Richard Ryan || Self-Determination Theory & Human Motivation

today it's great to have richard ryan on the podcast dr ryan is a professor of the institute for positive psychology and education at australian catholic university north sydney and professor emeritus in psychology at the university of rochester dr ryan is a clinical psychologist and co-developer of self-determination theory one of the leading theories of human motivation he is among the most cited researchers in psychology and social sciences today ranking among the top 1 percent of researchers in the field dr ryan has been recognized as one of the eminent psychologists of the modern era listed among the

top 20 most influential industrial organizational psychologists and has been honored with many distinguished career awards his co-author with edward deci of the book self-determination theory basic psychological needs and motivation development and wellness rich it's so great to finally have a sit down and have a chat with you yes scott's great to be here thanks for inviting me my pleasure and you know i want to just go back to kind of trace the development of your thinking and just who you are a little bit you know why how did you get into the field of psychology

in the first place ooh scott you know those kind of questions were always pretty complicated it was a for me it was a circuitous route but i suppose this part would interest you a lot i was a philosophy major when i was an undergraduate and i had a strong interest in phenomenology in particular and issues of freedom and dialectics and so that guaranteed that i was unemployed upon graduation and uh so the result of that was that i was looking for a job and my wife was working in a local facility for developmental disabilities and

she said there's a job for an aide open there and i went there they sent me to the wrong interview and i ended up directing a program for helping people get out of the institution and live independently and that got me really interested in issues of motivation and intervention and that led me to get back into psychology and you did your uh phd in in what like what discipline of psychology i'm a clinical psychological clinical i got my phd at the university of rochester in clinical i was for many years the director of clinical training

at rochester until i went to australia excellent and what was your like dissertation title hmm it was a really boring title i can't tell you what it was but they all are but i was basically testing the idea that ego involvement will undermine your intrinsic motivation so the more your ego's on the line the less you'll be intrinsically motivated so that was my my dissertation now that's really interesting because um that i mean that's a great obvious precursor to the more modern day work that you've done on motivation and so that really did start in

grad school um so who was your who's your advisor well when i started grad school my area was uh clinical neuropsychology so i was doing a lot of work in evoked potential uh research and that was with rafael corman who was a great advisor for me but i converted i guess ed dc and i were running gestalt groups together around the city of rochester at the time and we were you know good friends as clinicians and then we started to talk theory and he was already doing experiments on intrinsic motivation and the two of us

came together so my dissertation really had moved over to uh our beginnings of self-determination theory so you've really known edward dc a long time i didn't even realize it went back to grad school oh no and i've been friends since 1970s so we have a long history together [Music] that is amazing so you know a lot of this well all this stuff this research went came after abraham maslow's passing um as you know as anyone who was in my podcast knows i'm a big fan of abraham maslow in the humanistic psychology era and he you

know really thought a lot about motivation but he never used the expression intrinsic extrinsic right you know he never he never talked about that distinction when did that distinction start to crop up in psychology and uh uh you know who were some of your major influencers early on in your career well i'd say a big influencer and this also applies to dc is richard decharms richard decharms wrote a book in 1968 called personal causation in that book he really describes the difference between feeling like an origin like you're behind and engaged in your behavior versus

a pawn like you're being pushed around by external forces so he was an attribution theorist in the tradition of hyder he was also a psychodynamic thinker i would say he he was a big influencer and he did work on uh he discussed intrinsic motivation and he even discussed the hypothesis that rewards and ego involvement would undermine it although he didn't do much work on that himself uh was really ed who picked up that theme so i would say it was around uh robert white was a big influence on us i once got the opportunity to

meet with robert white and he's you know well known for his idea of affecting his motivation and competence motivation so i'd say between the charms and his ideas about autonomy and robert white and his ideas about competence those are kind of the theoretical forerunners for our work cool and um because you did say you did mention you studied philosophy so i am curious who are some of your uh philosopher influences especially in your thinking about autonomy because that's a topic that well obviously philosophers have been thinking about for a really long time with issues of

free will and uh i'm just curious if you you immersed yourself in the philosophy of mind you know or the existential philosophy literature at all before you you got into even into the field of psychology yeah i'd say that was there before my interest in psychology so i was a and that's awesome college a student of husserl i was really interested in european phenomenology and existentialism and in particular there was you know there's an early phenomenologist whose name is alexander fonder and he did a lot of work on the whole idea of uh what he

