Ногa

Insofar as intensity of pleasures and pains correspond to strength of behavioral responses, evolution should tend to adjust hedonic experiences to yield approximately fitness-maximizing degrees of effort to attain or avoid them. But for human beings, it is generally much easier to lose large amounts of reproductive fitness in a short time than to gain an equivalent amount. Staying in a fire for a few moments can result in permanent injury or death, at the cost of all of an organism’s remaining reproductive opportunities. No single meal or sex act has as much at stake per second—it takes weeks to starve, and the expected number of reproducing children produced per minute of mating is small. Thus, evolution may have had call to generate more intensely motivating-per-second pains in response to injury than pleasures in response to positive events