The Feeling of Learning and the Joy of Liking

Immeasurable in richness and overwhelming in immensity, the scale of New Media is of the grandest kind. To manage the deluge of incoming information and the trove of existing content, New Media firms rely on user generated ratings to optimize browsing and enhance search (Huberman, Romero, and Wu 2009). Users’ “Likes” and “Dislikes” for stylish clothing and entertaining videos enable firms such as Threadless, Amazon, and Netflix to manage their content as well as recommend products based on similarities between users’ history of preference ratings (Balabanovic and Shoham 1997). Understanding what motivates people to express their preferences by liking and disliking products and content online has important implications for New Media. Although users have social motives of sharing their preferences (Back et al. 2010; Gosling, Gaddis, and Vazire 2007; Toubia and Stephen 2013) and instrumental incentives of customizing their browsing experience when they express their preferences online (Herlocker et al. 1999; Herlocker, Konstan, and Riedl 2000), we propose that people evaluate their preferences for another reason – the feeling of learning about their own preferences. Specifically, we posit that people undergo a process of self-discovery when they express their preferences, and they derive an inherent sense of pleasure from this self-discovery process. As such, the more people feel they are learning about their preferences, the greater the pleasure they experience from liking and disliking. Moreover, relative to other judgment tasks not involving evaluating one’s preferences, liking and disliking evokes the highest enjoyment.