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 every day language and aims to be as simple as possible.

Three central ideas in the theory are:

1: It is wants and needs at each moment that drive our behaviour.

2: 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.

3: Our image our 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 ones arising from biological drives such as hunger.