Desire / a practical guide

What We Mean When We Say We Want

Desire forms through body, memory and relationships. Research shows how a cue gains force, why pleasure can lag behind wanting, and why the same person can want something in one place and refuse it in another.

Long-form guide ≈ 25 min core ≈ 45 min with sources Evidence checked 14 Aug 2026

Scope. Educational guide, with an adult section on sexual desire. It does not replace personal, medical or therapeutic advice. In sexual health, pleasure and safety require respect and freedom from coercion, discrimination and violence.32

01 · wanting

Wanting can arrive before liking, and outlast it.

02 · context

The brakes are part of the experience: safety, attention and meaning change the response.

03 · history

A desire has a history. Repetition, culture and institutions teach a cue what it promises.

The short answer

A desire is a prediction with a body attached.

It begins with a state, meets a cue, imagines an outcome, assigns value and prepares movement. The result can be approach, avoidance, delay, fantasy, repetition or a deliberate refusal. "Want" describes the felt pressure of that process; it does not identify one single substance in the brain.

The same mechanism can carry very different contents. Hunger can make a smell vivid. A message can promise belonging. A difficult question can pull attention toward an answer. A familiar screen can offer relief before anything on it has happened. Erotic desire can combine bodily arousal, attraction, imagination, relationship, identity and safety. Meaning changes with the body, learning, relationships and timing.

That is why "what turns people on?" has no universal answer. A stimulus becomes attractive through the relation among body, learning, attention, social meaning, timing and permission. The more precise question is: what changed around this person, now, for this cue?

multiple fields individual differences are large
The six-step loop

One loop, different desires.

Select a desire. The six steps stay recognisable while the body state, cue, promise and social consequences change. The model brings together research on reward, motivation, learning and relationships.

Body → cue → prediction → value → action → learning

01 Body need, energy, arousal or strain
02 Cue object, person, place, image or memory
03 Prediction what the cue seems to promise
04 Value pleasure, relief, status, meaning or contact
05 Action approach, avoid, imagine, delay or refuse
06 Learning the next encounter starts from what was learned

Food

Hunger changes the body. Smell or packaging becomes a cue. The mind predicts satiety and pleasure, while eating can bring both reward and relief. After satiation, the next bite is worth less. Later, the smell can trigger desire before hunger returns.

Wanting the food, liking the taste and learning the cue are connected, but they are not the same thing.Berridge, Robinson & Aldridge; Schultz
01 · reward science

Wanting, liking and learning can split apart.

Reward has three components that influence one another without becoming the same thing. A cue can attract attention and effort, an outcome can feel pleasurable, and the nervous system can learn the route.1 3

wanting · incentive salience

"Go toward it."

Wanting makes a cue attention-grabbing and an action worth effort. Dopamine participates in cue-driven pursuit; calling it the brain's pleasure chemical loses the distinction between wanting and liking.1

study + model
liking · hedonic impact

"This feels good."

Liking is the experienced pleasure of an outcome. It can be supported by partly distinct systems, including hedonic hotspots. A person can continue to want an outcome whose pleasure has flattened, or enjoy something without pursuing more of it.4

study + model
learning · update the expectation

"Remember the route."

Prediction error changes what a cue means: better than expected, as expected or worse than expected. Cues can become potent even when the reward is delayed, changed or absent. The same desire can therefore return more easily tomorrow.2

model supported by studies
02 · interoception and allostasis

Body state changes what seems desirable.

Desire reads hunger, thirst, sleep, heat, pain, hormonal change, illness, stress and available energy. Interoception is how we sense and interpret internal conditions. The brain is constantly estimating what the body needs and what an action will cost.5 6 7

Desire depends on state. The same meal can be invitation, nuisance or emergency depending on satiety and stress. The same conversation can feel nourishing after isolation and demanding after overload. A body under strain can put more weight on immediate relief because effort, uncertainty and future planning have become expensive.

The body starts preparing before a need is fully conscious. Allostatic accounts of motivation describe the nervous system as estimating future energy demand and the effort required to meet it. That estimate can produce a felt "I need to move." The experience is real; the interpretation can still be wrong.

Physiology and experience can diverge. In sexual-arousal research, a meta-analysis of 132 laboratory studies found stronger agreement between genital and self-reported measures in men than in women, with methods and timing affecting the result. The finding is about measurement, not permission: bodily response is never consent and never a complete report of desire.29

laboratory meta-analysis measurement is not meaning
03 · context

The brakes are part of desire.

