICHAEL K. NICHOLS/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/GETTY IMAGES
BRANDX PICTURES/JUPITER IMAGES

Some theorists have speculated that the advantage of this independence was that it made it more difficult for males to know whether a female was in the fertile phase of her monthly cycle. Male mammals often guard their mates jealously when their mates are ovulating, but go off in search of other females when their mates are not. If a male cannot use his mate’s sexual receptivity to tell when she is ovulating, then he has no choice but to stay around and guard her all the time. For females who are trying to keep their mates at home so that they will contribute to the rearing of children, sexual interest that is continuous and independent of fertility may be an excellent strategy.

If estrogen is not the hormonal basis of women’s sex drives, then what is? Two pieces of evidence suggest that the answer is testosterone–the same hormone that drives male sexuality. First, when women are given testosterone, their sex drives increase. Second, men naturally have more testosterone than women do, and they generally have stronger sex drives. Men are more likely than women to think about sex, have sexual fantasies, seek sex and sexual variety (whether positions or partners), masturbate, want sex at an early point in a relationship, sacrifice other things for sex, have permissive attitudes toward sex, and complain about low sex drive in their partners (Baumeister, Cantanese, & Vohs, 2001). All of this suggests that testosterone may be the hormonal basis of sex drive in both men and women.

Sexual Activity

Men and women may have different levels of sexual drive, but their physiological responses during sex are fairly similar. Prior to the 1960s, data on human sexual behavior consisted primarily of people’s answers to questions about their sex lives (and you may have noticed that this is a topic about which people don’t always tell the truth). William Masters and Virginia Johnson changed all that by conducting groundbreaking studies in which they actually measured the physical responses of hundreds of volunteers as they masturbated or had sex in the laboratory (Masters & Johnson, 1966). Their work led to a deeper understanding of the human sexual response cycle, which refers to the stages of physiological arousal during sexual activity (see FIGURE 8.17). Human sexual response has four phases:

Figure 8.17: The Human Sexual Response Cycle The pattern of the sexual response cycle is quite similar for men and for women. Both men and women go through the excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution phases, though the timing of their response may differ.

• During the excitement phase, muscle tension and blood flow increase in and around the sexual organs, heart and respiration rates increase, and blood pressure rises. Both men and women may experience erect nipples and a “sex flush” on the skin of the upper body and face. A man’s penis typically becomes erect or partially erect and his testicles draw upward, while a woman’s vagina typically becomes lubricated and her clitoris becomes swollen.
• During the plateau phase, heart rate and muscle tension increase further. A man’s urinary bladder closes to prevent urine from mixing with semen, and muscles at the base of his penis begin a steady rhythmic contraction. A man’s Cowper gland may secrete a small amount of lubricating fluid (which, by the way, often contains enough sperm to cause pregnancy). A woman’s clitoris may withdraw slightly, and her vagina may become more lubricated. Her outer vagina may swell, and her muscles may tighten and reduce the diameter of the opening of the vagina.
• During the orgasm phase, breathing becomes extremely rapid and the pelvic muscles begin a series of rhythmic contractions. Both men and women experience quick cycles of muscle contraction of the anus and lower pelvic muscles, and women often experience uterine and vaginal contractions as well. During this phase, men ejaculate about two to five milliliters of semen (depending on how long it has been since their last orgasm and how long they were aroused prior to ejaculation). Ninety-five percent of heterosexual men and 69% of heterosexual women reported having an orgasm during their last sexual encounter (Richters et al., 2006), although roughly 15% of women never experience orgasm, less than half experience orgasm from intercourse alone, and roughly half report having “faked” an orgasm at least once (Wiederman, 1997). The frequency with which women have orgasms seems to have a genetic component (Dawood et al., 2005). And it goes without saying that when men and women have orgasms, they typically experience them as intensely pleasurable.
• During the resolution phase, muscles relax, blood pressure drops, and the body returns to its resting state. Most men and women experience a refractory period, during which further stimulation does not produce excitement. This period may last from minutes to days and is typically longer for men than for women.

Although sex is typically a prerequisite for reproduction, the vast majority of sexual acts are not meant to produce babies. College students, for example, are rarely aiming to get pregnant, but they do have sex because of physical attraction (“The person had beautiful eyes”), as a means to an end (“I wanted to be popular”), to increase emotional connection (“I wanted to communicate at a deeper level”), and to alleviate insecurity (“It was the only way my partner would spend time with me”; Meston & Buss, 2007). Although men are more likely than women to report having sex for purely physical reasons, TABLE 8.2 shows that men and women don’t differ dramatically in their most frequent responses. It is worth noting that not all sex is motivated by reasons like these: About half of college-age women and a quarter of college-age men report having unwanted sexual activity in a dating relationship (O’Sullivan & Allegeier, 1998). We will have much more to say about sexual attraction and relationships in the Social Psychology chapter.

