iserith
Magic Wordsmith
Sometimes?
It really depends on the social milieu and the individuals, doesn't it; people are neither perfectly rational actors that respond to incentives and disincentives like machines coldly calculating the utility, nor are they Pavlovian dogs that will salivate immediately upon the ringing of the XP bell.
There are certainly people that view D&D as some sort of ... competition, I guess? How do they maximize the benefit to the character in the minimum amount of time?
But I don't know that everyone does. Others view it as an opportunity to get together and have fun playing a game, and creating a shared fiction; the character's progress is ancillary to the creation of the shared fiction.
Of course. People will vary. But I think it's a reasonable expectation to have as DM that you're more likely to get what you incentivize. That's especially true if the DM explains this thinking to the players directly. Which is why for most of my campaigns, I give XP for combat and social interaction and there's almost never any treasure after a fight. You have to poke around and explore for that. This creates an incentive to engage in all three pillars. (You'll almost never see my players try to loot the dead compared to other groups. I don't like that well-known phase of play so I don't incentivize it.)
Given the huge amount of emphasis placed on combat in most D&D games, I'm not sure that having characters slightly less likely to believe that combat is both the alpha and omega of all problem solving is a bad thing; I think a better question is, "Do traditional XP systems overly incentivize D&D's predisposition to cause players to think that every session is just combats loosely joined together by thin bits of narrative?"
I make no judgment as to whether combat is a good or bad thing in the abstract. It's going to depend on the campaign. But the rules set on its own certainly does suggest combat is the cause of and solution to all of life's problems (channeling Homer). That's particularly true of standard XP, especially if the DM is not granting XP for noncombat challenges (DMG, p. 261).