Besides Charles Cooley and Emile Durkheim, most classical sociological theorists looked askance at emotions. The Cartesian duality that sees rationality, reason, and logic as masculine and emotion and feeling as feminine was alive and well. I’ve tackled the idea that this is an untenable position here and here, so no need to dive too deeply into the basic arguments. Instead, I propose asking and answering the logical followup to that essay: what is affective action?

Perhaps the most explicit statement on affective action came from Max Weber, whose outline of sociology famously included a typology of action that included traditional, affectual, substantive-rationality, and instrumental rationality. Weber (1978:25) had this to say about affectual action:

Purely affectual behavior also stands on the borderline of what can be considered “meaningfully” oriented, and often it, too, goes over the line. It may, for instance, consist in an uncontrolled reaction to some exceptional stimulus. It is a case of sublimation when affectually determined action occurs in the form of conscious release of emotional tension. When this happens it is usually well on the road to rationali­zation in one or the other or both of the above senses.

The orientation of value-rational action is distinguished from the affectual type by its clearly self-conscious formulation of the ultimate values governing the action and the consistently planned orientation of its detailed course to these values. At the same time the two types have a common element, namely that the meaning of the action does not lie in the achievement of a result ulterior to it, but in carrying out the specific type of action for its own sake. Action is affectual if it satisfies a need for revenge, sensual gratification, devotion, contemplative bliss, or for working off emotional tensions (irrespective of the level of sublima­tion).

Much of sociology’s handling of emotions can be read from this quote. For one, there is a healthy skepticism that affective action is social action, or oriented towards others. In part, this is because it is reactive, impulsive, and, especially, lacking in cognition. Humans are special, as the story we’ve told ourselves goes, because we have big beautiful brains, language, and can control these passions! Affect, then, for Weber is something to be channeled into substantive or value rationality. The pursuit of ultimate ends like salvation or truth sublimates our base, animal reactions into human endeavors.

Of course, this is an ideal type, which means Weber is aware that this is a heuristic tool for understanding why empirical cases diverge from expected instrumental motives. But, we can set that aside as the point stands: sociologists struggle with making sense of the way feeling, thinking, and doing relates to each other. So, back to our initial question: what would a theory of affective action that is social, look like? In this essay, I will talk through the two different forms or types of pleasure and then introduce the idea of (affective) action tendencies.

Two Types of Pleasure

Affect, for better or worse, is tied tightly to pleasure and pain broadly defined. It is more “primitive” than cognition, rooted in two drives that all organisms share: approach and aversion (Lang and Bradley 2010). In mammals, this dual system of affective motivation remains intact, but more complicated because of our enhanced cognitive capacity and (typically) social nature. We still approach or avoid for the sake of homeostatic drives (hunger) and sensorimotor experiences (pain), but to this, we have affective systems that evolved in response to environmental pressures, social complexity, and the like (Panksepp 1998). I’ve discussed much of this in more detail here and here. For my purposes, the central point is that one of these affective systems, what Panksepp calls SEEKING, is innate to all mammals. It is a dopaminergic system that is located in the midbrain, but which has dense and numerous neural pathways leading “up” from its subcortical architecture to the grey matter that we believe makes us special. Moreover, rather than satiate or scratch our itch, when we pursue things that stimulate the SEEKING system, mammals will self-stimulate (Berridge 2018, 2023). Like a cocaine user that uses their entire stash in search of that initial high they felt, rats, apes, and other mammals will keep scratching because the pursuit is pleasurable.

Often called wanting, this system is a tonic or ceaseless motor. Its evolved function, in theory, is to drive neonates to find their primary caretaker for the sake of survival. It compels us to keep track of our mom or dad as they move about the environment; to follow them, like ducklings; and to become hypervigilant when we lose sight of them. The system is elastic, like all affective systems, and intimately tied to learning. Any object – physical, social, or abstract – can become something we SEEK. Our phones become things we keep close track of, for instance. We reach for them, unreflectively, when we first wake up, when we are in a meeting and bored, when we are driving. And, in the movement of reaching and touching, and even the very thinking about those movements fires dopamine and dopamine is affectively rewarding. It is pleasurable.

This type of pleasure is not the type of pleasure that sociologists often caricature as their strawman against simplistic economic theories of action or Freudian specters of psychological action. A separate neural system, called the liking system and tied to the release of opioids upon consumption or manipulation of the object we want, is the source of hedonic enjoyment. It is partially dissociable, neurally, and research has shown that while the two often work in sequence, the two operate apart in many cases. Addiction is the most obvious example (Berridge 2023). Here, intense craving drives actors to find their fix, but the fix only weakly triggers the liking circuitry; in many cases, it doesn’t trigger it at all. People feel no pleasure. But, their dopamine fires intensely during the craving stage. Conversely, evidence for disinterested experiences exists (Chatterjee and Vartanian 2016). When “consuming” art, for instance, the cycling we see between the wanting and liking systems observed in, say, eating a steak, are absent and only the hedonic pleasure spots fire.

