Satisfaction
Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
You receive a package, open it, pull out the packing bubbles, and squeeze one of the little dots, just so, and it yields up a sharp pop.
So satisfying.
You are reading a sentence in a Substack post and the author has left off the last.
Very unsatisfying.
Why?
It might just be me—I mean, it can’t just be me—but have you ever watched videos of machines perfectly harvesting rows of crops, leaving no stalk standing?1 So… satisfying.
This post is a meditation on a feeling that we call “satisfaction,” using the measure and motivate model, which I have been using to build explanations for experiences such as awe and ticklishness.
Ok, in addition to the bubble-popping and harvesting, what else is satisfying? Finishing a corn on the cob with nary a kernel remaining is satisfying. In The Office,2 the team is watching a DVD logo bounce around on the screen, and, almost always, it just misses hitting the corner of the screen, but when it does… so satisfying!
Satisfaction can be had from far more abstract stimuli. I have been reading The Count of Monte Cristo and it seems to me that when one gets to a part of a story in which a villain gets punished—or the star-crossed lovers finally unite or the mystery is solved—the feeling that one experiences is also satisfaction.
Why do these stimuli—superficially different from one another—all generate a feeling of satisfaction?3 What is this sensation measuring?
Here’s a guess. We have beliefs or pictures in our head—I’ll just use the term from cognitive science, “representations”—about some goal state. This could be a completely harvested field, a completely eaten corn on the cob, the syntax of a complete sentence, or the lovers’ destiny to be together. Generally, we have good intuitions about what something will look like or sound like or be like when it’s done. Even if it’s not something we’re intimately familiar with—a field of scallions, say—we get a lot of help because we are intimately familiar with visual properties such as symmetry, repetition, uniformity, and closure.4 We know what a completely harvested field looks like because we’re expecting it to be homogeneous.
Further, we often have a pretty good guess about how sure we are that the state we are observing matches the goal state. Consider, for instance, one of my favorite examples, crossword puzzles.5 Suppose the last square you’re missing in a puzzle crosses two proper nouns and you don’t know them based on the clues; maybe _ARRY is crossing with GA_E. You might be able to enter the last letter in the puzzle—your best guess of L or B—but you won’t be sure you got it right. In contrast, if the last square crosses SQ_ARE and Q_EEN, you’re going to be very confident when U fill in the last letter. Filling in the last letter when you’re sure is much more satisfying.
There seems to be an additional element to do with efficiency. The harvester is not just getting every stalk, but it’s grabbing them efficiently, without having to retrace any part of the field. Different goals will have different metrics of efficiency. Getting every last kernel of corn is different from getting the last square in the puzzle is different from getting the last bit of fluid—sorry about this—out of a pimple.6
So far, satisfaction seems to be asking the following questions:
Does what you see or hear match your sense of a completed goal?
How confident are you that it’s a good match?
Was the journey from the initial state to the goal state efficient?
There seem to be other parameters that affect how satisfying something is.
If the goal state is hard to reach, that seems to increase the sense of satisfaction. It is more satisfying to complete a Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle than a Monday puzzle. Even though I am a dog person, I like videos of cats navigating tight spaces or obstacle courses. The smaller the space or the more difficult the course, the more satisfying the successful squeezing through the opening or reaching the end without disrupting anything.
Related, if the goal state has taken time to reach after a buildup—possibly because the goal was hard to reach—that also seems to increase satisfaction. There are various bodily functions that could be used here as examples, but I’ll stick to eating (as opposed to elimination or more intimate functions). It feels more satisfying to eat when one has gone hungry for some time than when one has not.
The precision and exactness of the goal state matter, as in the harvest case. Videos in which wood joiners line up joints perfectly are, to me, very satisfying.
So to the three questions above, we add:
Was the goal hard to reach? Did it take a while? (Keep in mind it can still be efficient even if it takes a while.)
Was the match between A) your sense of the goal state and B) what you perceived very precise/exact?
