Research from psychology, neurobiology and behavioral economics indicates that a binary view of motivation, based on approach and avoidance, may be too reductive and that at least seven crucial motives are likely to affect human decisions, such as "consumption/resource seeking", "care", "affiliation", "achievement", "status-power", "threat approach" (or anger), and "threat avoidance" (or fear). As a preliminary investigation of the conceptual distinctness and relatedness of these motives, we conducted a semantic categorization task, in which participants were to assign provided words to one of the motives. Results suggest that, for each motive, subjects converge on how to make these differential assignments. Moreover, principal component analysis of these assignments suggests that the semantic inter-relations of the motives can be represented on a two dimensional space, or a “semantic atlas”. This atlas suggests that, while care and affiliation are conceptually close, affiliation is closer to threat-avoidance (or fear), while on opposite to these motives, we find achievement, consumption and power, with the latter lying closer to threat-approach (or anger). In a second study, we asked participants to rate how well motive-specific words described their currently experienced feelings. We find that semantically close motives also are more likely to be experienced together, that is, we replicate most of the semantic relations in a “subjective atlas”. In addition to these motivational atlases, we provide a database of motive-specific words, together with the valence and arousal scores, to be used for future research on the influence of motives on decision making.
Cooperative decisions are well predicted by stable individual differences in social values but it remains unclear how they may be modulated by emotions such as fear and anger. Moving beyond specific decision paradigms, we used a suite of economic games and investigated how experimental inductions of fear or anger affect latent factors of decision making in individuals with selfish or prosocial value orientations. We found that, relative to experimentally induced anger, induced fear elicited higher scores on a cooperation factor, and that this effect was entirely driven by selfish participants. In fact, induced fear brought selfish individuals to cooperate similarly to prosocial individuals, possibly as a (selfish) mean to seek protection in others. These results suggest that two basic threat-related emotions, fear and anger, differentially affect a generalized form of cooperation and that this effect is buffered by prosocial value orientation.
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