What this all suggests is that there are two types of pleasure, if we were to oversimplify things. One is predicated on all the elements associated with wanting things. Curiosity, anticipation, preparation, and so forth are all things that can be pleasurable in theory and practice, while pleasure in the colloquial sense of the term is its own domain. They can be tied together in many ways, but distinct enough to draw a clear line between them. Sociology, then, gets affective action all wrong in a couple of ways that this shift in conceptualization. (1) Affect drives action more than sociologists imagine, in part because cognition is impossible without it and very much caused – either commanded or controlled – by our subcortical affective systems. (2) Unreflective motor responses may be totally kneejerk and thus reactive, but emotional consciousness is still consciousness even without cognitive awareness. Perception, attention, labeling, retrieval and storage of memories, and decision-making are all affective processes as much if not more so than cognitive. So, Weber is partially correct: some affective action is purely reactive and, thus, perhaps not social in the sense he means. But, most affective action is. (3) Wanting is proactive, and even when habitual or routinized, deliberate in the sense that it is controlled, guided, and intentional. (4) Finally, proactive affective action is sometimes about prediction, drawing on a schema or mental representations that suggest expected rewards, but prediction and pursuit are not tightly coupled in reality. A lot of what we do is in spite of predictive models. Indeed, learning the value and salience of objects is affective rewarding – that is, generating, reinforcing, or updating schema is a piece of affective action.

Below, I expand on this to show the tendencies this proactive model of affective action suggests.

Affective Action Tendencies

Borrowing from Frijda’s (2006) use of the term action-tendencies to describe emotions, I would argue that there are four forms or ways that affective action disposes us to act: curiosity, hedonic pleasure, learning, and desire. This is to say our body and mind are predisposed to act, without prompting or environmental stimuli, to aimlessly search an environment for no specific or cognitively deliberate goal; to engage more deeply with unexpected, unplanned pleasurable objects or activities; to want to understand and explain the environment for no reason besides the fact that there is pleasure in learning; and, because we make predictions about things that will reward us and we purposefully seek that which we desire. The first two forms are purely unreflective impulsions, to borrow Martin’s (2011) terminology. Because our SEEKING or wanting circuits are tonic – continuously firing dopaminergic systems – we do not need to be “motivated” cognitively to work to stave off boredom, manage anxiety, quickly find thrill in cheap thrills, or simply ‘kill time.’ We also do not study this behavior much, mostly because we presume it is outside of the bounds of sociological analysis as solitary action (Cohen 2015). Perhaps, implicitly, it is also because the true sociological roots of this sort of behavior stem from the way our local and global environments shape and channel these tendencies. Everyone is curious, but who is encouraged to develop curiosity, how and when that curiosity manifests, the number, density, and frequency of things that occupy our curiosities vary based on a host of social factors. The cynical sociological response would be: well, of course, curiosity is just a function of things we already know like race or gender, and therefore, why study the behaviors when we can just study the forces? Yet, these behaviors preoccupy a significant amount of time and can become obsessions and addictions that remain interesting above and beyond the simplistic sociological wisdom that inequality is the answer to everything (see, for instance, Benzecry 2011), and, like many less sensational and exciting topics, remain features of society and therefore objects of a science of society.

This point may be most true of hedonic pleasures, which are far beyond most sociological inquiry. For sociology, the world is a dour, relentlessly cold-blooded, horrible, exploitative place. When we zoom out and see the effects of race or class or gender inequities, how could it not be anything but? There is no reason to not point out injustices but without the balance of all the good, the joys, the pleasures, what sort of science are we invested in? What’s worse, where I would see small joys in this activity or that, the poison of Marxist “theory” in the discipline makes others see exploitation, indoctrination, and oppression. The logical question would be: what joy, pleasure, and happiness would socialism or whatever its equivalent bring? I digress.

The other two tendencies can be both reflectively and unreflectively activated. Most people reading this essay, if they are still reading it, are reflectively committed to learning. Academics, scientists, theologians, sports and aesthetic fanatics, journalists, and the like are learning addicts. They crave knowledge. But, we are all disposed to learn and find dopaminergic joy in learning. It is the reason we pick up puzzles or magazines in waiting rooms and finding tiny moments of pleasure in fidgeting with these things. It is why we take pride in figuring out our way around a new city, or trying new restaurants and cataloging those we like and dislike, or mastering a new device or technology we purchase.

Of course, we are also motivated, proactively, to pursue the things we like or think we like. We make a reservation in advance to take our partner out on a date, considering things like favorite foods, the level of romanticism we want, other activities we might tether to the dinner, and so forth. We go to said restaurant, aware to some degree of what we might order. How aware varies, a lot. A steakhouse, for instance, delimits the choices to some degree, but I would guess that most people go there with a particular steak in mind, the sorts of sides they like, and even the alcoholic beverage they plan to drink. Others, maybe along for the ride, know that the steakhouse will have other options like lobster, and prepare themselves accordingly. Still, others may decide to go in for the gametime decision. Nevertheless, the goals are set and, once there, can be changed, but usually with some reflection. Desire, as a proactive affective tendency, is never purely rational in the utilitarian sense. One might be having such a good time at the dinner that the previously unplanned desire to have dessert arises organically. Seeing another table get a dessert or acquiescing to one’s company’s desires.

An arbitrary, low-stakes example, admittedly, pales in comparison to selecting a date for the prom, choosing a college major, pulling the lever in a voting booth, getting up for a religious service or sleeping in, and so forth. But, they all reflect the desires we have. People do not drive aimlessly to a voting place, walk in, and throw a proverbial dart at the board. Their decisions reflect a long set of intermediate chains of actions shaped powerfully by affect. That they are motivated to even go vote also says a lot about their desires as much as not going to vote speaks volumes about the disenfranchised, the lazy, the apathetic, the uninformed, or the unmotivated voter.

Tendencies, of course, are only as good or useful as impulsions in the way they manifest into actual action, or what I would call affective action repertoires. In the next post, I will dig deeper into the cluster or constellation of responses that are affective in nature even when they are intimately tied to cognitive processes.