Abstract
A major success in personality has been the development of a consensual structure of traits. However, much less progress has been made on the structure of an equally important aspect of human psychology: motives. We present an empirically and theoretically structured hierarchical taxonomy of 161 motives gleaned from a literature review from McDougall to the present and based on the cluster analysis of similarity judgments among these 161 motives, a broader sampling of motives than previous work. At the broadest level were: Meaning, Communion, and Agency. These divided into nine clusters: Morality & Virtue, Religion & Spirituality, Self-Actualization, Avoidance, Social Relating, Family, Health, Mastery & Competence, and Financial & Occupational Success. Each divided into more concrete clusters to form 5 levels. We discuss contributions to research on motives, especially recent work on goal systems, and the aiding of communication and systematization of research. Finally, we compare the taxonomy to other motive organizations.
Highlights
Goals and motives are fundamental to human behavior: they play a central role in its enactment and in our understanding of why people do what they do
This taxonomy is a powerful tool for identifying the “right variables” to measure for a limitless range of investigations into human motivation
This starts at the highest level of the taxonomy, which shows that meaning motives are distinct from agency and communion motives—a new finding in the literature
Summary
Goals and motives are fundamental to human behavior: they play a central role in its enactment and in our understanding of why people do what they do They have long been considered essential aspects of human personality (e.g., [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]). A variety of different motive lists and small-scale taxonomies have been proposed, psychologists have not yet developed a comprehensive, empirically based structure of human motives. This is unfortunate because a common conceptual framework systematizes and integrates knowledge; it greatly advances research and its application by increasing the field’s ability to understand, predict, and influence its object of study—in our case, human behavior. The result is that research is facilitated and the pace of theory development is accelerated
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