What the Mind Wants

Mohamed Bouazizi was a fruit seller. In 2010 he set himself on fire to protest his treatment by the Tunisian government, and his dramatic suicide ignited the revolution that came to be known as “Arab Spring.” Clearly, psychological needs–such as the need for justice– can be even more powerful than biological needs.

FETHI BELAID/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Survival and reproduction are every animal’s first order of business, so it is no surprise that we are strongly motivated by food and sex. But we are motivated by other things too. We crave kisses of both the chocolate and romantic variety, but we also crave friendship and respect, security and certainty, wisdom and meaning, and a whole lot more. Our psychological motivations can be every bit as powerful as our biological motivations, but they differ in two ways.

First, although we share our biological motivations with most other animals, our psychological motivations are relatively unique. Chimps and rabbits and robins and turtles are all motivated to have sex, but only human beings seem motivated to imbue the act with meaning. Second, although our biological motivations are few– food, sex, oxygen, sleep, and a handful of other things–our psychological motivations are virtually limitless. The things we care about feeling and thinking, knowing and believing, having and being are so numerous and varied that no psychologist has ever been able to make a complete list (Hofmann, Vohs, & Baumeister, 2012). Nonetheless, even if you looked at an incomplete list, you’d quickly notice that psychological motivations vary on three key dimensions: extrinsic versus intrinsic, conscious versus unconscious, and approach versus avoidance. Let’s examine each of these.

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic

Taking a psychology exam and eating a French fry are different in many ways. One makes you tired and the other makes you chubby, one requires that you move your lips and the other requires that you don’t, and so on. But the key difference between these activities is that one is a means to an end and one is an end in itself. An intrinsic motivation is a motivation to take actions that are themselves rewarding. When we eat a French fry because it tastes good, exercise because it feels good, or listen to music because it sounds good, we are intrinsically motivated. These activities don’t have a payoff: They are a payoff. Conversely, an extrinsic motivation is a motivation to take actions that lead to reward. When we floss our teeth so we can avoid gum disease (and get dates), when we work hard for money so we can pay our rent (and get dates), and when we take an exam so we can get a college degree (and get money to get dates), we are extrinsically motivated. None of these things directly bring pleasure, but all may lead to pleasure in the long run.

In most elections, only about a third of the eligible voters in Arizona bother to cast a ballot. That’s what made Mark Osterloh (above) propose the Arizona Voter Reward Act which would award $1 million to a randomly selected voter in every election. Given what you know about intrinstic and extrinstic motivation, what consequences might such an act have?

JEFF TOPPING/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX PICTURES

Extrinsic motivation gets a bad rap. Americans tend to believe that people should “follow their hearts” and “do what they love,” and we feel sorry for students who choose courses just to please their parents and for parents who choose jobs just to earn a pile of money. But the fact is that our ability to engage in behaviors that are unrewarding in the present because we believe they will bring greater rewards in the future is one of our species’ most significant talents, and no other species can do it quite as well as we can (Gilbert, 2006). In research on the ability to delay gratification (Ayduk et al., 2007; Mischel et al., 2004), people are typically faced with a choice between getting something they want right now (e.g., a scoop of ice cream) or waiting and getting more of what they want later (e.g., two scoops of ice cream). Waiting for ice cream is a lot like taking an exam or flossing: It isn’t much fun, but you do it because you know you will reap greater rewards in the end. Studies show that 4-year-old children who can delay gratification are judged to be more intelligent and socially competent 10 years later and have higher SAT scores when they enter college (Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989). In fact, the ability to delay gratification is a better predictor of a child’s grades in school than is the child’s IQ (Duckworth & Seligman, 2005). Apparently there is something to be said for extrinsic motivation.

There is a lot to be said for intrinsic motivation too (Patall, Cooper, & Robinson, 2008). People work harder when they are intrinsically motivated, they enjoy what they do more, and they do it more creatively. Both kinds of motivation have advantages, which is why many of us try to build lives in which we are both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated by the same activity–lives in which we are paid the big bucks for doing exactly what we like to do best. Who hasn’t fantasized about becoming an artist or an athlete or Kanye’s personal party planner? Alas, research suggests that it is difficult to get paid for doing what you love and still end up loving what you do because extrinsic rewards can undermine intrinsic interest (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999; Henderlong & Lepper, 2002). For example, in one study, college students who were intrinsically interested in a puzzle either were paid to complete it or completed it for free, and those who were paid were less likely to play with the puzzle later on (Deci, 1971). In a similar study, children who enjoyed drawing with Magic Markers were either promised or not promised an award for using them, and those who were promised the award were less likely to use the markers later (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973). It appears that under some circumstances people take rewards to indicate that an activity isn’t inherently pleasurable (“If they had to pay me to do that puzzle, it couldn’t have been a very fun one”); thus rewards can cause people to lose their intrinsic motivation.

