Pincus J David
Leading Indicator Systems & Motivation Metrics, One Franklin Street, Suite 2508, Boston, MA, 02110, USA.
Integr Psychol Behav Sci. 2025 Jan 25;59(1):22. doi: 10.1007/s12124-024-09881-5.
The concept of human goals is central to the study of psychology (i.e., motivation, behavior, and well-being), sociology (i.e., social structure, culture, and dynamics), education (i.e., setting objectives, student motivation, and growth strategies), management (i.e., leadership, employee motivation, productivity, organizational behavior), and economics (i.e., consumer and market behavior, decision making, labor relations), among others. Because it represents the ultimate desired destination that orients decisions and actions, it plays a central role in the theory and practice in these fields. Despite its centrality, the concept lacks theoretical consensus regarding its definition and distinctiveness from related concepts such as needs, motives, and values. Like these concepts, the goals literature suffers from the proliferation of both concepts and taxonomies, suggesting a need for a return to theoretical foundations. In this article, we advocate for a fundamental reconsideration of the concept of goals, anchoring it within a new psychological theory of human motivation based on first principles. The paper's primary contribution lies in demonstrating that the operational definitions utilized by academics and practitioners alike can be thought of as attempts to approach concepts of human motivation, specifically, emotional needs, without fully getting there. We review the leading definitions of human goals in the literature, concluding that they can be distilled to a fundamental set of human emotional needs, each associated with extensive literatures of their own. A comprehensive framework of 12 human emotional needs is introduced; it is argued that a comprehensive motivational framework offers significant advantages over current theoretical approaches, which tend to spin off an ever-expanding list of concepts. We consider the impact of embedding goals concepts within existing motivational constructs with clear benefits for: (a) theory development, (b) method development, and (c) practical applications, emphasizing the advantages of clear operational definitions.
人类目标的概念是心理学（即动机、行为和幸福感）、社会学（即社会结构、文化和动态）、教育（即设定目标、学生动机和成长策略）、管理学（即领导力、员工动机、生产力、组织行为）以及经济学（即消费者和市场行为、决策制定、劳动关系）等学科研究的核心内容。由于它代表了引导决策和行动的最终期望目标，因此在这些领域的理论和实践中都起着核心作用。尽管其处于核心地位，但该概念在定义以及与需求、动机和价值观等相关概念的区别方面缺乏理论共识。与这些概念一样，目标文献也存在概念和分类法泛滥的问题，这表明有必要回归理论基础。在本文中，我们主张对目标概念进行根本性的重新思考，将其基于第一原理锚定在一种新的人类动机心理学理论之中。本文的主要贡献在于表明，学者和从业者所使用的操作性定义可被视为在尝试接近人类动机概念，特别是情感需求，但并未完全达成。我们回顾了文献中关于人类目标的主要定义，得出的结论是，它们可以提炼为一组基本的人类情感需求，每种需求都有其自身丰富的文献。本文引入了一个包含12种人类情感需求的综合框架；我们认为，一个全面的动机框架比当前的理论方法具有显著优势，后者往往衍生出越来越多的概念。我们考虑了将目标概念嵌入现有动机结构中的影响，这对以下方面具有明显益处：（a）理论发展，（b）方法发展，以及（c）实际应用，同时强调了清晰操作性定义的优势。