In the Dual Control Model of sexual response, excitation and inhibition interact. People vary in their proneness to both. Desire depends on both: threat, evaluation, pain, fatigue, shame, conflict, privacy and time can change the response to the same cue.27 28

Safety

Can attention stay with the experience, or is the body scanning for consequences?

Attention

Is the cue vivid enough to compete with stress, screens, pain or performance monitoring?

Meaning

Does the moment promise pleasure, closeness, identity, relief, status or a role one does not want?

Permission

Is there genuine autonomy, mutuality and an ability to stop? These are ethical boundaries, not mood variables.

Change the context

Desire emerges from body, cue, meaning and consequences together.

opens narrows changes protects context
is active
04 · erotic desire

Sexual desire has many forms and motives.

Sexual motivation contains physical, emotional, goal-oriented and insecurity-related motives. Meston and Buss identified 237 expressed reasons for sex in one nomination study and organised ratings from 1,549 participants into four broad factors and 13 subfactors.24 A later Hungarian replication identified 197 reasons in free responses and described a similarly diverse motivational field.25

Desire can arrive spontaneously or after affectionate contact, attention, attraction and a sense of safety. Rosemary Basson's circular model made room for responsive desire. Later studies show that models help when they fit the person and the data, but they do not define normality.26

Fantasies add another warning against moral shortcuts. In a population survey of 1,516 adults rating 55 fantasies, only two fantasies were statistically rare for women or men; many themes commonly labelled unusual were common in the sample. Content alone does not tell us whether a fantasy is distressing, consensual, enacted, wanted or harmful.30

In couples, desire forms between two people. A 35-day diary and 12-month study of 229 same-sex/gender and mixed-sex/gender couples found that desire discrepancy predicted sexual distress at the next day and at 12 months. The result points toward the couple and its negotiation: discrepancy is not one partner's defect.31

adult research real variation consent is non-negotiable
05 · learning and habit

Repetition ties desire to context.

Repeatedly pairing a context with an outcome teaches the nervous system what to notice. Habits form when responses become linked to stable features of a situation; changing the context can loosen the link.9 10

The cue can be completely different from the reward. A doorway can predict a conversation; a time of night can predict a screen; a vibration can predict social information; a particular room can predict relief. Uncertainty can hold attention, but its effect depends on how it changes expected value and reinforcement rate. "Variable reward" is worth testing as a design problem; its effect is not the same in every app.

Digital environments compress cues, feedback and repetition. A 2025 preregistered study across problematic gaming, buying/shopping, pornography and social-network use found heightened cue reactivity in risky and pathological groups, including responses to generic start or log-in screens. The result supports cue-reactivity as one mechanism in problematic use; frequency alone does not establish an addiction.40

When a pattern is costly, start with the environment. Alter the cue, add a pause, make the intended action easier, change the stable context and see whether the response changes. The situation is part of the intervention.

longitudinal and preregistered evidence small environmental experiment
06 · time, scarcity and self-control

Present bias changes the decision.

People often discount delayed rewards in a curved, hyperbolic way. A smaller reward available now can temporarily beat a larger reward later, especially when an immediate bodily state makes the future feel abstract.11 12

That is why intentions made in a calm state can be revised by hunger, arousal, fatigue, anger, loneliness or fear. An intense state changes the weights in the decision. A future self becomes easier to protect when the plan is tied to the environment: a default, a calendar cue, a prepared meal, a blocked notification or a pre-committed conversation.

Scarcity changes attention before any individual choice. Experiments and farm-cycle data in a widely discussed Science paper found that thoughts about financial strain and moments of poverty could consume cognitive resources; later work also found that experimentally reduced bandwidth could lower reported enjoyment of consumption. Material pressure changes attention, decision capacity and the value of immediate relief.13 14

Implementation intentions link a vague wish to a cue: "If situation X occurs, I will do Y." They can start an action, but they do not replace changing a harmful environment or meeting a real need.15

07 · belonging, status and imitation

Other people help make objects desirable.

Many desires pass through relationships. We may want an object because it grants entry, recognition, safety, independence, desirability or a story about who we are. The need to belong describes a recurring desire for frequent, positive interaction within ongoing bonds; reputation can recruit reward-related striatal regions that overlap with monetary reward, without making social and monetary value interchangeable.16 18

attachment

Sometimes the person is the reward.