Just as rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation, punishments can create it. In one study, children who had no intrinsic interest in playing with a toy suddenly gained an interest when the experimenter threatened to punish them if they touched it (Aronson, 1963). College students who had no intrinsic motivation to cheat on a test were more likely to do so if the experimenter explicitly warned against it (Wilson & Lassiter, 1982). Threats can suggest that a forbidden activity is desirable, and they can also have the paradoxical consequence of promoting the very behaviors they are meant to discourage. For example, when a group of day care centers got fed up with parents who arrived late to pick up their children, some of them instituted a financial penalty for tardiness. As FIGURE 8.18 shows, the financial penalty caused an increase in late arrivals (Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000). Why? Because parents are intrinsically motivated to fetch their kids and they generally do their best to be on time. But when the day care centers imposed a fine for late arrival, the parents became extrinsically motivated to fetch their children–and because the fine wasn’t particularly large, they decided to pay a small financial penalty in order to leave their children in day care for an extra hour. When threats and rewards change intrinsic motivation into extrinsic motivation, unexpected consequences can follow.

Figure 8.18: When Threats Backfire Threats can cause behaviors that were once intrinsically motivated to become extrinsically motivated. Day care centers that instituted fines for late-arriving parents saw an increase in the number of parents who arrived late.

Conscious versus Unconscious

When prizewinning artists or scientists are asked to explain their achievements, they typically say things like, “I wanted to liberate color from form” or “I wanted to cure diabetes.” They almost never say, “I wanted to exceed my father’s accomplishments, thereby proving to my mother that I was worthy of her love.” People clearly have conscious motivations, which are motivations of which people are aware, but they also have unconscious motivations, which are motivations of which people are not aware (Aarts, Custers, & Marien, 2008; Bargh et al., 2001; Hassin, Bargh, & Zimerman, 2009).

For example, psychologists David McClelland and John Atkinson argued that people vary in their need for achievement, which is the motivation to solve worthwhile problems (McClelland et al., 1953). They argued that this basic motivation is unconscious and thus must be measured with special techniques such as the Thematic Apperception Test, which presents people with a series of drawings and asks them to tell stories about them. The amount of “achievement-related imagery” in the person’s story ostensibly reveals the person’s unconscious need for achievement. (You’ll learn more about these sorts of tests in the Personality chapter.) Although there has been much controversy about the validity and reliability of measures such as these (Lilienfeld, Wood, & Garb, 2000; Tuerlinckx, De Boeck, & Lens, 2002), research shows that a person’s responses on this test reliably predict the person’s behavior in certain circumstances. For example, they can predict a child’s grades in school (Khalid, 1991). Research also suggests that this motivation can be “primed” in much the same way that thoughts and feelings can be primed. For example, when words such as achievement are presented on a computer screen so rapidly that people cannot consciously perceive them, those people will work especially hard to solve a puzzle (Bargh et al., 2001) and will feel especially unhappy if they fail (Chartrand & Kay, 2006).

Michael Phelps is clearly high–in need for achievement, that is–which is one of the reasons why he ultimately became the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time.

AP PHOTO/THE CANADIAN PRESS, RYAN REMIORZ

What determines whether we are conscious of our motivations? Most actions have more than one motivation, and Robin Vallacher and Daniel Wegner (1985, 1987) have suggested that the ease or difficulty of performing the action determines which of these motivations we will be aware of. When actions are easy (e.g., screwing in a light bulb), we are aware of our most general motivations (e.g., to be helpful), but when actions are difficult (e.g., wrestling with a light bulb that is stuck in its socket), we are aware of our more specific motivations (e.g., to get the threads aligned). Vallacher and Wegner argued that people are usually aware of the general motivations for their behavior and only become aware of their more specific motivations when they encounter problems. For example, participants in an experiment drank coffee either from a normal mug or from a mug that had a heavy weight attached to the bottom, which made the mug difficult to manipulate. When asked what they were doing, those who were drinking from the normal mug explained that they were “satisfying needs,” whereas those who were drinking from the weighted mug explained that they were “swallowing” (Wegner et al., 1984). The ease with which we can execute an action is one of many factors that determine whether we are or are not conscious of our motivations.

Approach versus Avoidance

The poet James Thurber (1956) wrote: “All men should strive to learn before they die/What they are running from, and to, and why.” The hedonic principle describes two conceptually distinct motivations: a motivation to “run to” pleasure and a motivation to “run from” pain. These motivations are what psychologists call an approach motivation, which is a motivation to experience a positive outcome, and an avoidance motivation, which is a motivation not to experience a negative outcome. Pleasure is not just the lack of pain, and pain is not just the lack of pleasure. They are independent experiences that occur in different parts of the brain (Davidson et al., 1990; Gray, 1990).

