The Thriving with Social Purpose (TSP) motivational pattern focuses on the powerful consequences of effectively “amplifying” each of the components within our motivational systems to promote optimal functioning, while also infusing goals focused on belonging, helping, equity, and social responsibility into our “home page” motivational orientation. This chapter thus explains, in scientific terms, what it means to thrive and how social purpose goals can elevate our life experience. Consistent with the idea that humans are “whole-person-in-context” living systems, this chapter also discusses ways to enhance motivation and optimal functioning by amplifying the nonmotivational components of human functioning (i.e., biology, knowledge and skills, and key features of the environment). This is the chapter that scholars can best use to generate a wide range of hypotheses for future research about motivation and optimal functioning and that professionals can best use to guide and catalyze their (intrinsically whole-person) intervention efforts.

This chapter explains why the TSP framework elevates goal content focused on humans living and working together in cooperative groups above the many other personal goal themes evident in human goal striving, such as happiness, self-determination, and positive self-evaluations (as cataloged in the twenty-four-category Taxonomy of Human Goals presented in Chapter 3). Citing evidence from developmental and social psychology, experimental economics, social neuroscience, and the evolutionary human sciences, this chapter asserts that the core defining feature of humanity (from a motivational perspective) is not self-interest but social purpose. Consistent with this premise, readers will learn not only how social purpose evolved but how that achievement enabled humans to soar above all other species with respect to cultural and intellectual accomplishments. This chapter also directly tackles the common misconception (in Western cultures) that social purpose is merely “self-interest in disguise,” and why invalidating that fallacy is essential for continued human progress.