Self-determination theory - Edward L. Deci et Richard Ryan

Self-determination theory: basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness

Livre sur la Théorie d’auto-détermination

Highlights

Preface

the large and still growing community of SDT scholars who share information, methods, and practices through the Center for Self-Determination Theory (CSDT) website (www.selfdeteminationtheory.org)

24. On Basic Needs and Human Natures: Altruism, Aggression, and the Bright and Dark Sides of Human Motivation

multiple examples from around the world show that the more environments are supportive of autonomy and basic psychological needs more generally, the less the people within them have a need to assert power through physical or psychological bullying. The findings suggest that the more need-supportive the family and school environments are, the less students engage in bullying, and the more they are likely to identify with and internalize positive values toward others (Dillon, 2015).

24. On Basic Needs and Human Natures: Altruism, Aggression, and the Bright and Dark Sides of Human Motivation

We posit that such humanizing effects of need support are not limited to classroom environments (e.g., see the workplace bullying research reviewed in Chapter 21) but can be seen across both micro and macro social contexts.

24. On Basic Needs and Human Natures: Altruism, Aggression, and the Bright and Dark Sides of Human Motivation

The darker sides of human behavior, of which dishonesty, lack of empathy, and bullying are but handy examples, are systematically related to the pattern and intensity of basic psychological need thwarting. Negative social behaviors are very often (though obviously not in all cases) responses to non-nurturing or invasive conditions, both developmental and situational.

24. On Basic Needs and Human Natures: Altruism, Aggression, and the Bright and Dark Sides of Human Motivation

people are prepared to develop and express defensive and antisocial tendencies, particularly where social contexts affording psychological need supports are missing. This observation connects with SDT’s extensive experimental and field evidence that controlling, evaluative, and need-thwarting conditions focus people on more egoistic and selfish aims and lead to distrust and objectification of others.

24. On Basic Needs and Human Natures: Altruism, Aggression, and the Bright and Dark Sides of Human Motivation

distinct human “natures” are manifested as a function of whether individuals are afforded need-supportive conditions or, alternatively, face significant need threats or obstacles to need satisfaction.

24. On Basic Needs and Human Natures: Altruism, Aggression, and the Bright and Dark Sides of Human Motivation

scholars who invoke evolutionary perspectives to reconstruct human nature as competitive, anxious, greedy, or inherently aggressive ignore a wealth of data from anthropology and comparative biology showing “that we are group animals, highly cooperative, sensitive to injustice, sometimes warmongering but mostly peace loving. There is thus both a social and a selfish side to our species”

24. On Basic Needs and Human Natures: Altruism, Aggression, and the Bright and Dark Sides of Human Motivation

Our research on helping and benevolence demonstrates that even when no reciprocal benefits can be expected from the prosocial actions, people can find such acts satisfying of their basic psychological needs. Recently, for example, Martela and Ryan (2016) reported an experimental study in which participants were asked to play a word-based computer game. In one condition, they were informed that for every correct answer they provided, the game would donate rice to the United Nations World Food Program for beneficiaries they would not meet or know (benevolence condition). In the other condition, participants simply played the game for fun and were not made aware of the donations (control condition). When compared to the control condition, the group that knew their actions were benefiting others experienced more positive affect, interest, and meaningfulness and less negative affec

24. On Basic Needs and Human Natures: Altruism, Aggression, and the Bright and Dark Sides of Human Motivation

Results also supported the hypothesis that the positive effects of prosocial behavior on these indicators of psychological wellness were mediated by autonomy, competence, and relatedness need satisfactions.

24. On Basic Needs and Human Natures: Altruism, Aggression, and the Bright and Dark Sides of Human Motivation

They specifically hypothesized that helping and prosocial behaviors would satisfy all three basic psychological needs, which would mediate the relations between helping behavior and outcomes such as positive mood and vitality. First, people are able to experience competence as they effectively help others. Second, people can experience relatedness while helping others, through a sense of empathy and interest in others, and their active involvement on the others’ behalf. Finally, insofar as it is unforced and has an internal perceived locus of causality (I-PLOC), helping engages people’s autonomy. Precisely because most helping and prosocial activity is not driven by salient external rewards or compulsions, instead reflecting people’s stock and flow of personal values, it is accompanied by a sense of autonomy and choice. In sum, volitional helping was expected by Weinstein and Ryan not only to benefit the recipients but also to engender enhancements of well-being in the helpers, and these helper effects would be accounted for by satisfactions of the helpers’ basic psychological needs.