Research suggests that, all else being equal, avoidance motivations tend to be more powerful than approach motivations. Most people will turn down a chance to bet on a coin flip that would pay them $10 if it came up heads but would require them to pay $8 if it came up tails, because they believe that the pain of losing $8 will be more intense than the pleasure of winning $10 (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). Because people expect losses to have more powerful emotional consequences than equal-size gains, they will take more risks to avoid a loss than to achieve a gain. When participants are told that a disease is expected to kill 600 people and are asked to choose between administering Vaccine A, which will save exactly 200 people, or Vaccine B, which has a one-third chance of saving everybody and a two-thirds chance of saving nobody, about three-quarters of them decide to play it safe and select Vaccine A. Yet, when people are given a choice between Vaccine C, which will allow exactly 400 people to die, or Vaccine D which has a one-third chance of allowing no one to die and a two-thirds chance of allowing everyone to die, about three quarters of them decide to take the gamble and select Vaccine D (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). Now, if you do the math you will quickly see that Vaccine A and Vaccine C are identical, as are Vaccine B and Vaccine D. The descriptions of the identical vaccines are just two ways of saying the same thing. And yet, when vaccines are described in terms of the number of lives lost (as C and D are) instead of the number of lives gained (as A and B are), most people are ready to take a big risk. It is interesting to note that monkeys show the same tendency (Lakshminarayanan, Chen, & Santos, 2011).

On average, avoidance motivation is stronger than approach motivation, but the relative strength of these two tendencies does differ somewhat from person to person. TABLE 8.3 below shows a series of questions that have been used to measure the relative strength of a person’s approach and avoidance tendencies (Carver & White, 1994). Research shows that people who are described by the high-approach items are happier when rewarded than those who are not, and that those who are described by the high-avoidance items are more anxious when threatened than those who are not (Carver, 2006). Just as some people seem to be more responsive to rewards than to punishments (and vice versa), some people tend to think about their behavior as attempts to get reward rather than to avoid punishment (and vice versa). People who have a promotion focus tend to think in terms of achieving gains whereas people who have a prevention focus tend to think in terms of avoiding losses (Higgins, 1997). In one study, participants were given an anagram task. Some were told that they would be paid $4 for the experiment, but they could earn an extra dollar by finding 90% or more of all the possible words. Others were told that they would be paid $5 for the experiment, but they could avoid losing a dollar by not missing more than 10% of all the possible words. People who had a promotion focus performed better in the first case than in the second, but people who had a prevention focus performed better in the second case than in the first (Shah, Higgins, & Friedman, 1998). Similarly, people with a high need for achievement tend to be somewhat more motivated by their hope for success, whereas people with a low need for achievement tend to be somewhat more motivated by their fear of failure.

A “credit card surcharge” and a “cash discount” are precisely the same thing. But they sure don’t feel that way! RyanAir customers were outraged in 2012 when the airline imposed a 2% surcharge on customers who paid with credit cards. Would the airline have been wiser to raise their ticket prices by 2% and then offer a 2% discount to customers who paid with cash?

IMAGEBROKER.NET/SUPERSTOCK

And what is probably the biggest thing that people want to avoid? All animals strive to stay alive, but only human beings realize that this striving is ultimately in vain and that death is life’s inevitable end. Some psychologists have suggested that the motivation to avoid the anxiety associated with death creates a sense of “existential terror” and that much of our behavior is merely an attempt to manage it. Terror Management Theory is a theory about how people respond to knowledge of their own mortality, and it suggests that one of the ways that people cope with their existential terror is by developing a “cultural worldview”–a shared set of beliefs about what is good and right and true (Greenberg, Solomon, & Arndt, 2008; Solomon et al., 2004). These beliefs allow people to see themselves as more than mortal animals because they inhabit a world of meaning in which they can achieve symbolic immortality (e.g., by leaving a great legacy or having children) and perhaps even literal immortality (e.g., by being pious and earning a spot in the afterlife). According to this theory, our cultural worldview is a shield that buffers us against the anxiety that the knowledge of our own mortality creates.

Terror management theory gives rise to the mortality-salience hypothesis, which is the prediction that people who are reminded of their own mortality will work to reinforce their cultural worldviews. In the last 20 years, this hypothesis has been supported by nearly 400 studies. The results show that when people are reminded of death (often in very subtle ways, such as by flashing the word “death” for just a few milliseconds in a laboratory, or by stopping people on a street corner that happens to be near a graveyard), they are more likely to praise and reward those who share their cultural worldviews, derogate and punish those who don’t, value their spouses and defend their countries, feel disgusted by “animalistic” behaviors such as breastfeeding, and so on. All of these responses are presumably ways of shoring up one’s cultural worldview and thereby defending against the anxiety that reminders of one’s own mortality naturally elicit.