called will or self-determination uh from a phenomenological point of view and so he was he was certainly an early influence on me i also was steeped in the philosophy of paul recore who was a later phenomenological existential thinker i had a lot of interest in the work of sartre but also analytic philosophy to some extent the work of harry frankfort on on free will and autonomy has been really important so um self-determination theory i think has always wanted to be well anchored and conversant with its uh with its philosophical underpinnings i think there's too few

theories today that really uh explicitly state their ontologies and epistemologies and i think that's something that we we strongly want to do and this this has been there from the beginning yeah it's that's evident and that's a great that's a great feature so to say so to speak of of your self-determination theory um even before we we get into the nuts and bolts of the theory and um things surrounding that i want to stay on the philosophy topic for a second because this is a topic that very much interests me you know i had a

i had a two-part series debate with sam harris for this podcast about uh free will and do you follow sam harris at all have you ever i don't that's fine well that's you're excused for that but he uh he he he's very much uh believes we don't have free will um it's usually a straw man argument it's usually a definition of free will that no one would ever want anyway so so i'm pretty skeptic about anybody who argues the free will idea because they usually set up some kind of ridiculous model of what free will

would look like like there's no prior causes there's no prior thought there's no prior input right it has to come x nilio and of course no events in the universe happen that way so they win if that's what free will is they win yeah i hear you brother i hear your brother well there's a definition there is a certain definition one could propose as he does that you know he's right in in in that sense in the sense he's talking about but i do think there's a there's a free will worth wanting i think that

the kind of uh self-determination you talk about in your research is a free will with one i think daniel dennett you know the the philosopher of mind who is uh is a compatibilist would agree you know uh with that is so i do want to know like your conceptualization of self-determination like what is it you know before we get to the nuts and bolts of the needs and and the nuances of the theory let's just talk about self-determination for a sec because i think that's an interesting in its in of itself of what does that

mean among humans what are we doing translated into some other terms like self-regulation you know self-determination is when you know what you're doing is something that you feel that you're regulating and in other words that you're also a behavior that you stand behind or self-endorse this is why it aligns with the phenomenological view of self-determination because when you act with self-determination you're acting in a way where you're willing to do it and you do it volitionally and therefore you can be wholeheartedly engaged in what you're up to so in in kind of that briefest form

self-determination is true volition true volition so there's a lot of things that can arise that can pull me away from uh or even fool me into thinking i'm i'm i volition when i when i really don't i'm fascinated with the phenomenon of colts you know and i'm fascinated with a phenomenon of a mind control so i guess you can have external coercion and you can have you could have internal coercion you know people with ocd you know people with lots of things a lot of competing you know psychopathologies and things that are they're inner um

taking them away from yeah you know i would say their higher self so so i think that and you're maybe they're yeah you're just right scott which is it's not parallel to the distinction between internal and external because you can have heteronomous forces that are within you can have your own interjects you can have your own internalized stigmas and pressures and biases that actually take you away from self-determination and autonomy so the the threats to autonomy are not just external they're also internal yeah and carl rogers talked about that introjection i think is the phrase

he used yeah so that's certainly the case so yeah yeah i'm sorry awesome no that's awesome do you use it as adapt adapting it from carl rogers or just a coincidence no actually you know car rogers also adapted it from where i did which is from psychoanalytic theory uh when we talk about an interject you're talking about a partially assimilated uh internalization uh and uh and rogers meant it in the same way um you know if we if i was to trace it where i got the term from it would be from my psychoanalytic training

and particularly from the work of roy shaffer who really did talk about a continuum of motivations um not too dissimilar from what we did but you know we adopted it without the same psychoanalytic assumptions this is great okay so can you tell our listeners a little bit uh can you go through the motivational continuum let's start with like just going through the motions when you think about uh any action you have when you ask people why are you doing what you're doing there's a whole variety of answers people might give one answer might be i'm

being forced to do it or compelled to do it by forces that are outside me um that would be you know coercion and it would be a form of being externally regulated they're making me do it um i i could also be seduced into doing something with a carrot that's riding in front of me or a reward i'm now doing it for the reward so it's still an external force that's driving me but here it's in a repetitive force we call both of those external regulation that's when your motivation is dependent on either the external

