Glossary of terms

Dilemma — a short story with a decision for which there is no right answer. In the test only one thing interests you: why you decide the way you do.

Motivation — the reason a decision grows from. The same decision can have a completely different motivation for two people.

Motivational layer — one of the six sources of deciding in the Why We Decide framework: Survival, Benefit, Relationships, Order, Principles, Integrity. They are not types of people, and they are not rungs on a ladder — each of us uses all of them.

Moral compass — your result from the test: a percentage profile of the six layers. It shows a mix, not a box.

Dominant motivation — the layer with the highest share in your profile; the most common source of your decisions.

Secondary motivation — the second-strongest layer in the profile. Together with the dominant one, it forms the core of how you decide.

Area of life (category) — the context of a dilemma: partnership, family, parenting, work, business, society, everyday life. The same person decides differently in different areas.

Heinz dilemma — Lawrence Kohlberg's classic dilemma: should a man steal a drug to save his dying wife? Kohlberg used it to show that the justification matters more than the answer.

Ethics of care — Carol Gilligan's term: moral reasoning led by relationships and by responsibility for particular people, not by abstract principles. In the framework it corresponds to the Relationships layer.

Rationalization — a justification supplied after a decision that was in fact made intuitively (see Jonathan Haidt). That is also why the test works with how you yourself see your motivations.

System 1 and System 2 — Daniel Kahneman's pair of terms: fast intuitive thinking (1) and slow deliberate reasoning (2). System 1 runs most everyday decisions.

Subject–object — Robert Kegan's mechanism of development: what we are run by (the subject), we learn to see from a distance (the object). Self-reflection in the test is exactly this move.

Consistency profile (in preparation) — a look at whether you use the same motivations across areas of life, or switch by context.