24. On Basic Needs and Human Natures: Altruism, Aggression, and the Bright and Dark Sides of Human Motivation

As expected, helping per se had at most a weak positive effect on well-being outcomes. Yet, this effect was moderated by the relative autonomy of helping. When the helping was more autonomous, these effects were substantially stronger, having a robust impact on the outcomes.

12. Relationships Motivation Theory: The Self in Close Relationships

Whoever says You does not have something for his object.

—Martin Buber (1970, p. 55)

12. Relationships Motivation Theory: The Self in Close Relationships

RMT posits that, beyond these extrinsic benefits, feeling relatedness with others is an intrinsic and basic psychological need—something proximately valued for its own sake. Because close relationships have so consistently yielded significant adaptive benefits to individuals, we have evolved to be intrinsically motivated to seek out and maintain close, open, trusting relationships with others

Self-determination theory: basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness

The phenomenon of intrinsic motivation reflects the primary and spontaneous propensity of some organisms, especially mammals, to develop through activity—to play, explore, and manipulate things and, in doing so, to expand their competencies and capacities. This natural inclination is an especially significant feature of human nature that affects people’s cognitive and emotional development, quality of performance, and psychological well-being. It is among the most important of the inner resources that evolution has provided (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Ryan & Hawley, 2016), and because it represents a prototypical manifestation of integrative organismic tendencies, SDT research began with it as a primary focus.

Self-determination theory: basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness

we introduced the concept of perceived locus of causality (PLOC; de Charms, 1968; Heider, 1958) as an attributional concept that reflects different levels of human autonomy. Specifically, de Charms suggested that an intentional behavior can be either intrinsically motivated, in which case it would have an internal perceived locus of causality (I-PLOC), or extrinsically motivated, in which case it would have an external perceived locus of causality (E-PLOC). Behaviors with an I-PLOC are experienced as autonomous, and those with an E-PLOC are experienced as controlled (i.e., nonautonomous).

Self-determination theory: basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness

Deci and Ryan (1980a, 1985b) argued that the introduction of extrinsic rewards for an activity that is intrinsically motivated can prompt a change in PLOC from internal to external

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

We discuss our criteria for basic needs, suggest that some motives (e.g., power) that are called needs in other theories are compensations for basic need frustrations, and argue against some conceptions of need hierarchy.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

the concept of needs—the idea that there are fundamental nutrients or supports that individuals must have to thrive—is both complex and controversial

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

The concept of needs is relatively common in the field of biology, a field that focuses primarily on the physical structure of the organism, its survival, and its reproduction (e.g., Ehrlich, 2000; Jacob, 1973). Agreement exists that there are specifiable, physiological requirements, the fulfillment of which is essential to the life of the individual organism and the deprivation of which leads to serious harm and ill health

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

The concept of needs is therefore unlike some “motivational” concepts with which it is often conflated, such as wants, preferences, or desires, because the concept of needs is fundamentally built around a potentially objective and empirically specifiable criterion. If something is merely a want, its satisfaction may or may not advance the organism’s thriving. I might “want” more chocolates after finishing the box, but satisfying that desire might not enhance my health and wellness; indeed, it might even have negative consequences. Having more chocolates is not a need. To be a basic need, there must be observable and meaningful positive consequences for health and thriving stemming from its satisfaction and significant harms stemming from its deprivation or frustration, regardless of preferences.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Nutritional guidelines continue to change frequently as we understand more and more about optimizing nutrition.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

SDT forwards the proposition that there are specifiable psychological and social nutrients which, when satisfied within the interpersonal and cultural contexts of an individual’s development, facilitate growth, integrity, and well-being. Conversely, when these psychological need satisfactions are frustrated or thwarted, there are serious psychological harms (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Ryan, 1995). We refer to these necessary satisfactions for personality and cognitive growth as basic psychological need

