Kent Berridge

Who they are

Kent Berridge is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Michigan, where he has spent much of his career mapping the neural circuitry of reward. His name is most closely associated with a single finding: that wanting something and liking it are produced by different systems in the brain. Dopamine, long treated in both scientific and popular writing as the brain's pleasure chemical, turns out on his evidence to govern something narrower, the drive to pursue a reward, which he and his colleagues call incentive salience. The separate system that produces actual pleasure, hedonic impact, depends instead on a much smaller and more fragile set of circuits, including sites in the nucleus accumbens shell that Berridge's lab has mapped in detail.

The finding grew out of work with Terry Robinson on what happens to rats whose dopamine is destroyed almost entirely. The animals stopped seeking out food, to the point of starving beside it, while their pleasure reactions to a drop of sugar water on the tongue stayed intact. That gap between pursuit and pleasure became the basis of the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction, first proposed with Robinson in 1993 and revisited in a thirty-year retrospective in 2025.

Berridge's own description of the asymmetry between the two systems, quoted in Adam Alter's Irresistible, has become one of the more widely cited lines in popular writing about compulsive technology use: wanting, he says, is "much more robust and big and broad and powerful. Liking is anatomically tiny and fragile." He has been explicit, including in the 2025 review, that the theory was built for drug addiction and extended only cautiously to behaviours such as gambling and binge eating. It was never extended by its authors to apps or social media, a distinction often lost when the finding travels outside neuroscience.

Key papers

Berridge has not published a solo-authored book. His single book credit is as co-editor, with Morten L. Kringelbach, of an academic collection on the neuroscience of pleasure, an edited volume of contributions from many researchers, not a book he wrote himself. His actual influence runs almost entirely through journal papers.

Robinson, T. E., & Berridge, K. C. (1993), "The neural basis of drug craving: An incentive-sensitization theory of addiction," Brain Research Reviews, 18(3), 247-291. The paper that proposed incentive-sensitization: that repeated drug exposure can make the wanting system progressively more reactive to drug-associated cues, independent of pleasure.

Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (1998), "What is the role of dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience?," Brain Research Reviews, 28(3), 309-369. The paper that formalised the wanting/liking dissociation as a general account of reward.

Robinson, T. E., & Berridge, K. C. (2025), "The Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction 30 Years On," Annual Review of Psychology, 76, 29-58. A retrospective that corrects some of the theory's more common misreadings, including the assumption that liking necessarily declines as wanting rises.

Edited volume: Kringelbach, M. L., & Berridge, K. C. (Eds.) (2010), Pleasures of the Brain, Oxford University Press. An edited academic collection on the neuroscience of pleasure across species.

Key ideas

The wanting/liking dissociation: pursuit of a reward and the pleasure of it are generated by different, unevenly sized brain systems.

Wanting can rise through sensitisation without liking rising to match it, which is why a rising engagement metric is not evidence of enjoyment.

His own formulation: wanting is "much more robust and big and broad and powerful. Liking is anatomically tiny and fragile."

The theory was built for drug addiction and extended cautiously to gambling and binge eating. Its authors never extended it to apps or social media.

Concepts on this site

wanting versus liking, his central finding, developed jointly with Terry Robinson

variable rewards

behavioral addiction

operant conditioning

Find them elsewhere

Faculty page and Google Scholar profile confirmed via his University of Michigan department listing and a Scholar profile verified at umich.edu that links his own lab site. No X, Bluesky or LinkedIn account could be confirmed as his

Checked 2026-09-10. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.

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