pressure or the external rewards that are out there and if those weren't there your motivation would go away uh the another kind of motivation is well why are you doing that well because i think i should or i'd feel bad about myself if i didn't or you know my uh i feel proud of myself if i do this thing we call those things interjection because those are internal rewards and punishments that are driving your behavior the fear of anxiety or shame or uh the ego boost of uh of uh you know inflating yourself by feeling

really great um those things are also motivating forces that we call interjection and they're not very autonomous either because we can be pushed around just as you were just saying uh by those interjects you know my shoulds can make me do a lot of things that are not really what i value still again we can do things because we're valuing them we actually believe in them so you know i might do something like collect money for a cause i care about it's no fun it's not interesting but i truly value it so i volitionally and

willingly do it and we would call this identification because you're identified with your goal and your aim in that case and that's also very volitional and highly autonomous and finally you know we talk about intrinsic motivation now we're doing this is when you do something just because it's inherently enjoyable and interesting to you to do so it's also fully volitional and so you can see here we move from being externally controlled all the way up to being fully volitional and this is why we call it a continuum of autonomy but it has lots of way

stations along the line of different types of motives uh they'll further you up on that continuum in your motivation the better the outcomes typically are the higher your well-being the better your performance uh the more congruent you are in action the less conflicted so you know many good things happen from being more on the more autonomous end of that motivational continuum cool thank you thank you for explaining that um and then you have like a a test that like people like employees and companies can take to like or or is it sort of do you

have you developed any instruments well we yeah we've developed a lot of instruments and some of them are for research use uh you know because our research instruments tend to be longer and because they have to get through the gauntlet of of the psychometrics journals demand but then we do a lot of work in industry and there we use things that are really practical measures you know i have a company that i started with scott rigby that's called motivation works and in there we measure what we call motivation quality very quickly with employees but it's

basically asking them what are the drivers of your work on your job and to the extent that they're more external you see lower quality motivation less you know more absenteeism more you know less less good organizational behavior poor performance you see the opposite the more people are really intrinsically motivated and identified with their work goals wonderful wonderful uh the one one question i wanted to ask you um on about this motivational continuum was uh samir nurah muhammad's work at penn he's found that a great motivating force and i have found this personally my life a

great motivating force is uh the underdog uh narrative um feeling like you have something to prove to someone who doesn't who doesn't believe in you but you still believe in yourself you know um and i was wondering where is that on the motivational continuity i mean that's probably like an extra extrinsic i put it right in there as an introject i'm gonna show them so now you know you're being reactive plus you're also trying to live up to a standard that's really being externally defined in that case uh you know this is like but it

feels so good but it feels so good to crush your competition once who doesn't believe in you uh it may it seems like a pretty empty goal i mean if that's if that's the kind of basis of somebody's overall motivation i think then it's pretty limited as a goal you know like i would rather not have somebody become a phd in psychology because they want to prove to their mom that they're good i'd rather that they loved the field of psychology and cared about the content of that field that they were more concerned with their

understanding of the field than the grades that they got or the credentials they attained i mean these these kind of i'm not saying that those are not motivating goals but they're kind of an impoverished form of motivation because the goal is pretty superficial and then it can be pretty easily undermined i've been on the search for the perfect mattress for the past few years and let me tell you i've gone through so many mattresses my friends have made fun of me because for so long i didn't actually own a mattress i just went through so

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kind of fu attitude from within i mean it's the only thing that saved me ryan you know i mean it's the only thing that saved me to be like you know what i'm going to prove to them that i do have some kind of intelligence now i do agree that a more mature you know intrinsic to the right of your continuum someday you know you want to morph and and and which i did thank thankfully i don't still feel like i need to prove anything to anybody but but i do think as a child it

served it served its purpose well you know again i'm not going to argue that it's not a motivation it is it sits in the middle of our continuum it's something that shows some uh some some energizing functions but think about it scott wouldn't it have been better had you had people who actually did care about uh where you were headed believed in you supported you for that growth i mean there would have been a much nicer motivational path to the same outcomes uh than the the one that you outlined and i'm not saying that you