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Murray (1938) defined a need as a construct that stands for “a force which organizes perception, apperception, intellection, conation and action in such a way as to transform in a certain direction an existing, unsatisfying, situation”

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

definition of need encompasses virtually any motivating force in people. People’s desires, motives, wants, and strivings all represent “forces that organize perception and action.” Thus Murray’s definition of need applies with equal appropriateness to a starving man’s utterance that he “needs food” (Murray’s hunger need) and a billionaire’s remark that he “needs another vacation home” (Murray’s acquisitive need)

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Murray’s conception of need therefore fails to differentiate acquired desires, preferences, motives, and appetites from actual basic needs.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Specification of people’s basic psychological needs can thus tell us much about what was entailed in thriving during our species’ history, including our propensities toward curiosity, skill building, and social belonging. In fact, the idea that psychological need satisfactions can function as proximal motivators of propensities and behaviors that have yielded advantages at multiple levels of selection is consistent with recent developments in evolutionary psychology (Ryan & Hawley, 2016; see also Chapter 24).

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

as a mammalian species, we have a protracted period of dependence in which social connection is critical and active cognitive growth is essential. As SDT research will detail, during this early developmental period supports for relatedness, autonomy, and competence are required for infants and young children to be intrinsically motivated, to attach to others and form secure social bonds, and to integrate social regulations into their self-regulatory capacities (discussed in Chapter 13), all processes essential to adaptation and thriving in “cultural animals” such as humans

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Clarifying what is essential to the thriving of an organism, including the exploration of need candidates and consequences, can in fact tell us much about the nature of that being. Organisms are, most fundamentally, entities whose basic and fundamental organization concerns the fulfillment of needs, some common and some species specific. In each species, physical, behavioral, emotional, and cognitive adaptations exist that are specialized for fulfilling these needs. This extends to psychological structures, as organisms must be built to orient toward the “right” phenomena and possess sensibilities and experience satisfactions that facilitate adaptions. In humans, given our social natures, any such inherent tendencies and perceptual sensitivities must ultimately have been related to the procurement of individual and group resources

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

to claim that the satisfaction of certain psychological needs is essential and adaptive does not mean that people will always be aware of their importance, or even that they will consciously place value on these satisfactions over others. In fact, as research that we subsequently review demonstrates, people may or may not want what they need, or may not need what they want. Social controls, seductive reward contingencies, and cultural introjections can all lead to the motivated neglect or frustration of basic psychological need satisfactions.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

phenomena (Braybrooke, 1987; Plant et al., 1980). As with physical needs, psychological needs are defined in SDT in terms of functional effects on thriving versus ill-being. To be classified as a need there must be, by definition, functional costs of need frustration or neglect and benefits of flourishing for satisfying them. Thus the validity of SDT’s claim that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are basic psychological needs

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Many intrinsically motivated activities yield need satisfactions, learning, and well-being enhancements, even though phenomenally obtaining such positive outcomes is not necessarily what proximally motivates action (Ryan & Deci, 2013).

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

they proposed that needs should elicit or organize goal-oriented behaviors designed to satisfy them.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

final standards are that a need should be universal; that it not be derivative of other motives; that it have impact across a broad array of behaviors; and that it have implications beyond immediate psychological functioning. All of these standards apply to the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness that SDT has proposed

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Autonomy

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

refers to feeling willingness and volition with respect to one’s behaviors

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

The need for autonomy describes the need of individuals to experience self-endorsement and ownership of their actions—to be self-regulating in the technical sense of that term. The opposite of autonomy is heteronomy, as when one acts out of internal or external pressures that are experienced as controlling. Autonomy does not, as we use it, refer to independence. In our view and evidence (e.g., Ryan, La Guardia, Solky-Butzel, Chirkov, & Kim, 2005; Ryan & Lynch, 1989), the phenomena of independence, dependence, and interdependence can each be either autonomously or heteronomously motivated

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Competence refers to feeling effective in one’s interactions with the social environment—that is, experiencing opportunities and supports for the exercise, expansion, and expression of one’s capacities and talents

