A fundamental requirement for truly understanding human motivation is having a detailed hierarchical taxonomy of human motivation that allows us to move from the broadest of human motives to fairly specific goals. This hierarchical structure is both theoretically important as it represents the relationships among different motives, as well as empirically important, as it provides a principled method for measuring motives at different levels of abstractness or concreteness.
Over the years my colleagues and I have developed two detailed, hierarchical taxonomies of human motives. In our first foray, Addy Chulef, David Walsh and I created a detailed hierarchical taxonomy of 135 motives:
- Chulef, A., Read, S. J., & Walsh, D. A. (2001). A Hierarchical Taxonomy of Human Goals. Motivation and Emotion, 25, 191-232.
We recently followed up on that paper by looking at a larger sample of 165 goals, with a larger sample of respondents. The resulting work has been published as:
- Talevich, J.R., Read, S. J., Walsh, D. A., Iyer, R., Chopra, G. (2017). Toward a comprehensive taxonomy of human motives. PLOS ONE 12(2): e0172279. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0172279
A figure of the resulting hierarchical structure can be seen below.
This taxonomy is influencing our work on computational models of motivation, risky-decision-making, and human personality, as it helps to identify the motives/goals that are relevant in different contexts, so that we can accurately measure and model them.
We also plan to use this taxonomy to study decision making in a variety of domains, such as an EMA study of everyday social behavior, and in terms of people’s judgments of the impact of various decisions on important life goals (Goal Impact).