had to compensate for some bad motivational circumstances and honestly i don't know because um samir's research and i'd love to i'd love to send you this paper that samir just published this paper he's at warden he actually contrasted two motivations uh narratives one is the underdog but the other is the favorite narrative which is like people always believed in me and you know and then i made it and he found that the underdog one like increased performance better than than the other one so that kind of like turns on its head a little bit you

know the the narratives we tell ourselves you know maybe some are i can believe that in a short-term experiment i can believe that or i i i totally get it as a dynamic i don't think it's a sustainable dynamic making a living and uh being being really engaged in your field if it's if it's all about your ego proving i think it's it's gonna not sustain itself did you see the last dance by any chance no i didn't michael jordan has is known for uh of course you know michael jordan is right yeah he is

known for creating imaginary uh foes to to keep him sustained so to him i would i was again i'd push back at certain contexts maybe like nba sports you know like it might be sustainable to like keep like you know being like i'm gonna prove i'm gonna prove them wrong you know it might be might be actually i don't think you'd explain michael jordan's persistence and success by that motive he doesn't create a game for himself and doesn't you know pump himself up in these ways those sound like ways to get himself intrinsically motivated to

present himself with challenge to um but i i i i can't imagine that that would be a a basis for the career michael jordan you'd be surprised but i do think that like not maybe not that alone like he obviously does have intrinsic love for the game and yeah i mean without the intrinsic love for the the game you know it seems like hard to be sustainable um i mean can't you have like multiple of these motives at once uh actually our self-termination model says you almost always do so you know when i'm involved in

my work you know to some extent it's intrinsically motivated to some extent it's coming out of value to some extent i'm interjected and need to do well and you know beat myself up if i wrote a poor article so you know you have multiple motives always going and what we look at is where's the relative's autonomy in that you know because it's a balance of those things but they certainly coexist and they coexist within every almost within every act you know that's hardly humans are messy pure interest yeah yeah and we have multiple motives usually

um going and uh but when some become predominant it can undermine the quality of our overall actions and i don't doubt that you know people pump themselves up for little uh ego games like that i don't think it's if that's where your main motivation is sitting it's not going to end up in a high quality motivation over time okay so let's go into some of your uh the needs the major needs of self-determination theory and how you selected them you know why they make the cut well you know we didn't start out with a theory

of basic psychological needs we started out with a narrower theory of what are the things that facilitate or undermine intrinsic motivation and we found that context that supported people's autonomy and supported people's feelings of competence were the things that really drove intrinsic motivation and then when we started to look at internalization and what are the things that lead people to deeply internalize the values of their culture the people around them it was feeling of autonomy that they you know are autonomy supported that they could feel competent to do the things that um were being asked

of them and then third that they felt closely connected to others so autonomy competence and relatedness popped out really strongly for the basis of internalization and as we were studying these things that feed into high quality motivation all of our studies were showing that when you had autonomy competence and relatedness you also had high well-being all the indices of flourishing and that's when we started to move toward a theory of basic needs that a full functioning person is is has their volition has that sense of efficacy and feels socially connected and uh propositive in what

they're doing so those things congeal in a full functioning person so those they seem like necessary conditions for wellness and so you know as we've looked in settings like workplaces classrooms uh health clinics uh psychotherapy settings we see all three of those needs really being potent drivers of the wellness outcomes that are there so i i can say really empirically we came to these as three basic needs but there's also a deductive portion of it sdt is what we call an organismic theory it grows out of the organismic psychological tradition and in that you know

when you think about what is a healthy organism it's organism that's moving in the direction of differentiation and integration which means that it's moving in direction of greater self-regulation of autonomy and greater effectiveness in its environment and if it's a social organism greater integration so those three concepts autonomy competence and relations fall deductively out of organismic thinking as well as inductively out of what we found in all of our research on motivation how much did you sort of consult maslow's writings on basic the basic needs and uh um you know yeah like there's no self-actualization

as a specific need in your theory and uh just wondering if like did you consider any of his well i think organismic theory says that there's an inherent and propensity towards integration which is very close to the self-actualization idea and certainly roger's idea of self-actualization was also an integrative idea so i think there are some parallel ideas over there um you know for myself you know maslow was a an author i read as a kid so you know because i was i'm so much older except for me he was like a a person i read