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Where individuals are prevented from developing skills, understanding, or mastery, the competence need will be unmet.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Relatedness refers to both experiencing others as responsive and sensitive and being able to be responsive and sensitive to them—that is, feeling connected and involved with others and having a sense of belonging

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Relatedness is experienced both in being cared about and in caring. The need is satisfied when others show concern toward the individual, as well as when the individual has opportunities to be benevolent toward others, as both directions of caring enhance a sense of connectedness

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

We theorize that, when any of these three basic psychological needs is frustrated or neglected either in a given domain or in general, the individual will show motivational, cognitive, affective, and other psychological decrements of a specifiable nature, such as lowered vitality, loss of volition, greater fragmentation, and diminished well-being.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

In fact, we have seen little evidence for any psychological needs beyond the three we have isolated (see, e.g., Ryan & Deci, 2000a).

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

throughout this book we review evidence for the multiple individual and group benefits associated with attaining satisfactions of these very basic psychological needs and of harms associated with their neglect or frustration.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Rather than predicting outcomes primarily from need strength, within SDT we predict them primarily from the extent to which a person’s needs have been either satisfied or frustrated, or from the extent to which social contexts are or have been either supporting or thwarting of need satisfaction.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

we suggest that many acquired strivings or desires do not promote mental health or wellness; indeed, some of them, precisely because they distract from or compete with activities that could fulfill basic psychological needs, hamper growth and well-being, even when they are important to the person and the person is highly efficacious with respect to them (Ryan et al., 1996). Research that we report in Chapter 11 on goal contents theory (GCT) strongly supports this postulate by confirming that aspiring for, and even attaining, some culturally sanctioned goals, such as lavish material success, outer image, and fame, are not reliably associated with health and well-being. Thus many motives and goals that organize and activate behavior can be viewed dynamically as peripheral, derivative, compensatory, or substitutive in nature.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Kasser, Ryan, Zax, and Sameroff (1995) showed that teenagers who become materialistic often come from homes in which caregivers were controlling or cold. Pursuing material goods, or external signs of worth, thus appeared to be a compensation for lacking an inner feeling of worth

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

several of the motives that Murray labeled needs, such as for dominance, acquisitiveness, power, and abasement, are themselves derivative of basic needs, which is to say that they are often either need substitutes intended to compensate for a previous lack of fulfillment of basic needs or are acquired motives that serve as indirect and therefore more or less satisfactory avenues to basic need satisfaction

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Even something as widely accepted as the “need for achievement” is typically not simply a pure reflection of the need for competence, even though that is an important source of this motive (see Deci & Moller, 2005; Koestner & McClelland, 1990). Beyond a desire for competence per se, achievement is often valued by individuals who believe that being a high achiever will make them more worthy or lovable; it is an attempt to gain relatedness. This can be manifested in compulsive overachievement or an excessive drive to excel, often connected to conditional parental regard (Roth, Assor, Niemiec, Ryan, & Deci, 2009; Ryan & Moller, 2016). To use another example, the pursuit of social dominance and power may often dynamically represent not a basic need in its own right but a compensation for having previously been deprived of feelings of effectance and autonomy. Lammers, Stoker, Rink, and Galinsky (2016) recently showed, for example, how gaining autonomy quenched the desire for power. As ends in themselves, therefore, such motives are often substitutes for need fulfillment, much like feeding off junk food when one requires nutrition.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

SDT findings thus show that efficacious satisfaction of some desires or motives can actually be associated with ill-being rather than well-being (e.g., Kasser & Ryan, 2001; Niemiec, Ryan, & Deci, 2009). This is an extremely important point with regard to basic theories of motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2001). Much of modern empirical psychology touts the importance of efficacy or goal attainment without taking a critical stance concerning efficacy for what.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

A person high in desire for dominance may assert control over a passive bystander and briefly feel potent. But attaining such dominance is unlikely to yield any basic need satisfactions and thus is unlikely to foster any durable sense of well-being

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

such satisfactions are identified within SDT as compensatory, derivative, or defensive in nature and often the result of proximal or pervasive need frustrations.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

By contrast, gaining love, gaining new skills, or acting in accord with an abiding value are more likely to fulfill basic needs and thus quite directly enhance wellness

