Following the critical PHP security vulnerability announced by the National Cyber Security Centre, we have decided that we must take this website down to protect our users.
We are working on a new website and will relaunch as soon as we are able to. In the meantime, here is a short summary of the theory.
Overview
Motivation is more than just our reasons for doing things. It includes our innate reactions, habits, drives, desires, goals, plans and so on.
PRIME Theory brings together what we know about motivation into a single model. Its goal is to improve our ability to explain, predict and influence behaviour. It sticks as closely as possible to everyday language and aims to be as simple as possible.
Motivation
Processes in the brain that energise and direct behaviour.
The theory has three central ideas:
It is wants and needs at each moment that drive our behaviour.
Our intentions and beliefs about what is good or bad only influence our actions if they create sufficiently strong wants and needs at the relevant moment.
Our image of ourselves and how we feel about that – our identity – is a potentially very strong source of wants and needs, which can be enough to overcome those arising from biological drives such as hunger.
The PRIME model
Understanding motivation requires an understanding of the human motivational system: the system of “forces” that energise and direct our actions. Although there are many theories of motivation, surprisingly none had sought to integrate all of its major modes of operation, from conscious decision-making through to classical and instrumental learning.
The human motivational system appears to operate at five levels of complexity, which give the theory its name:
Plans
Self-conscious intentions to do things in the future.
Responses
Starting, stopping or modifying actions.
Impulses
Urges and inhibitions felt at the moment of action.
Motives
Wants and needs: desires for anticipated pleasure or satisfaction, and needs for relief from discomfort.
Evaluations
Beliefs about what is good or bad.
Motives can only influence responses through impulses, and evaluations can only influence responses through motives and then impulses. Plans give structure to our actions, but can only influence them through the motives and evaluations operating at the moment they are to be carried out. Stimuli, information and overall arousal “bathe” the whole system.
Each step up, from reflexes to impulses, motives and evaluations, allows greater flexibility of responding, while plans allow sequences of action to be prepared in advance.
The theory is pitched at the psychological level, but provides a “pegboard” into which theories at other levels, including economic and neurophysiological theories, can be plugged.
Identity and change
Identity is our disposition to form mental representations of ourselves, and the feelings attached to these. It is the ultimate source of self-regulation. Its major elements are:
Labels
For example, “non-smoker”.
Attributes
For example, “health-conscious”.
Rules
For example, “I do not smoke”.
Self-consciously stopping doing something involves forming a rule (a plan) not to do it, or to try not to. Applying that rule generates a want or need not to do it, and it is this that has to win out at the relevant moment.
Our dispositions change through maturation, learning, habituation and sensitisation, associative learning, explicit memory, and analysis and re-formulation. Change can be “chaotic”: small events can trigger large shifts, and change can occur as a single, complete transformation.
Testing the theory
A scientific theory identifies a set of observations as a class of phenomena, and makes assertions about the underlying reality that brings about or affects that class. PRIME Theory makes predictions that can be tested, for example:
Prediction
Saying that one “should” do something (an evaluation) will not predict behaviour unless accompanied by evidence that one “wants” or “needs” to do it (a motive).
Evidence
Forty percent of smokers in England say they “ought” to stop smoking, while 29% say they “want” to. Only those who say they want to are more likely to go on to make a quit attempt in the following 3 or 6 months (Smit, Fidler & West, 2011).
Not every finding fits so neatly: smokers who say they intend to stop soon are more likely to try, even when they do not report wanting to. Findings like this need further examination, and are how the theory is refined.
Publications
The theory is set out in full in the book Theory of Addiction by Robert West (Wiley-Blackwell).
Smit E, Fidler J, West R (2011) The role of desire, duty and intention in predicting attempts to quit smoking. Addiction.
Fidler J, West R (2011) Enjoyment of smoking and urges to smoke as predictors of attempts and success of attempts to stop smoking: a longitudinal study. Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
McEwen A, West R (2010) The PRIME approach to giving up smoking. Practice Nursing, 21(3), 145–153.
West R (2009) The multiple facets of cigarette addiction and what they mean for encouraging and helping smokers to stop. COPD, 6, 277–283.
West R (2009) Possible application of PRIME Theory of motivation to promote safer driving. Behavioural Studies in Road Safety 17. London: DfT.
The slides, downloads and questions and answers from the old site will return with the new website.
