Appetative and Consumatory Behaviours

[chrdoesscience]

There's a line of thinking in ethology (and more rarely in psychology in general) that states that all behaviours can be broken down into appetative or consumatory behaviours. Consumatory behaviours are pretty much any behaviour that is an endpoint of an action, like eating or sex. Appetative behaviours are any actions that lead to an endpoint,

Comments

[unicorn_magic]

why was that distinction between the two types of behaviors made in the first place?

[chrdoesscience]

I'm not entirely certain; we didn't really go into the history of it... But in psychology, there used to be a lot of resistance towards the idea that genes controlled much, if any, behaviour, and all behaviour was thought to be entirely learned. (This idea became very popular after WWII, for obvious reasons.) So if you subscribe to that philosophy, it makes sense that all activities have to lead up to a direct, explicit payoff. (So appetative behaviours are everything leading up to the payoff, and consummatory behaviours are the payoff itself.) And there was some evidence to support it, like with courtship and feeding behaviours, but it really doesn't explain as much as it was originally hoped.
This idea also went along pretty well with operant conditioning and tabula rasa, which were also pretty prominent at the time.