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

We also maintain that, unlike drives (e.g., Freud, 1920/1961; Spence, 1958; Zajonc, 1965), basic psychological needs do not operate in a homeostatic manner, and they cannot be sated in the same way as can a drive such as hunger or thirst. People can indeed eat too much, but they cannot have too much autonomy, too much competence, or too much relatedness in the way we define these terms. They can, of course, have too many social interactions but not too much sense of feeling deeply connected.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

The main focus of TMT is on a basic organismic need for self-preservation (which for us represents a basic physical need), as well as the derivative human psychological need that TMT posits to protect against awareness of death and mortality

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

avoidance of death awareness, and its resultant anxiety, represents TMT’s most fundamental human psychological need. The need to avoid awareness of mortality leads to a secondary need for self-esteem, which buffers death anxieties and provides people at least a symbolic immortality. People are said to act to defend or shore up self-esteem whenever mortality becomes salient. TMT thus explains group identifications, as well as outgroup prejudices, as a function of mortality threats, as these protect or enhance self-esteem.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

people strive for symbolic continuity, and through this mechanism TMT explains social conformity and concerns with image, along with the need for belonging. In fact, to gain self-esteem people are motivated to connect, create meaning, and contribute to society—again largely to quell mortality awareness rather than because these provide intrinsic satisfactions.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

TMT represents to us a deficit-need theory, since the motivations it has in focus are primarily defensive and reactive in nature. As we have argued (Ryan & Deci, 2004b), however, if the most fundamental human need were that of avoiding anxiety and awareness of death, people would be more prone to hide from stimulation and shrink from exploration and integrative activity rather than to be active and inherently interested in growth and stimulation

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

In fact, we do not think it is possible to explain well the vital, forward-moving nature of mind and life as motivated by avoidance of the awareness of death (Ryan & Deci, 2004a).

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

TMT treats the self-expansion motive as something that exists primarily to allow people to survive until they can procreate and to protect their self-esteem, we still see the overarching view as deficit-oriented

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

The active nature of human development is more driven by interest and engagement than by anxiety, avoidance, or defense.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

when it comes to the dynamics of everyday human behavior, we see satisfaction and frustration of our three basic psychological needs as more explanatory than those associated with episodic mortality threats.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

people cannot psychologically thrive by satisfying one need alone, any more than people can live healthily with water but not food, or plants can thrive on soil without sunlight. Social environments that afford, for example, opportunities to experience competence but fail to nurture relatedness are ones conducive to an impoverished human condition. For example, career development that requires so much time that one is unable to satisfy relational needs (a condition of epidemic proportions in many modern societies) will extract a high cost on well-being, regardless of how effective in and valuing of a career one is. Worse yet are contexts that specifically pit one need against another, thus creating conflicts that inevitably produce ill-being and sometimes maladjustment. For example, parents may require that a child relinquish autonomy to gain relatedness (e.g., when they intrusively control the child with contingent love) and in so doing set the stage for the development of ill-being (e.g., maladaptive perfectionism) or even psychopathology (Ryan, Deci, Grolnick, & La Guardia, 2006).

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

The necessity of satisfying all three basic needs across the lifespan separates our theory from yet another type of need theory, namely, those that specify a hierarchy of needs in which one level of basic needs must be well satisfied before another level energizes as a salient motivating force (e.g., Alderfer, 1972; Maslow, 1954)

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

despite the appearance of Maslow’s (1943) pyramid-shaped hierarchy in most every introductory psychology textbook and its intuitive appeal, empirical evidence for his hierarchy of psychological needs is quite thin. Nor does one need to look far to find problematic cases for the hierarchy. People often put their safety at risk to experience actualization (think of any explorer or traveler), and people frequently pursue relatedness and generativity at cost to their personal security