as a teenager and i wouldn't say he wasn't influential but he was influential more in the sense of like pointing to possibilities in the field uh then in terms of formal theory um you know i i very much think that the humanistic spirit in focusing on self-actualization has some kinship with sdt's idea of an active individual who's moving in a direction of integration all the time so there are similarities i agree i agree and i i think the integration piece is so essential i was wondering how you incorporate the integration piece into self-determination theory because

one could have um you know could score high in in the the needs for relatedness competence autonomy um but still not be particularly integrated as a whole human right i don't think that's so um you know again when we're thinking about need satisfaction if i think about a setting in which somebody has all three of those needs setting it's almost by definition that they're integrated in their functioning there because if i have those needs satisfied that means i'm pursuing the things that matter to me that i value that interests me so i have volition i

have connection and social support because i have the relatedness and i'm feeling efficacious you know i can't see in that anything other than a pretty integrated person are there any needs that that you're considering uh adding to the picture um yeah i'll just ask that question have you ever you know considered you know we've always had an open list so you know we we came out with a tentative theory of uh three basic needs uh by the early 90s we were sort of in that place and we've always kept the list open for people to

nominate other things uh one of my former students tim casser at one time tried to put security into the list but as we as we looked at the need for security we found it kind of in line with with maslow's thinking here it's really a deficit need it's really something that rears its head when you don't have it but if you have it it's not very prominent and it's not all that enhancing so it doesn't predict wellness it's kind of like a necessary but not sufficient condition for some things to happen in your life so

security was one that we tried to bring in to meet criteria but didn't meet those criteria more recently of frank martella from finland uh joined our group in rochester when i was still there and i thought he was interested in benevolence and altruism as a possible basic psychological need and i will say you know exploring that the evidence has shown really how much of a wellness enhancer benevolence is when people act with benevolence they are typically doing so autonomously so they're satisfying their autonomy need they're typically feeling effective so they're getting some competence needs they're

connecting with people but they're also getting some kind of warm glow of benevolence which has its own unique effect on wellness and and we found that over and over again so although benevolence doesn't fit all the criteria we have for what a basic need is it certainly is an enhancement a wellness enhancer and it's a big part of how people find meaning in life so yeah i would agree with that i i i support adding adding that to your list um i i don't know uh if you if you have heard uh about my book

transcend that came out uh recently i have i have i i'd love to send you a copy and uh perhaps we could compare contrast and really nerd out someday um and get in the weeds in a way that our listeners probably don't want to listen to right now but but you know my tendency is always to nerd out my tendency is always to nerd out so you know you have to stop me when i go there oh i love it oh no i mean that's my that's my tendency too and uh i'd love to uh

maybe just discuss with you some uh needs that i've added that that aren't in your theory um and maybe uh you know you have good reasons for that and you know maybe i need to rethink things maybe you need you need to rethink things who knows um but um uh one thing that i was really excited about the benevolence thing is i did add that as a separate need from the need for connection um i did separate those out in my my revised hierarchy of needs um and i've been developing a scale with my colleagues

called the light triad scale i don't know if you've come across that at all um it's a great idea as opposed to the dark triad yeah exactly have you come across it at all and i have not scott so you'll have to i'll send you i'll send you that i'll send you that paper um and yeah i think that really does capture more well we call it a benevolent orientation you know towards others i don't know if you've seen uh we have a meta-analysis that shows that uh pro-social you know behavior and anti-social behavior are

strongly predicted in meta-analyses by autonomy and control so when people have autonomy they tend to be pro-social we think of that as the default in human nature and under controlled circumstances they tend to be more anti-social and i think it fits with this this overall idea did you know that every year us businesses waste billions of dollars because bad writing causes confusion misses the mark or just takes too long to get to the point on the flip side better writing always helps businesses win and impress customers enhance brand perception improve internal communication and strengthen relationships

