Commonalities of values and motives: Beyond the Big Three

Bilsky Wolfgang, Janik Michael

Abstract

We outline a parsimonious taxonomy for classifying motives, based on Schwartz's (1992) higher-order values self-transcendence, conservation, self-enhancement, and openness to change. This taxonomy is validated by re-analyzing the correlations between 17 of Murray's (1938) motives across 15 samples, using confirmatory multidimensional scaling (MDS). In this way, we complement former studies discriminating between the "Big Three" - affiliation, achievement, and power - according to the motivational opposition "self-enhancement vs. self-transcendence" (Bilsky & Schwartz, 2008). Furthermore, we resume earlier analyses that considered the opposition "openness to change vs. conservation" as well, in order to specify a general taxonomy of human motives (Bilsky, 2006).