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Maslow’s hierarchy does convey an idea: Many people will feel unable to pursue some “higher” gratifications when externally controlled or economically deprived in terms of basic securities.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

recent work by Welzel (2013), which distinguishes between surviving and thriving priorities. As Welzel’s population-level research indicates, when people are occupied by material deprivation and threats to survival, their inherent propensities toward emancipative values, personal growth, and thriving can be crowded out. They often must focus on what he labels “extrinsic strategies.” Yet Welzel (2013) adds: “extrinsic priorities prevail in a population only as long as necessary, whereas intrinsic priorities begin to predominate as soon as possible” (pp. 176–177). In both this view and ours, the more people are under external controlling pressures, either material or social, the less they can direct their resources and energies to the satisfactions of flourishing

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

considerable evidence suggests that pursuit and attainment of basic psychological need satisfactions often becomes derailed or even distorted under materially and culturally unsupportive conditions, which we further discuss in Chapters 22 and 23. Yet even under conditions of economic struggle, basic need satisfactions remain critical to wellness (Rasskazova, Ivanova, & Sheldon, 2016). Moreover, we also show that, on an individual level, both material and psychological deprivations in development can lead people to defensive or compensatory functioning that interferes with basic need satisfactions and with their ultimate wellness (Kasser et al., 1995; Ryan, Deci, & Vansteenkiste, 2016).

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

individuals, to the extent that they are healthy, will tend to gravitate toward those domains and activities in life that feel sustaining to them—that is, to those areas in which basic psychological needs can be potentially fulfilled (Ryan, 1993; Sheldon & Gunz, 2009).

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

people will tend either to avoid or to engage only under duress those domains and activities that appear less likely to fulfill one or more of the basic needs.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

this tendency to gravitate toward need-satisfying situations operates effectively only to the extent to which the individuals are relatively autonomous in their functioning. In other words, acting freely to satisfy basic needs requires having not established controlled behavior patterns that keep one rigidly tied to pursuit of nonhealthy aspirations or desires.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

In addition, it requires capabilities to pursue that which one deems worthwhile (see Chapter 23).

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

there are costs in terms of motivation, interest, persistence, performance, and well-being in environments that thwart basic need satisfactions. We also discuss how the dynamics of need fulfillment account for why people migrate toward specific interests, vocations, and relationships and why people function differentially within such areas or relationships as a direct function of how needs are addressed therein. The psychological gravity of specific activities and relationships—their motivational power—we argue is a function of their relation to fulfillment of the three basic needs we have specified.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

the degree to which a culture, domain of activity, group, or personal relationship affords the three basic psychological need satisfactions, persons within them will show greater vitality, growth, integration, and well-being.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

We derive our perspective on competence from the work of White (1959), who argued that there exists a nonderivative or primary organismic propensity toward feeling competent and having effects on one’s environment, a propensity he labeled effectance motivation

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

effectance motivation concerns our natural active tendency to influence the environment, from which we derive the feeling of efficacy, that is, “the satisfaction that comes with producing effects” (White, 1963, p. 185). For White, competence was the accumulated result of one’s effectance-motivated interactions with the environment.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

According to White (1959, 1963), the development of various competencies, from walking to manipulating symbols to handling objects dexterously, although surely dependent on maturation, also require learning, and such learning requires motivation. The need for competence supplies the energy for this process of learning. And whereas the biological function (the ultimate goal) of effectance-motivated activity may be adaptation, the experiential or proximal aim is often just the spontaneous feeling of competence that comes from producing effects on one’s external or internal environment.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Children, for example, exercise and stretch their competencies simply for the pleasure or satisfaction that the activity provides. In fact, externally applied rewards and reinforcers, under many circumstances, often stifle rather than facilitate this tendency (e.g., Danner & Lonky, 1981; Grolnick & Ryan, 1987; Warneken & Tomasello, 2008).

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

It is not merely the achievement of tangible goods or physical supplies that orients people toward others. Rather, one of the primary goals of behavior is the feeling of belonging and of being significant or mattering in the eyes of others. There is a basic need to feel responded to, respected, and important to others, and, conversely, to avoid rejection, insignificance, and disconnectedness, a fact that applies not just to humans but other primates as well (see de Waal, 2009). Reis (1994) suggested that the core of relatedness across many varied forms of social interactions involves having others respond with sensitivity and care, conveying that one is significant and appreciated.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

