psychological hedonism
Noun
Meaning
psychological hedonism (uncountable)
The view that the ultimate motive for all voluntary human action is the desire to experience pleasure or to avoid pain.
Synonyms
Examples
According to psychological hedonism, the ultimate egoistic motive is to gain good feelings of pleasure and avoid bad feelings of pain.
Contributions to modern psychology Psychoanalysis Whether or not Sigmund Freud was a psychological egoist, his concept of the pleasure principle borrowed much from psychological egoism and psychological hedonism in particular.
Jeremy Bentham (1789) Bentham explicitly described what types and qualities of pain and pleasure exist, and how human motives are singularly explained using psychological hedonism.
Some psychologists explain empathy in terms of psychological hedonism.
Thus, behaviorism uses but does not strictly support psychological hedonism over other understandings of the ultimate drive of human behavior.
Using pleasure and pain to control behavior means behaviorists assumed the principles of psychological hedonism could be applied to predicting human behavior.