Keynote Speaker: Geoff MacDonald, PhD
Wanting more than just safety: The strength of reward in motivating social behaviour
I was very honoured to have been invited to speak at SITAR and very much enjoyed giving the talk and interacting with the warm and interesting people at the conference. The talk itself focused on a line of work in my lab examining the role of social reward processes in romantic relationships.
In essence, I argued that social psychologists have been heavily focused on the ways that the risk of rejection (i.e., social threat) causes people to hold back from investing themselves emotionally in their relationships. While I believe this is very true, it’s also true that across domains and species, the regulation of behaviour involves sensitivity both to threats and rewards. As such, we should expect people to regulate behaviour not just around feelings of safety, but also feelings of desire. In particular, my lab argues that intimacy and closeness is perhaps the fundamental reward of relationships and detecting opportunities for reward should motivate approach behaviour. That is, whereas a lack of threat makes people feel like it is safe to invest, it is the presence of rewards that should make people want to invest.
One line of work I discussed is my former student Stephanie Spielmann’s work on holding on to feelings for ex-partners. Stephanie has shown that people are most likely to have lingering feelings for an ex when they feel their current or future relationships lack potential for reward, but returning to the ex would bring reward. Perceptions of threat from current, future, or past partners had little to do with these dynamics. Indeed, if threat was the central motivating force, you would expect little emotional attachment to exes who had been rejecting. Instead, Stephanie’s results suggest that reward is fundamental enough to satisfying the need to belong that if reward is lacking in one relationship then people will go looking for it in another relationship, including ex-partners.
Another line of work I discussed is work I’ve conducted with Judith Gere. We collected a large sample of individuals in relationships allowing us to conduct a high powered test of the relative influences of social threats and rewards on the process of commitment in romantic relationships. As predicted, we found that reward was a strong and consistent predictor of commitment and all its components (satisfaction, investment, and quality of alternatives). Social threat was actually a weak predictor of commitment because, although people who worried about rejection from their partners were less satisfied (leading to lower commitment), they were also more invested (leading to higher commitment). These data also suggested that reward and threat processes are tied to individual differences in adult attachment. Avoidant attachment is marked by lower reward perceptions whereas anxious attachment is marked by higher threat perceptions.
Indeed, in another line of work, again conducted in conjunction with Stephanie Spielmann, we showed that the lower reward perceptions of individuals higher in avoidant attachment appear to be a defense against the potential loss of rewards. That is, the low reward perceptions of avoidants only appear in relationships where there is high intimacy (and therefore something to lose), and are associated with avoidants predicting that the loss of rewards would be relatively less hurtful. Overall, then, avoidants appear to defensively underestimate the potential rewards of relationships to protect themselves from the pain of disappointment and loss.
However, the final study I presented, conducted with Terry Borsook, suggests that it is possible to break through avoidants’ defenses. We hired a confederate to be consistently kind or cold in a fast-friends task with participants. We found that avoidant participants who experienced a consistently warm confederate actually reported higher levels of connection than even secure participants.
Overall, then, I hoped I had convinced the audience that the rewards of romantic relationships offer their own powerful and complex dynamic that at least equals the importance of social threat in the regulation of relationship behaviour. Please visit my website (www.macdonaldlab.ca) if you’d like to read any of the papers described here.
I was very honoured to have been invited to speak at SITAR and very much enjoyed giving the talk and interacting with the warm and interesting people at the conference. The talk itself focused on a line of work in my lab examining the role of social reward processes in romantic relationships.
In essence, I argued that social psychologists have been heavily focused on the ways that the risk of rejection (i.e., social threat) causes people to hold back from investing themselves emotionally in their relationships. While I believe this is very true, it’s also true that across domains and species, the regulation of behaviour involves sensitivity both to threats and rewards. As such, we should expect people to regulate behaviour not just around feelings of safety, but also feelings of desire. In particular, my lab argues that intimacy and closeness is perhaps the fundamental reward of relationships and detecting opportunities for reward should motivate approach behaviour. That is, whereas a lack of threat makes people feel like it is safe to invest, it is the presence of rewards that should make people want to invest.
One line of work I discussed is my former student Stephanie Spielmann’s work on holding on to feelings for ex-partners. Stephanie has shown that people are most likely to have lingering feelings for an ex when they feel their current or future relationships lack potential for reward, but returning to the ex would bring reward. Perceptions of threat from current, future, or past partners had little to do with these dynamics. Indeed, if threat was the central motivating force, you would expect little emotional attachment to exes who had been rejecting. Instead, Stephanie’s results suggest that reward is fundamental enough to satisfying the need to belong that if reward is lacking in one relationship then people will go looking for it in another relationship, including ex-partners.
Another line of work I discussed is work I’ve conducted with Judith Gere. We collected a large sample of individuals in relationships allowing us to conduct a high powered test of the relative influences of social threats and rewards on the process of commitment in romantic relationships. As predicted, we found that reward was a strong and consistent predictor of commitment and all its components (satisfaction, investment, and quality of alternatives). Social threat was actually a weak predictor of commitment because, although people who worried about rejection from their partners were less satisfied (leading to lower commitment), they were also more invested (leading to higher commitment). These data also suggested that reward and threat processes are tied to individual differences in adult attachment. Avoidant attachment is marked by lower reward perceptions whereas anxious attachment is marked by higher threat perceptions.
Indeed, in another line of work, again conducted in conjunction with Stephanie Spielmann, we showed that the lower reward perceptions of individuals higher in avoidant attachment appear to be a defense against the potential loss of rewards. That is, the low reward perceptions of avoidants only appear in relationships where there is high intimacy (and therefore something to lose), and are associated with avoidants predicting that the loss of rewards would be relatively less hurtful. Overall, then, avoidants appear to defensively underestimate the potential rewards of relationships to protect themselves from the pain of disappointment and loss.
However, the final study I presented, conducted with Terry Borsook, suggests that it is possible to break through avoidants’ defenses. We hired a confederate to be consistently kind or cold in a fast-friends task with participants. We found that avoidant participants who experienced a consistently warm confederate actually reported higher levels of connection than even secure participants.
Overall, then, I hoped I had convinced the audience that the rewards of romantic relationships offer their own powerful and complex dynamic that at least equals the importance of social threat in the regulation of relationship behaviour. Please visit my website (www.macdonaldlab.ca) if you’d like to read any of the papers described here.