Markman, A.B., Brendl, C.M., & Kim, K.
Preference and the specificity of goals
Emotion Vol. 7, Issue 3 (2007)
Motivational states influence preferences toward objects in the world by activating particular goals. At what level of abstraction do goals drive people’s feelings of preference? We explore this question by examining how changes in need to eat affect expressed preferences for foods that are appropriate for different times of day. We are interested in whether the need to eat involves a need to eat food in general or a need to eat foods contextually appropriate to the time of day. To explore this issue, we make use of previous findings suggesting that items relevant to satisfying a goal increase in their value when the goal is active relative to when it is inactive, but items unrelated to that goal decrease in their value when the goal is active relative to when it is inactive. We observed that when people need to eat, this goal involves foods that are contextually appropriate to the time of day that the study was run. Hence, the goal they seek to fulfill is narrower than seeking foods in general.
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