Mutual attention, responsiveness and the expectation of continued contact can make approach feel safe. Exclusion can create a conflict between approach and avoidance: connection is wanted, but the social world feels dangerous.

status

Public recognition can be the reward.

Money, praise, rank and reputation can overlap in reward processing. That helps explain why public recognition can be energising; social and monetary value remain different.18

mimesis

We learn what is worth wanting from others.

Festinger's social-comparison theory and Girard's literary account of mediated desire describe a social fact: we often learn what to want by seeing what another person notices, owns, praises or pursues.19

Self-determination theory adds a different vocabulary: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Across domains, people tend to sustain motivation more easily when they can experience choice, effectiveness and connection. A 2022 meta-analysis of 144 studies and more than 79,000 students found that teacher autonomy support predicted need satisfaction and self-determined motivation, with competence the strongest predictor in that educational sample.17

Autonomy, competence and relatedness do not have the same form for everyone. Autonomy can mean independence in one setting and the ability to choose one's obligations in another. Relatedness can be intimate, communal, spiritual or professional. The value of a desire is partly learned from the relationships and institutions that make its outcome meaningful.

08 · culture, development and evolution

Culture shapes what seems desirable.

Human desire has bodily constraints and learned meanings. Culture shapes the self that evaluates an outcome, the roles that make it respectable, the objects that signal membership and the futures that count as success. The self and its contexts change one another over time.20 21

First, sampling limits the conclusion. Behavioural science has often generalised from Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic populations. Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan's review argued that these samples can be outliers across perception, fairness, cooperation, reasoning, moral judgement, self-concepts and motivation. A large sample is not automatically a sample of "human nature."20

Second, group averages are not people. A 45-country, 14,399-person replication found average sex differences in some mate preferences while also finding cultural variation and a relationship between gender equality and age preferences. The authors did not show that biology or culture alone explains individual desire. Evolutionary and biosocial accounts can generate hypotheses; they cannot replace a person's history, situation, agency and structural options.22 23

Desire also changes across the life course. The YSEX replication across 4,655 participants in different age groups found the same five top reasons across groups while preserving a wide taxonomy of motives. The capacity remains; cue, role, body and meaning change.25

cross-cultural research the mean is not the person
09 · emotions as instruments

People sometimes want the feeling that will help.

Hedonic accounts say we seek pleasant feelings and avoid unpleasant ones. Instrumental accounts add a second motive: an emotion can be desired because someone expects it to be useful. Across five studies, Tamir and colleagues found that making anger or anxiety seem useful increased people's motivation to experience it and shaped emotion-consistent behaviour, including when the goal was activated outside awareness.34

This explains why someone can want fear in a horror film, grief in a song, anger before a negotiation, nervousness before a performance or sadness that keeps a bond vivid. Pleasure is one value signal among others: information, energy, coherence, identity and progress can matter too.

It also explains a paradox. Valuing happiness too intensely can make people monitor the gap between their actual mood and an ideal mood, reducing the very happiness they are trying to secure. The goal can become another source of pressure.35

In practice, ask two things: what is the feeling doing and is its cost acceptable? An emotion can be functional in one moment and punishing when it becomes the only available route. Meaning, flexibility and consequences matter more than pleasantness alone.

10 · when wanting and well-being split

Desire intensity is not a diagnosis.

Craving, compulsion, anhedonia, depression, medication effects, trauma, chronic stress and relationship conflict can change the loop. Incentive-sensitisation research describes a route in which cues become more powerful while pleasure fails to rise with wanting; cue-reactivity meta-analyses find partly overlapping networks across drug, gambling, food and sexual cues, with important differences.1 38

The same networks can respond to very different cues; that does not establish a diagnosis. A repeated behaviour does not become an addiction because it is frequent. The clinically relevant questions are about loss of flexibility, persistent impairment, distress, safety, consent and consequences. Distress caused only by moral condemnation is not the same thing as a disorder.

WHO's ICD-11 classifies compulsive sexual behaviour disorder within impulse-control disorders. Clinical assessment needs to consider distress, impairment, flexibility and safety, while avoiding the pathologising of consensual, non-heteronormative or simply uncommon sexuality. There is no "normal desire level" that can be inferred from gender, orientation, fantasy or relationship status.33 39

If desire changes sharply, causes suffering, interferes with life, involves coercion or feels impossible to control, consult a qualified clinician.

clinical review no diagnosis here
11 · a guide for your own life

Make the desire more precise.