Taken together, these parameters—hard to reach, takes time to reach, precision—imply that the feeling of satisfaction is measuring how confident one is that one has observed a precise/efficient solution to a difficult or pressing problem.
Can’t Get No Satisfaction
The linguistic opposite of satisfying—unsatisfying—is not exactly the inverse. Take the wood joining case. If the parts don’t line up at all, it’s not exactly unsatisfying. It’s much more unsatisfying if the joints nearly line up, but don’t quite. The same is true (for me) for corn or chicken wings. Seeing an uneaten chicken wing isn’t unsatisfying. Seeing one with some meat left on the bone is oddly unsatisfying.
So satisfaction has what seems to be something of an uncanny valley. If the stimulus is far from “right,” then it’s not really satisfying or unsatisfying: it’s just a chicken wing or corn on the cob. But as it gets close to right but just misses, it’s very unsatisfying, and then leaps up to very satisfying as it matches the solution state.
The explanation for this phenomenon is probably similar to the explanation for other uncanny valley effects, which, unfortunately, I confess, eludes me. If I had to guess, as one gets further and further from a good match between one’s sense of the goal state and the actual state, you just don’t see the thing as possibly done. It’s not a candidate to be satisfying because you don’t even recognize it as trying to be at the goal state. So as things diverge, it’s less unsatisfying because your satisfaction system isn’t even bothering to judge whether it’s a good match or not.
Motivation
Now, what is satisfaction motivating?
The first thing to notice about satisfying stimuli is that we seek them. The video about harvesting I linked to above—about agricultural machines—attracted more than one million views within two months after posting. One channel showing pimple popping has more than seven million subscribers and nearly five billion views. Whatever satisfaction is, we can’t get enough of it.
Satisfying stimuli are, in a word, appealing and we have an appetite for viewing them. Generally, stimuli that are rewarding lead us toward some adaptive target. In this case, given that satisfaction seems to relate to efficient solutions of problems, attracting our attention is probably to motivate learning.
It might be useful to distinguish between the sense of satisfaction one gets when one sees or perceives something satisfying—the harvesting case—and the sense of satisfaction one gets when one does something satisfying.7 Completing some task efficiently—perhaps clearing four lines simultaneously in Tetris—is satisfying and seems likely to be evolution’s way of signaling to you that whatever you just did, do that again. I’m rewarding you because you solved some problem effectively and efficiently, so if the problem returns, do the same thing. You’re doing great.
In terms of the former—perceiving something satisfying—many problems have solutions similar to other problems, so learning how to solve vexing problems is useful for solving the next vexing problem that comes along. The feeling of satisfaction is evolution’s way of saying, hey, you are seeing—or hearing or perhaps feeling—a good solution to a problem and should attend to it. In the same way that awe directs attention to something so you can learn from it—there really are holes as big as the Grand Canyon—satisfaction might help you learn how. Here are some ways to harvest a field, join wood, eat a chicken wing…. You should probably pay attention; you might learn something.
REFERENCES
Wagemans, J., Elder, J. H., Kubovy, M., Palmer, S. E., Peterson, M. A., Singh, M., & Von der Heydt, R. (2012). A century of Gestalt psychology in visual perception: I. Perceptual grouping and figure–ground organization. Psychological bulletin, 138(6), 1172.
See 2:15 in the linked video for very satisfying scallion harvesting. The video contains other similarly satisfying examples.
Season 4, Episode 5.
oddlysatisfying on Reddit is dedicated to, well, oddly satisfying things.
So-called “Gestalt Psychology” is a good place to look for these perceptual primitives (Wagemeans et al., 2012).
I hesitated to use this example because it’s gross, but many people do seem to find the “perfectly” popped pimple very satisfying. The perfection sems to lie in the rapid and complete expression of the fluid, which seems to be consistent with the claim here, that there is a representation of a goal state (all fluid gone) and efficiency (speed).
I thank fellow fossil, Josh, for highlighting this issue. Having said that, I’m not sure it’s going to be useful to draw this distinction. It seems like a good unified theory of satisfaction should bridge the self/other divide.
Gracias.