In this book, we focused on answering two questions: Can we use semi-structured interview data to understand motives? What motivates people’s moral judgments? We began by describing why critics argue that semi-structured interviews are insufficient for studying people’s motives. We then used the remainder of our book to respond to these questions and critiques about the use of semi-structured interview data to study motives. To respond to the questions posed, we drew from different lines of work, such as the Sociology of Culture, Cognitive Science, and Qualitative Methods. In writing this book, we also provided new theoretical, empirical, and methodological insights. Our responses challenged long-standing narratives about the use of semi-structured interview data and supported the recent developments in sociology and cognitive science about using such data to study motives. In doing so, we hope we have inspired scholars to use our theoretical and methodological tools as points of departure for their own research and answers to the above questions. Our main argument throughout the book is that just as scholars have used cognitive science to build theory in sociology, as well as to reject the possibility of using semi-structured interviews to study motives, we could use findings from cognitive science and qualitative methods to operationalize motives in semi-structured interviews.