The aim is to see which part of the loop is asking for attention, then change one condition and observe the result with less shame and more information.

01 · name the target

Object, action, state or relation?

"I want the phone" may mean information, relief, company, stimulation or a break from a task. Name the thing the action is trying to produce.

02 · split the signals

Wanting, liking, outcome.

Write three lines: what pulls me, what I expect to feel, and what happened last time. Desire becomes testable when prediction meets result.

03 · describe the context

Body, cue, story, people, time.

Note sleep, hunger, pain, stress, place, audience, identity, friction and urgency. Context belongs in the explanation.

04 · change one variable

Run a small experiment.

Move the cue, add a pause, make a desired action easier, ask for clearer reciprocity or test the desire in a different time and place.

05 · relationships

Negotiate the meaning.

Ask: do we want the same activity, the same feeling or the same reassurance? Keep refusal possible. Agreement must remain possible throughout.

06 · review

What did the loop learn?

Record the immediate result and the next-day result. See whether the change holds tomorrow.

Seek professional support for persistent distress, trauma, compulsive behaviour, medication effects, sexual pain, safety concerns or coercion. Otherwise, the right response may be nourishment, a boundary, a conversation, a medical check, a new environment or permission to let the desire pass.

12 · what we still do not know

What we still do not know.

Research describes mechanisms, but it does not exhaust lived experience. These are the questions current methods still answer only partly.

measurement

What is the unit?

Self-report, physiology, behaviour, neural activity and language each reveal a different slice. There is no objective desire meter.

translation

When does a model travel?

Animal reward models clarify some components; human meaning, consent, culture and autobiographical memory require other methods.

ecology

What do algorithms change?

Digital systems alter cue density, feedback speed, social comparison and available pauses. Long-term causal evidence is still catching up.

variation

What counts as difference?

Age, sex, gender, orientation, disability, medication, trauma, class and culture may change a loop without defining a person's capacity for desire.

ethics

Who benefits from the desire?

Institutions can cultivate a desire while shifting its costs to the person. A desire may be genuine and still be shaped by a market or norm.

agency

What does freedom mean?

Freedom requires more than choosing among cues. It includes the ability to change a context, refuse a role and build a future that remains inhabitable.

Method and limits

What we know, and how firmly we know it.

This page brings together primary studies, meta-analyses, models, official health guidance and published philosophical or cultural works. It is not a systematic review or a clinical guideline. Links point to PubMed, DOI records, WHO or stable book texts where available.

What counts as evidence here?

Study means an empirical paper, meta-analysis or preregistered/cross-cultural dataset. Model means a theory used to organise findings. Synthesis marks a conclusion made by connecting sources. Caution marks a boundary, disagreement or measurement limit. Practice is a reflective exercise.

What does "turn on" mean here?

It means that a cue, condition or meaning increases approach, attention, arousal, expected value or willingness to continue for some people in some contexts. It does not mean universal attraction, conscious endorsement, consent, safety or a promise of pleasure.

What does "turn off" mean?

It can mean inhibition, loss of attention, reduced expected value, pain, threat, satiation, boredom, learned avoidance, shame, conflict or an ethical refusal. A turn-off may protect a person from a situation that should not continue.

How current is the research?

The evidence search and health-guidance check were completed on 14 August 2026. The page favours durable sources, but digital-use research, diagnostic language and clinical guidance can change. Recheck current guidance before making a health decision.

Sources for further reading

Studies, models and books.

The sources show what supports each claim, where disputes remain and what to read next. Start with the first ten for the core mechanism, then move into sex research, social motivation, culture, economics, digital environments and the history of thinking about desire.

Filter the sources by type.

  1. 01 · model / review Berridge & Robinson (2016), “Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction”

    Separates incentive salience from pleasure and explains why cue-driven wanting can outlast liking.

  2. 02 · study / neuroscience Schultz, Dayan & Montague (1997), “A neural substrate of prediction and reward”

    Classic primate evidence for reward-prediction-error signalling in dopamine neurons.

  3. 03 · review / components Berridge, Robinson & Aldridge (2009), “Dissecting components of reward”

    A compact account of liking, wanting and learning as separable reward processes.

  4. 04 · review / pleasure Berridge & Kringelbach (2015), “Pleasure systems in the brain”

    Reviews hedonic hotspots and the neural architecture of pleasure.

