What Motivates Us?

What Motivates Us?

Deep down, what motivates you? Which aspects of your life are most meaningful to you? What are the goals that drive your behavior?

Professor Steven Reiss has given a unique answer to these questions with a scientific approach. He asked thousands of people from different cultures and diverse backgrounds about their intrinsic motivation. Although scientists have been studying human nature for centuries, Reiss was the first to investigate human goals and psychological needs through large-scale scientific surveys.

The result of Reiss' work was the first system to measure what motivates an individual in a standardized and comprehensive way: The Reiss Motivation Profile® (RMP). This profile assesses 16 core desires that are deeply rooted in human nature and inherent in all of us. These goals are common not only to humans but also to our close relatives in the animal world: food consumption, danger avoidance, peer association, competitiveness and leadership.

What makes RMP the "Science of Motivation®"?

Unlike other tests in the field, Professor Reiss did not use an a priori approach. That is, he did not create a list of motivators in advance and try to measure them. Instead, he developed the RMP with an empirical (scientific) approach. The first draft of the questionnaire contained more than 500 items reflecting all kinds of goals that could motivate someone. After reducing this list to 328 items, he worked on four separate sample groups using a statistical technique called factor analysis to interpret the data. The result was 16 scales, each with eight items. In short, Reiss identified the list of motivators with data, not with his own ideas.

Summary

RMP's reliability and validity studies have undergone rigorous peer review for publication in scientific journals. The test has also been validated by independent researchers in the US as well as Canada, Finland and Poland.