A General Theory of Human Motivation
The human sciences stand roughly where medicine stood in 1850. Doctors could describe diseases in detail but could not say why they occurred or which treatments would work. Germ theory changed that with one idea: disease has a cause you can name. The AIM Framework is that idea for wanting. It is based on three sources — Appetites, Intrinsic Motivation, and Mimetic Desire — which the brain mixes into a single signal, and the mixing loses information that most of our institutions assume we still have.
Three sources of wanting
Not categories invented for convenience. Each has its own neural pathway, its own satiation pattern, and its own tell.
Appetites (A)
What the body and basic security need: food, rest, warmth, safety, shelter, a floor of income. Urgent while active; fades once met; returns when the deficit does.
Signature: satiates, then recurs.
Intrinsic Motivation (I)
What is rewarding in the doing: curiosity, mastery, play, care, creative work, genuine connection. Continues in private with no audience or reward, and deepens as competence grows.
Signature: persists in private.
Mimetic Desire (M)
Wanting caught from watching others want. Shaped by what is visible, who is prestigious, and what is scarce; prone to rivalry when people converge on the same targets.
Signature: interest evaporates once novelty is worn off.
What gets lost in the mix
The brain cannot act on three signals at once, so it integrates them into one value per option. That output records how much you want something but not why. The source tags are not hidden; they are gone, the way red, green and blue paint stirred together cannot be separated by staring at the result.
Asked why you chose, the brain does not answer “I don't know.” It builds a plausible story and believes it. Socially caught wants are the most likely to be misfiled as your own, because they arrive before awareness and leave nothing behind to check.
This is why asking people what they want, the foundation of consumer research, welfare economics and much of therapy, asks a question the architecture cannot reliably answer.
Try the Two-Question Diagnostic
Introspection cannot read the source, but behaviour can be tested for it. Two questions, by elimination.
The framework itself
The framework itself is Chapter 4 and Appendix A, taken together. Chapter 4 states the axioms and the architecture. Appendix A is the mathematics of that system. The rest of the treatise explains what the framework is and how it plays out.
Where to go next
The theory
The architecture in seven short sections: sources, integration, opacity, confabulation, parasitism, satiation, and the patch.
ReadThe nine axioms
The premises everything is derived from, with what each one rests on and what would falsify it.
ReadAsk the AI
The corpus behind the chat is the full Treatise and research archive, kept current. Specific questions get specific answers.
Open the chat
AIM is the work of Yule Guttenbeil, a technology lawyer with a commerce degree in management. The framework is his account of wanting, written so psychology, economics and neuroscience can share one set of definitions.
About the author and the book