  5. 05 · review / body Craig (2002), “How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body”

    Foundational account of interoception as a bodily sense.

  6. 06 · review / predictive body Barrett & Simmons (2015), “Interoceptive predictions in the brain”

    Predictive-processing account of how the brain models internal bodily states.

  7. 07 · review / allostasis Touroutoglou et al. (2020), “Motivation in the Service of Allostasis”

    Connects motivation, effort, interoception and the anterior mid-cingulate cortex.

  8. 08 · study / curiosity Gruber, Gelman & Ranganath (2014), “States of curiosity modulate hippocampus-dependent learning”

    High curiosity improved memory for answers and incidental material while engaging dopaminergic circuitry.

  9. 09 · review / habit Wood & Neal (2007), “A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface”

    Explains how stable contexts cue habits and how goals interact with them.

  10. 10 · longitudinal study / habit Lally et al. (2010), “How are habits formed?”

    Real-world repetition study that made habit formation look gradual and highly variable.

  11. 11 · theory / time Ainslie (1975), “Specious reward”

    Behavioral theory of impulsiveness and hyperbolic delay discounting.

  12. 12 · review / visceral states Loewenstein (1996), “Out of control: Visceral influences on behavior”

    Shows how hot bodily states reshape valuation and self-prediction.

  13. 13 · study / scarcity Mani et al. (2013), “Poverty impedes cognitive function”

    Experiments and farm-cycle data on financial concerns and cognitive bandwidth.

  14. 14 · study / scarcity Shah, Mullainathan & Shafir (2012), “Some consequences of having too little”

    Scarcity can narrow attention toward the scarce resource and alter decision-making.

  15. 15 · review / planning Gollwitzer (1999), “Implementation intentions”

    Shows how if-then plans link intentions to cues and action.

  16. 16 · review / belonging Baumeister & Leary (1995), “The need to belong”

    Argues that stable interpersonal attachment is a pervasive human motivation.

  17. 17 · theory / motivation Ryan & Deci (2000), “Self-determination theory”

    Autonomy, competence and relatedness as basic psychological needs.

  18. 18 · fMRI study / social reward Izuma, Saito & Sadato (2008), “Processing of social and monetary rewards”

    Reputation and money both activated reward-related striatal regions in a small fMRI study.

  19. 19 · social theory Festinger (1954), “A theory of social comparison processes”

    Classic account of how people evaluate themselves through comparison with others.

  20. 20 · cross-cultural review Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan (2010), “The weirdest people in the world?”

    Warns against treating WEIRD samples as representative of humanity.

  21. 21 · review / self and culture Markus & Kitayama (1991), “Culture and the self”

    Independent and interdependent self-construals as culturally patterned motivational contexts.

  22. 22 · preregistered cross-cultural study Walter et al. (2020), “Sex differences in mate preferences across 45 countries”

    Large replication testing evolutionary and biosocial perspectives with 14,399 participants.

  23. 23 · review / mating Buss & Schmitt (2019), “Mate preferences and their behavioral manifestations”

    Reviews context-specific mating strategies, similarities, differences and cultural variation.

  24. 24 · study / sexual motives Meston & Buss (2007), “Why humans have sex”

    237 reasons; 1,549 ratings; four broad factors and 13 subfactors.

  25. 25 · replication / age groups Wyverkens et al. (2018), “YSEX? A replication study in different age groups”

    4,655 participants and a broad taxonomy of sexual motives across ages.

  26. 26 · model / sexual response Basson (2000), “The female sexual response: a different model”

    Circular, context-sensitive account of responsive sexual desire.

  27. 27 · model review / sexual response Bancroft, Graham, Janssen & Sanders (2009), “The dual control model”

    Sexual excitation and inhibition as interacting, individually variable processes.

  28. 28 · scoping review / 152 papers Janssen & Bancroft (2023), “The Dual Control Model of Sexual Response”

    Maps applications of excitation and inhibition research from 2009 to 2022.

  29. 29 · meta-analysis / 132 studies Chivers et al. (2010), “Agreement of self-reported and genital measures of sexual arousal”

    Separates physiological measures from subjective reports and their methodological moderators.

  30. 30 · population survey / fantasies Joyal, Cossette & Lapierre (2015), “What exactly is an unusual sexual fantasy?”

