Wanting, liking, and the sociology of motivation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Despite being a central topic, current theories of motivation in sociology remain underdeveloped. This paper supplements existing sociological theories on motivation with insights from affective and cognitive neuroscience to address this issue. The resulting sociological affective model of motivation treats affect as an independent force that sometimes coordinates with cognition while taking charge at other times. Drawing on recent work in the neuroscience of motivation and reward, the paper shows how two affective mechanisms—wanting and liking—can shed light on various behavioral outcomes of interest while allowing for sharper theorizing of key distinctions that need clarification in the literature. By examining the distinctive contribution of each process, the paper reveals a proactive, desire‐driven agent often overlooked by prevailing sociological models emphasizing a reactive actor responding creatively and deliberately when internal meanings and external cues are incongruent. The paper concludes by outlining the broader implications of this synthetic affective model of motivation for sociology.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it