The Action-Site: A Neglected Unit of Analysis—Theoretical Construction of the ACE Emotional Experience Model

There is a systematic gap between intention and behavior: intention explains on average only 28% of the variance in behavior, and experimentally induced changes in intention correspond to only small-to-medium changes in behavior. This article argues that the primary source of this gap is not insufficient intention strength, but a mismatch between the unit of analysis adopted in explanation and the unit in which action actually occurs. To address this, the article establishes the action-site—a behavior–psychological unit anchored by the intentional object and characterized by experiential continuity—as a new unit of analysis. It proposes three immediate experiential conditions constituting the internal experiential structure of the action-site: autonomy (the immediate experience of choice, definition, and exit rights), confirmation (the immediate feedback signal regarding whether the current step matches expectations), and enjoyment (a process-approach motivation composed of three mutually compensatory sources: comfort, interest, and meaning). The three conditions are mutually independent and irreducible to one another, forming pairwise bidirectional supply loops, with supply subject to marginal diminishing returns. When one condition is absent, action is temporarily sustained through focus shifting; when focus shifting fails and the experiential tone undergoes an abrupt change, the action-site terminates, and the actor enters a new site—this is cross-task and cross-scale compensation. When the deficit remains unrepaired over the long term and the site is no longer re-entered, action breaks down in three distinguishable ways: resistance-type, disorientation-type, and depletion-type. The main contributions of this article are: proposing the action-site as an intermediate unit of analysis; characterizing the dynamic mechanisms among the three conditions within this unit, thereby explaining several phenomena that existing theories have difficulty addressing; providing new operational definitions for each of the three conditions, among which the exit-right dimension of autonomy, the path-signal reconceptualization of confirmation, and the meaning interface of enjoyment have not been addressed in the existing literature; and shifting the attribution of action failure from trait-based accounts to systemic diagnosis. ACE is a model of the action-site: it explains the experiential structure within the site and its consequences for action, as well as why compensation occurs, but it does not explain which new site is entered after site termination.