    1,516 adults rated 55 fantasies; statistical rarity and stigma are not the same.

  31. 31 · daily diary + longitudinal couples study Jodouin et al. (2021), “Discrepancy in dyadic sexual desire predicts sexual distress”

    229 couples; desire discrepancy predicted later sexual distress in both time horizons.

  32. 32 · official health guidance World Health Organization, “Defining sexual health”

    Sexual health as well-being, safety, respect, pleasure and freedom from coercion.

  33. 33 · official classification WHO, ICD-11 overview

    Context for compulsive sexual behaviour disorder as an impulse-control classification.

  34. 34 · five studies / emotion goals Tamir et al. (2015), “An expectancy-value model of emotion regulation”

    Expected usefulness can make people want anger or anxiety and act in emotion-consistent ways.

  35. 35 · emotion study Mauss et al. (2011), “Can seeking happiness make people unhappy?”

    Valuing happiness too intensely can create monitoring pressure and reduce well-being.

  36. 36 · fMRI / purchase anticipation Knutson et al. (2007), “Neural predictors of purchases”

    Anticipated gain, price and purchase decisions recruit distinguishable signals.

  37. 37 · meta-analysis / cue reactivity Noori et al. (2016), “Largely overlapping neuronal substrates of reactivity to drug, gambling, food and sexual cues”

    176 studies and 5,573 individuals; overlapping cue-reactivity networks with modality-specific differences.

  38. 38 · behavioral addiction model Brand et al. (2019), “The I-PACE model”

    Person, affect, cognition and execution as interacting processes in problematic behaviours.

  39. 39 · clinical review Assessment and treatment of compulsive sexual behavior disorder (2024)

    Clinical cautions around diagnosis, misdiagnosis, stigma and sexual medicine expertise.

  40. 40 · preregistered cue-reactivity study Antons et al. (2025), “Cue reactivity towards distal cues in problematic internet use”

    Generic log-in screens can function as cues in diagnostically validated problematic-use groups.

  41. 41 · meta-analysis / rewards Deci, Koestner & Ryan (1999), “A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards”

    Important debate about how external rewards can alter intrinsic motivation.

  42. 42 · motivational theory Higgins (1997), “Beyond pleasure and pain”

    Regulatory focus: promotion and prevention organise different kinds of wanting.

  43. 43 · motivated cognition Kunda (1990), “The case for motivated reasoning”

    Desire can shape which reasons feel available and persuasive.

  44. 44 · literary theory René Girard (1961), Deceit, Desire and the Novel

    Mediated or mimetic desire: the model can organise the object's value.

  45. 45 · social theory Thorstein Veblen (1899), The Theory of the Leisure Class

    Conspicuous consumption and status display as social communication.

  46. 46 · sociology Pierre Bourdieu (1979), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

    Taste as classed practice, learned distinction and social positioning.

  47. 47 · cultural theory Sara Ahmed (2004), The Cultural Politics of Emotion

    How feelings circulate through bodies, signs, histories and institutions.

  48. 48 · cultural theory Lauren Berlant (2011), Cruel Optimism

    When an attachment to a desired object makes flourishing harder to reach.

  49. 49 · philosophy of agency Harry Frankfurt (1971), “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”

    First-order desires, second-order volitions and the question of what it means to identify with a desire.

  50. 50 · philosophy Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

    Desire as the striving by which a being persists and becomes intelligible through its powers.

  51. 51 · philosophy Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

    Appetite, deliberation, habituation and the practical formation of character.

  52. 52 · psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1920), Beyond the Pleasure Principle

    A historical attempt to think about repetition, compulsion and the limits of pleasure as a master principle.

  53. 53 · social learning Albert Bandura (1977), Social Learning Theory

    Models, observation, imitation and self-efficacy as routes by which desire and action are learned.

  54. 54 · persuasion Robert Cialdini (1984), Influence

    Social proof, scarcity, authority, reciprocity and commitment as recurring influence principles.

  55. 55 · sociology of intimacy Eva Illouz (2007), Cold Intimacies

    How markets and emotional life can become entangled in modern relationships.

  56. 56 · technology and markets Shoshana Zuboff (2019), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

    A critical account of behavioural prediction, extraction and the commercial shaping of action.

The philosophical and cultural works are not empirical proof for the behavioural claims. They are lenses: ways of asking what a laboratory measure leaves out, who benefits from a norm, and how a private feeling becomes a public economy.