As in the case of Ritchie and Martin's method, there were no drafts from you - all the material was collected independently through web searches and reading primary sources. The confirmation statuses are the same:[Confirmed], [Partially confirmed], [Not confirmed]. The first thing worth noting is that there is a common confusion in the author's name (see section 1) - I have addressed it separately. The test questions are not given in this article; they are in a separate instruction file for the bot.
1. Important clarification: what is the author’s real name?
In your message, the test is called “A. A. Rean’s method”, and the initials are indeed correct - but it is worth clearly recording: the full name of the author of the method isArthur Alexandrovich Rean, and not “Andrey Aleksandrovich,” as is sometimes erroneously written on the Internet (including in some of the sources that came across during this research).[Confirmed]This is a common confusion precisely because of the “initials + surname” format, under which the technique is usually cited.
2. Who is Arthur Rean
Arthur Aleksandrovich Rean is a Russian psychologist, born on March 8, 1957 in Ufa.[Confirmed]In 1979 he graduated from the Bashkir State University, after which he was accepted as a research intern at the Faculty of Psychology of the Leningrad State University - that is, his scientific career from the very beginning was connected with the Leningrad / St. Petersburg school of psychology.[Confirmed]
He is a Doctor of Psychology (since 1992), professor (since 1994), academician of the Russian Academy of Education (academician since 2016, corresponding member since 1996) in the department of psychology and developmental physiology.[Confirmed]Rean was deputy chairman of the council on social psychology at St. Petersburg University and was a member of the doctoral dissertation councils at the Russian State Pedagogical University named after. A. I. Herzen.[Confirmed]
The main area of his scientific interests is personality psychology, educational psychology, psychology of asocial and delinquent (illegal) behavior and its prevention, psychology of aggression, problems of social orphanhood, socialization and social maturity of the individual.[Confirmed]He is the author of more than 400 publications, including over 25 monographs, books and textbooks.[Confirmed]
A technique for diagnosing motivation for success and fear of failure (often abbreviated asMUN) first published in his book“Personality psychology. Socialization, behavior, communication"(SPb.: “Prime-EVROZNAK”, 2004).[Confirmed - accurate bibliographic description, including page numbers 138 and 146–147, which contain the text of the questionnaire and the key, respectively, verified directly against the source reproducing the methodology]
3. Theoretical roots: from McClelland to Heckhausen
Unlike Ritchie and Martin's methodology (created as an applied HR tool without a strict theoretical framework), the Rean test is directly rooted in one of the most developed and empirically studied areas of the psychology of motivation -achievement motivation theories.
It is generally accepted that the theory of achievement motivation was laid down in the middle of the 20th century by the works of three researchers: American psychologistDavid McClelland(David McClelland), who in the 1940s, together with his colleagues, began the systematic study of human needs, American psychologistJohn Atkinson(John W. Atkinson), who developed a formal model of achievement motivation in the 1960s, and the German psychologistHeinz Heckhausen(Heinz Heckhausen), one of the most famous and authoritative researchers of achievement motivation in European psychology.[Confirmed]
The key idea of this tradition: achievement-oriented behavior is determined by the relationship between two opposing tendencies -desire for success(motive of achievement in the narrow sense, desire for a positive result, pride in achievement) andavoiding failure(the desire to prevent a negative result, fear of shame and blame for failure).[Confirmed]According to Atkinson's model, a person with a predominant motive of striving for success when choosing tasks of varying complexity develops a characteristic preference for tasksmedium difficulty- not too easy (there is no real sense of achievement in them) and not too difficult (the risk of failure is too high); and a person with a predominant motive of avoiding failure, on the contrary, often has a tendency to choose extremes - either obviously easy tasks (so as to be guaranteed not to lose), or unrealistically difficult ones (so that in case of failure it can be justified by the excessive complexity of the task, and not by one’s own incompetence).[Confirmed]Please note: this pattern of choosing extremes is directly baked into one of the statements of the Rean questionnaire (see the instruction file for the bot) - that is, the test is not just inspired by Atkinson's theory, but directly operationalizes one of its key predictions in the form of a specific item.
Rean's technique is a Russian-language adaptation and development of this theoretical tradition, and not a direct translation of one Western test; it was created as a compact tool for practical diagnostics (primarily in educational and professional activities) of the two poles of this axis of motivation, long studied in world psychology.[Partially confirmed - the very fact of theoretical continuity is well documented in secondary sources, but the exact methodological procedure for developing the Rean questionnaire itself - for example, where exactly the wording of specific 20 statements came from, whether they underwent their own psychometric validation with the publication of factor structure and reliability - was not found in a testable form during the course of this study]
4. Method structure
The questionnaire consists of20 statements, each of which must be answered “yes” or “no” (the instructions clearly explain that “yes” combines both explicit agreement and “more likely yes than no,” and “no” means the opposite).[Verified - verified directly from the original source]
For each answer that matches the key, 1 point is awarded, up to a maximum of 20 points. Three-zone interpretation:[Confirmed]
- 1–7 points— motivation to fail (fear of failure) is diagnosed.