The meaning and motives of a great deal of human behavior can be linked, either directly or indirectly, to the need for relatedness, from forms of dress and hygiene to the readiness to engage in social rituals to preoccupations with image, status, or achievement. Out of the need for relatedness, people often behave in ways that are intended to bring them acceptance, approval, and group membership (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). The need to relate or belong is especially critical for understanding people’s tendencies to internalize values and behaviors from their cultures (Ryan & Deci, 2011). Because of the need to feel connected, people take interest in what others believe and do, what others expect of them, so they are in a position to behave in ways that ensure acceptance and involvement.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

For better or for worse, they have a readiness to adopt external views as part of their own psychic makeup. The critical issue, from the SDT perspective, concerns the degree to which such internalized goals and values become integrated as opposed to remaining relatively alien to the self in the form of introjects or external regulations.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Another important and closely related issue within SDT concerns the differentiation between behaviors intended to achieve relatedness and those that actually satisfy this basic psychological need.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

unless the people feel somehow personally acknowledged and affirmed for their actions, the relatedness need will not be fulfilled. People motivated by the need for relatedness may put a life’s worth of effort into looking beautiful, being rich, or doing what modern culture convinces them to do without ever feeling loved for themselves, without having the need for relatedness truly satisfied

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

it is not merely being admired that counts. Rather, people must have the perception that others care for them unconditionally rather than conditionally and that they are accepted for who they are

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

autonomy concerns the regulation of behavior by the self, and, indeed, etymologically it refers to self-regulation. Quite simply, the concept of autonomy is deeply linked to the problem of integration and the feelings of vitality and experiences of wholeness in functioning that accompany it.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Because it is through the regulation of behavior that people access and fulfill other basic needs, both physical and psychological, autonomy has a special status as a need. It is a vehicle through which the organization of personality proceeds and through which other psychological needs are actualized.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

the full satisfaction of competence is enhanced when autonomy is collaterally satisfied.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

people have the experience of relatedness and intimacy especially when others willingly care for them and/or they are willingly connected and caring for the other. Nonautonomous connections do not satisfy this need for relatedness, except in degraded forms.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

autonomy concerns the extent to which people experience their behavior as volitional or as fully self-endorsed, rather than being coerced, compelled, or seduced by forces external to the self.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Actions that people fully “stand behind,” that are experienced as congruent expressions of the self, and that do not involve one part of the personality dominating others, are autonomous actions

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

when people feel that the source for the initiation and regulation of their actions is external to the self—for example, when they merely comply with forces that are pressuring them—then heteronomy or alienation is in evidence.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

When people act with full volition they bring into the action the whole of their resources, interests, and capacities. Congruent actions—those that are integrated and self-endorsed—are functionally distinguishable from more heteronomous states of motivation because the latter entail less access to the person’s cognitive, affective, and physical capacities and thus involve only partial functioning

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

we repeatedly see the functional impact of differences in relative autonomy on cognitive performance, creativity, persistence, and other qualitative aspects of behavior. Autonomous actions more fully engage individuals’ talents, abilities, and energies. In contrast, we show empirically how, when people are motivated for controlled reasons, they often produce lower quality outputs.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

The concept of autonomy as volition and self-endorsement had, prior to SDT, been largely ignored within the landscape of mainstream empirical psychology. In fact, as we reviewed in the previous chapter, the concept has been criticized not only by behaviorists but also by some postmodern and relativist theorists (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991a) and some reductionists (e.g., Hood, 2012).

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Individuals who are autonomous will also, to a significant degree, be dependent in important relationships and interdependent with relevant groups (e.g., Ryan, et al., 2005). Independence does not imply autonomy but, rather, implies being either separate and/or not reliant on others (Ryan & Lynch, 1989; Soenens et al., 2007). Autonomy as volition is as relevant for females as for males, for Easterners as for Westerners, for collectivists as for individualists. It is a basic human issue.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Intrinsic motivation is defined as spontaneous activity that is sustained by the satisfactions inherent in the activity itself, and it is contrasted with activity that is functionally dependent for its occurrence or persistence on separable rewards or reinforcements.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

When not under the pressure of physical need deprivation, people have a primary propensity to seek out novelty and challenges, to explore new environments, and to undertake new adventures, and through these activities to experience interest and gain competence (Deci & Moller, 2005; Ryan & Deci, 2013). Thus one reason we use intrinsic motivation as a criterion for optimal development is that, without intrinsic motivation, developmental processes would be greatly hampered, if not debilitated. In childhood, play, interest, and exploration are intrinsically motivated processes that serve adaptive functions. Yet across the lifespan, intrinsic motivation continues to play a critical role in people’s growth, creativity, vitality, and sense of well-being (Ryan & Moller, 2016).

