Incentive Relativity

Helen saw a picture of an attractive man in an online dating page and is happy that he accepted to meet her in a coffee house. As he arrives, Helen feels disappointed because the picture posted online does not reflect the current looks of the person. Is Helen’s disappointment caused by his current looks or by the expectation she developed after seeing his picture? Tom used to like sweets, but after being treated for surgery-related pain, he developed an opioid addiction. Now, whenever he is having ice cream all he can think of is going home and taking a few pills. Has Tom lost his sweet tooth or does anticipating an opioid high make him lose his appetite for that ice cream he used to like so much? These two examples illustrate the fact that in addition to its absolute value, an incentive’s value may depend on how it compares to other incentives that were expected to occur (as it happened to Helen) or are expected to occur in the near future (as in Tom’s situation). Incentive relativity refers to a distortion in the absolute value of an incentive when the incentive occurs in the presence of expectancies of different value. Incentive relativity is connected to a variety of psychological processes, including expectancy, motivation, emotion, and memory. To illustrate its relevance, imagine living surrounded by people who can only evaluate incentives by their absolute value. In such a society, the same outcome would have the same emotional impact regardless of prior experience. Two people losing a thousand dollars in a Las Vegas casino would have a similar emotional response whether one of them is a successful lawyer in a Manhattan firm and the other an unemployed worker. Incentive relativity may allow the lawyer to remember the casino experience as exciting, while the jobless worker would feel emotionally devastated. Similarly, a wave of public protest against government decisions can be described in terms of “relative deprivation,” that is, the experience of being deprived of something a person feels entitled to receive. Incentive relativity can also interfere with our ability to empathize with friends when we see their problem from our perspective, rather than theirs, or lead us to underestimate or overestimate our resources and abilities because we have inaccurate expectations of what we can achieve. The pervasive influence of incentive relativity in daily life makes it relevant to understand the conditions, mechanisms, and neural machinery that make such comparisons possible.