Human beings’ interest in those elements that are essential for life is nothing new. At the same time as the philosophy of opulence, a way of understanding life emerged that emphasizes the need to reduce basic desires to their minimum expression: Eastern asceticism, Epicureanism, the practice of meditation or, more recently, the example of Henry David Thoreau and his life in Walden
However, all these trends have in common the renunciation of desires from a spiritual or, at the very least, deeply subjective perspective. What happens when science intervenes in these inquiries?
In an investigation whose goal was to find the structure of desires characteristic of the human being, the American psychologist Steven Reiss found 16 basic desires, sources of motivation, which are key when it comes to explaining our actions, the volitional dimension of our species: what moves us when interpreting, choosing and acting on our environment. This categorization of desires into 16 factors is based on a study in which more than 6,000 people participated and is a way of approaching the study of what shapes our behavior and our way of satisfying needs.
However, It also helps explain personality of each one depending on which desires we give more importance to and which less. In this way, and depending on which desire is the most priority for us, it would be possible to find what Reiss defines as the “point of happiness ” from each person.
The author published this classification for the first time in 2000 with the book Who am I? The 16 Basic Desires that Motivate Our Actions and Define Our Personalitiesand it is the following:
1- Acceptance the need to be appreciated.
2- Curiosity the need to learn.
3- Food the need to eat.
4- Family the need to have and raise sons and daughters.
5- Honor the need to be loyal to the traditional values of a community.
6- Idealism the need for social justice.
7- Independence the need to have guaranteed individuality.
8- Order the need for stable and organized environments.
9- Physical activity the need to exercise.
10- Can the need to have a certain capacity for influence.
eleven- Romantic love the need for sex and beauty.
12- Saving the need to accumulate.
13- social contact the need to have relationships with others.
14- Status the need to be socially significant.
fifteen- Tranquillity the need to feel safe.
16- Revenge the need to hit back.
Nuance
It is worth remembering, however, that, getting down to the specifics, the list of objectives, goals and sources of motivation are practically infinite in human beings, given that any concept or representation can embody one of them.
Furthermore, we must take into account cultural variations among people in each region, which may reward or repress certain manifestations of desire and will. Reiss proposes a list of 16 basic wishes common to all people who, however, They take on a different form depending on our decisions and our context a theory of motivation.