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

The spontaneous satisfactions that support the intrinsic motivational processes include feelings of autonomy or self-determination and feelings of effectance or competence.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

we review an abundance of research showing the reduction of intrinsic motivation (as well as the creativity, cognitive growth, and quality of engagement that are associated with it) in contexts that fail to support autonomy and do not afford optimal challenges and competence-enhancing feedback. Studies are also reviewed that indicate that contexts absent of relational security lead to preoccupations that interfere with intrinsically motivated activity

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

another essential process in optimal development is the assimilation and self-regulation of social practices and values. This active process of internalization concerns the extent to which people take in practices and regulations from their social groups, transforming them into self-regulations, allowing them to be executed independently and (optimally) volitionally. Whether speaking of values concerning social behavior, work ethics, manners of dress and speech, morality, or other culturally transmitted regulations, internalization is a critical process.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

it determines not only social adjustment but also personal wellness.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

social contexts supportive of basic psychological need fulfillment facilitate the internalization and integration of social values and practices and thus enhance social effectiveness and connectedness

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

By contrast, social environments that are excessively controlling, overchallenging, or rejecting disrupt the natural human tendency toward social internalization and again produce alienation, interpersonal and intrapersonal conflict, and a less full engagement of human potentials.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

The issue of integration concerns two broad problems within the socialization of individuals. One is the problem of accepting and regulating the motivation for doing activities that are not inherently enjoyable and thus not intrinsically motivated. Household chores, work tasks, cultural rituals, obeying laws, and many other types of behavior require internalization and serve as examples of activities that people would likely not do out of intrinsic interest. People will, however, be motivated to do these activities in the service of competence and relatedness—internalizing these practices and values allows people to feel more effective and connected to their social group. Full internalization, however, entails one not only carrying out these activities but doing so volitionally, based in self-valuing of the activity or its outcomes; in such cases, the behaviors, though extrinsically motivated, will be autonomous and better sustained

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Integrating emotions is, in part, a matter of internalizing the regulations that allow people to manage feelings and impulses and find ways to express and harness them. Emotional regulation is thus also a matter of internalization involving experiences of competence, relatedness, and autonomy.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

basic need satisfactions facilitated greater intrinsic motivation and more integrated internalization and effective self-regulation, we also repeatedly found empirically that these same need satisfactions were associated with both lower psychopathology and ill-being and greater attainment of psychological health and wellness.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

Although states of happiness are related to well-being, they by no means ensure it, because they do not, in our view, fully define what it means to be fully functioning or flourishing. Although happiness is often a symptom of wellness

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

true well-being is a state of being able to nondefensively experience events and access one’s capabilities and energies to engage in purposive, valued, and coherent living (Ryan, Deci, & Vansteenkiste, 2016).

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

SDT suggests, in fact, that resistance to control, oppression, and other psychological need deprivations is a function of a natural push from within, something seen in familial, classroom, organizational, political, and cultural contexts alike

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

we described how basic need satisfaction leads to fuller functioning that includes more robust tendencies toward intrinsic motivation, the integration of extrinsic regulations where these are fitting (and rejection of those unfitting), and to greater awareness, vitality, and well-being.

4. Psychological Needs: Varied Concepts and a Preliminary Description of SDT’s Approach

we suggested that the affordance of need supports conduces toward social harmony and identification, which in turn is a source of stability within social systems

5. A Brief History of Intrinsic Motivation

Brown (2009) discussed the role of play in the development of many species and observed: “Of all the animals, humans are the biggest players of all” (p. 58).

5. A Brief History of Intrinsic Motivation

Humans, whose expansive neoteny includes a protracted period of dependency and protected growth, represent the quintessential curious species.

Bookmarks