- 8–13 points— the motivational pole is not clearly expressed; at the same time, within this middle zone, an additional nuance stands out: 8-9 points - a certain tendency towards motivation for failure, 12-13 points - a certain tendency towards motivation for success (that is, only a result of exactly 10-11 points is interpreted as truly neutral).
- 14–20 points— motivation for success (hope for success) is diagnosed.
This is a fairly simple technique in design - much simpler than, for example, Zimbardo’s ZTPI or Duckworth’s Grit scale with their multifactor structure. This should be clearly stated when presenting the result to the user: the test measures one bipolar axis, and not a multidimensional profile.
5. How Rean describes the two poles of motivation
The meaningful description of the two types given by the author himself in his book should be reproduced close to the original, since it is, in fact, the theoretical framework for interpreting the result:[Confirmed - retold from the original source]
Motivation for success refers to positive motivation. With such motivation, a person, when starting a business, has in mind the achievement of something constructive and positive. At the core of activity is the hope for success and the need to achieve success. People with this profile are usually confident in themselves and their abilities, responsible, proactive and active, they are distinguished by perseverance in achieving goals and determination.
Motivation to fail is a negative motivation. With this type of motivation, a person’s activity is associated with the need to avoid breakdown, blame, punishment, and failure; it is based on the idea of avoidance and negative expectations. When starting a business, a person is already afraid of possible failure in advance and thinks about ways to avoid it, and not about ways to achieve success. People motivated to fail, as described by Rean, are usually characterized by increased anxiety and low self-confidence, tend to avoid responsible tasks, and, if necessary, to solve particularly important tasks, they can fall into a state close to panic - at the same time (an important reservation of the author himself) this may well be combined with a very responsible attitude to business, that is, one should not confuse the fear of failure with irresponsibility.
6. Important scientific disclaimer: self-report is not the only or “gold standard” way to measure achievement motivation.
Here it is worth connecting to a broader scientific context, which directly concerns the interpretation of the results of any such questionnaire, including the Rean technique.
One of the most famous and influential findings in the history of achievement motivation research comes from David McClelland, the same researcher whose work lies at the origins of this entire tradition. In the articleMcClelland, D. C., Koestner, R., & Weinberger, J. (1989). How do self-attributed and implicit motives differ? Psychological Review, 96(4), 690–702The authors showed that there is a fundamental difference between two ways of measuring achievement motivation:[Confirmed]
- Implicit (implicit) motives- measured by projective methods (classically - the Thematic Apperception Test, TAT, where a person comes up with stories based on ambiguous pictures, and motivation is “read” from the content of these stories, and not from direct questions). Such motives, according to research, better predict spontaneous, involuntary human behavior over a long period of time.
- Explicit (self-attributed) motives— are measured by direct questionnaires, where a person consciously answers questions about himself (the Rean questionnaire and most similar motivation tests belong to this class of methods). Such measurements better predict a person's informed, deliberate decisions and choices.
The key and rather inconvenient conclusion for practitioners from this research tradition is:the correlation between implicit and explicit measures of the same seemingly same motivation in the same person is often low or not found at all— that is, what a person consciously says about himself in the questionnaire and what actually drives his behavior on an unconscious level can diverge quite noticeably.[Confirmed]This is not a specific complaint specifically about the Rean technique - it is a fundamental, well-documented feature of the entire field of measuring achievement motivation, known to the science community since the late 1980s, and applies to any questionnaire of this type, and not to any one specific test.
Practical conclusion: the result of the Rean test should be interpreted asa person’s conscious self-perception of his motivational orientation- which in itself is valuable and useful for reflection - but not as a direct and exhaustive measurement of the “true”, deep motivational structure of the individual.
7. Related techniques
In the same content area (motivation for success/avoiding failure) in psychological practice, including Russian-speaking, other tools are also common - primarilyA. Mehrabian questionnaire(Albert Mehrabian) to measure achievement motivation, also existing in several Russian-language adaptations (in particular, in the adaptation by M. Sh. Magomed-Eminov).[Partially confirmed - the very existence of this parallel tradition of instruments is well documented in the Russian-language psychological literature, but a detailed direct comparison of the two methods on specific psychometric indicators was not carried out as part of this study]This is worth keeping in mind if you want to add an alternative or complementary measurement tool for the same construct domain to your product in the future.
8. Outcomes for product development
- The test measures one bipolar axis (success↔failure), and not a multidimensional profile - the simplest in structure of all your dozen methods, which should be clearly reflected in the UX (short passage, simple yes/no format).
- The middle zone of the result (8–13 points, especially 10–11) is not a “mistake” or “indecisiveness” of the user, but a meaningful and expected result: most people have a mixed, not polar, motivational profile.
- It is worth explicitly informing the user (especially in an AI interpretation) that the result reflects how a person consciously perceives himself, and not some uncontested “deep” diagnosis of his psyche - this is consistent with the scientific consensus about the limitations of self-report measures of motivation.
- Since the test is about the attitude towards success/failure in general, it complements well the other tests of your top ten (for example, Grit Duckworth is about perseverance regardless of the emotional attitude towards failure, and the Rean test is about the emotional and motivational coloring of this attitude).