REDEFINING

MOTIVATION AS
HUMAN
PURPOSE
WHO WE ARE
NEW WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT PEOPLE






By Professor Steven Reiss, Ph.D

09/04/2013 Redefining Motivation as Human Purpose | Psychology Today
www.psychologytoday.com/blog/who-we-are/200912/redefining-motivation-human-purpose 1/2
The behaviorist construct of drive is basically just a renaming of Freud's
construct of psychic energy. Behaviorists artificially induced motivational
energy in nearly every experiment they conducted with animals;
consequently, they produced a science of how very hungry animals
behave. f eating were all we did, behaviorism would be much more
relevant than it is.
Millions of fans will watch the 2010 Rose Bowl football game between
Ohio State and Oregon. Different people will have very different matters
on their mind before the game, and they will run off to do a diverse range
of activities after they watch the game. Some fans will be thinking about
romance, others about their careers, and still others about politics. f all
the fans were put on a diet and lost 15% body weight prior to the game --
much like all animals in behaviorist studies -- the only thing on their minds
would be meals and eating. By inducing hunger in their animals prior to
experiments, behaviorists eliminated from their studies the single most
important variable affecting human behavior, namely, purpose (what
people want to do.)
Human beings have automatically occurring purposes, goals, and intents
that repeat periodically over and over throughout the lifespan. At the
dawn of scientific psychology, instinct theorists suggested taxonomies of
human goals. Recently, my colleagues and scientifically derived and
validated 16 human needs, which is similar to previous taxonomies. A
"need" is a motive that can be satisfied only temporarily; that is, needs
determine a person's life goals. The 16 human needs predict significant
real-world behavior much better than most psychologists realize. (See my
previous post on the 16 human needs.)
One of Freud's greatest mistakes was to think of motivation as energy
rather than as purpose. f you want to understand somebody's behavior,
ask the person what he/she is trying to accomplish, not what happened
when he/she was three years old. Knowledge of an individual's
purpose predicts the individual's future behavior in real life situations,
while recalled childhood experiences predict almost nothing.



New ways of thinking about people
by Steven Reiss, Ph.D.
Redefining Motivation as Human Purpose
Psychology of Human Purpose
Published on December 9, 2009 by Steven Reiss, Ph.D. in Who We Are
believe that a flawed philosophy of science has led psychologists to pay inadequate attention to
human purpose, which think is the single most important factor for understanding and predicting
behavior. We have created a psychology of what happens in laboratories. n the real world, you have
to know what people are trying to accomplish in order to understand them and especially to predict
how they will behave in the future.
Sigmund Freud's constructs "psychic determinism" and "psychic energy" laid the basis for a
psychology that pays little attention to consciously determined purpose. Freud's construct of psychic
energy is a vague idea. Where does the energy comes from? After party and release the energy to
socialize, how does the energy come back motivating me to socialize again? What kinds of psychic
energy are there and how do they relate to each other? The construct of psychic energy is at the
heart of Freud's mechanical, cause and effect analysis of the human psyche. This construct is invalid
because motivation is purpose, not psychological energy.
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The Myths of ntrinsic-
Extrinsic Motivation
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versus Abnormal
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Steven Reiss is Emeritus Professor
of Psychology and Psychiatry at The
Ohio State University.
more...
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adolescents and for girls. How come?
Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D.

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09/04/2013 Redefining Motivation as Human Purpose | Psychology Today
www.psychologytoday.com/blog/who-we-are/200912/redefining-motivation-human-purpose 2/2
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Tags: amp nbsp, cause and effect, constructs, determinism, football game, human psyche,
human purpose, ohio state, philosophy of science, psychic energy, psychologists, sigmund
freud, single most important factor, vague idea



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