Research

In the middle of the 90s, in a personal crisis, the psychologist unexpectedly found out that science has hardly found any answers on the question "Who am I?". From then on Steven Reiss dedicated his creativity to this subject.

In a row of nine big research periods with over 8000 men and women all together, Reiss explored which psychological "final motives" - which he later called life motives - drive humans in the end.

Reiss defines life motives as motive dimensions which summarise different, but similar motives and also work as intrinsic motivation: They are elementary "final motives" and the purposes of our action. We experience the fulfilment of individual needs, which arise from the respective life motives, as an end in itself: They alone make us happy and content.

Backgrounds

Which motives are therefore psychologically so important that one can call them "final goals" or "final motives"?

For Reiss the individual assessment of each of the 16 life motives is the key to not only understanding human behaviour, but also to be able to predict human behaviour. The Reiss-Profile illustrates the respective basic aims and values of a person and allows a more comprehensive (self)-understanding.

As Aristoteles already said, motives can be distinguished between means and purposes, whereas means serve only as "intermediatory" intersteps, to get what you want. They motivate only in this respect when they create or allow something else. In the end, it is about all basic behaviour patterns and actions with which one is - according to the specialist term - intrinsically motivated: you do something for its own sake - and nothing else.

The theory of 16 life motives is formulated very extensively. The decisive factor would be the "complexity postulate", more exactly: the "complexity reduction postulate": like chemists can lead back all materials on elementary components, all psychologically significant motives exist practically of a combination of 16 basic values or final values.

The theoretical fundamentals:
1. The 16 life motives are universally valid: They describe all important, from people as intrinsically valuable and meaningful experienced actions as an end in itself.
2. Motivated human behaviour can be led back on either single life motives or as a combination of 16 life motives.