ABSTRACT
Emotion and motivation The classic science fiction depiction of androids such as C3PO in Star Wars and Data in Star Trek: Next Generation is of superhuman intelligent beings able to speak many languages and store vast amounts of information. Nevertheless, such intelligence does not enable them to fully understand the eccentric behaviors of their human colleagues who constantly place themselves in danger, fall in love, and tell jokes. These androids lack emotions. Reading between the lines of these popular depictions we might conclude various things. We might conclude that emotions are ‘what makes us human, force us to make illogical decisions, and that we could do without them if redesigned from scratch. Needless to say, these conclusions are incorrect. Emotional processes have a long evolutionary history and are by no means unique to humans. What may ‘make us human’ is our ability to consciously reflect on our emotions and share them socially via our language and culture, but not our emotions per se. If a new organism were redesigned from scratch it would still be helpful to have early warning routines for danger and fast-acting mechanisms that prepare it to fight or flee. It would still be helpful to devote greater attention to stimuli that are necessary for survival. These are all considered functions of emotions. Finally, emotions do sometimes lead to decisions that may not have occurred via more deliberative reasoning but this, by itself, does not make them illogical. For instance, in cooperative games with another person we often make decisions based on social values of fairness rather than maximizing individual financial gain (e.g. Sanfey, Rilling, Aaronson, Nystron, & Cohen, 2003). This is not necessarily illogical – there may be good survival reasons, honed by evolution, that promote such cooperation. For humans, many social stimuli and situations are rewarding (e.g. imitation, cooperation) or punishing (e.g. social exclusion). As such, both social stimuli and non-social stimuli are likely to have been selected as having survival value in our evolutionary past.
