The final and interesting law regarding motivation that I found in the slides is the law of hedonic contrast, which explains how a person’s subjective emotions directly correlate with an incentive they’re doing. A great example of this could be a person who studies for an exam is more likely to be looking forward to it (at least just getting it done), and a person who procrastinates studying will most likely feel an abrasion towards completing the test. An interesting article that explored this topic deeper had also found data supporting the idea that humans tend to be more focused on their mistakes and unfavorable incentives than favorable ones, which could be a means of survival. In the experiment run on two groups of people, both were given the same hypothetical situation of a hospital either opening or closing during a pandemic, and whether or not the people would allow it to happen. The results had found that, “Our findings do not imply that people do not experience hedonic contrast for positive outcomes. Indeed, two of our studies (Studies 1b and 3a) found hedonic contrast for positive outcomes, even when attention was not experimentally drawn to a reference point. Our findings suggest only that people experience stronger hedonic contrast for negative than for positive outcomes.” Although this was one singular study to observe one behavioral law, this tactic could arguably be used quite often especially in politics to convince people that the hedonic value of something, in this case, a hospital, means that many people's lives and livelihoods depend on whether or not the majority crowd that funds them believes to have an intrinsic positive value.
References: Voichek, G., & Novemsky, N. (2021). Asymmetric Hedonic Contrast: Pain Is More Contrast Dependent Than Pleasure. Psychological science, 32(7), 1038–1046. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797621991140
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