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would i would propose hum and i say this humbly i have the utmost of respect for your work but i think maybe it'd be nice to consider adding the need for exploration as i as i add in my revised hierarchy of needs um in in your model because we do find that is a separate need let me just say a couple things about that though i mean i i'm happy to consider all needs but problem with calling something like exploration a basic need is it it's really something that happens in certain domains and times that

it doesn't cut across all of the types of things we typically explain with basic needs when people are in an exploratory mode they're typically getting a high satisfaction of the need for competence when they're truly an exploratory mode they have a lot of volition behind that and so there's a lot of already basic need satisfaction going on and exploration and so to have it be its own basically you'd have to say well exploration is part of all the different behaviors people engage in and it's not i think it is all of those and i think

that's i think i could make a case that it is okay um my colleague colin deyoung and i are rang a paper well it's taking a long time to finish it but the how why the need for exploration is i mean it's it's aimless it's aimless in a lot of ways in a goalless and i would actually i would actually argue that it's uh separate uh clearly distinct from the need for competence and mastery and and i would even go so far and i know you're going to totally disagree with me on this and it's

totally fine please feel free to disagree on anything i say but i i would actually make the case that the need for competence is tied to to ego and self-esteem uh and uh yeah it is if it's uh controlled competence hmm in other words if you could distinguish what's driving my competence is the kind of ego involvement we were talking about before then indeed indeed but there can be a more so you think so you could distinguish between a more exploratory form of mastery competence from an ego form yeah yeah i don't think so you

know again it gets back to what what's motivating your uh your activity there [Music] very interesting um and yeah so well let's talk about self-esteem because i do actually posit the need for self-esteem as its own thing and i've read i've read great papers you've written on this arguing why um you didn't include self-esteem in your model yeah and i think you've made great points you know they're very wise and very buddhist way of thinking about it and i was wondering if you could unpack a little bit um why you didn't include self-esteem in your

model and then maybe i could try to defend why i why i did in my model but i'd love to hear some of you thinking about that well self-esteem gets used in some different ways um when you but typically you measure self-esteem your ass you're you're getting it's a positive self-concept that people have and there's no doubt that you know it's good to have that positive view of yourself and your social relations that gets measured with self-esteem measures but if you have if you're engaged in life in a way that has autonomy if you feel

connectedness with other people if you feel effective at what you're doing you have self-esteem but that means it's a derivative it's an outcome of these other satisfactions that we have in life but if you're motivated to get self-esteem we call that ego involvement i mean why am i concerned about how i'm being uh evaluated or how i'm am i good or am i bad just the very fact of entering into those questions and those comparisons has moved me you know away from a more autonomous kind of functioning but when i'm functioning well i'm not one

i mean when a person is functioning well they're not wondering how how am i doing how do i compare to the others am i great those questions don't even come up because you are feeling good so self-esteem is a is an evaluative stance with respect to yourself i mean this is one view of it and that's not a basic need it grows out of certain kind of social situations and sometimes it's actually a harmful problem to be focused on self-esteem yeah this is a really interesting question motivation versus need i mean i think i try

to make the case that i do believe self-esteem is a need it is a fundamental need you see you see a catastrophic failures depression etc with very low levels of self-esteem so certain certain minimum threshold it seems to be required of a healthy self-esteem versus a narcissistic self-esteem um but also i include the need for safety in my model because i think it's a need but i actually i very much take your point i think it's an excellent point about if you're if your primary motivation is self-esteem and that that does maybe connote a sense

of disintegration in the system to a certain degree so i'd absolutely agree with that um and it actually raised an interesting question about individual differences something i'm interested in very much you know people could have uh even in all three of your needs some people people very dramatically the extent to which they want uh connections you know in their lives or people very dramatic extent they want autonomy and competence so um you know what what have you found in from an individual different perspective are there thing ones that like are the better better predictors of

of things in life than others you know from a variation perspective well the first thing is that people will vary in terms of their self-reported preference or care about autonomy relatedness or competence one of the good things about sdt is it's a functional theory it says it doesn't matter whether you like or care about those things if you don't have them you show the deterioration functioning associate the theory predicts or and when you do have them even if you say it doesn't matter to me having them enhances your wellness so this is a functional theory

rather than a preference theory and we even show that preferences don't really change those results much there's no interaction between getting your needs met and predicting wellness and whether that's what you thought you wanted um so you know there's that i think that's really important because when we're thinking about needs we're not talking about people's values we're talking about the requirements they have to be full function by the way just decide can i tell you one quick side story oh please yeah of course of course it was somewhere around 19 i'm going to say 72

that you know because you asked me about maslow i had read some of his books at the time i had dropped out of college and i was living up in cambridge and just reading a lot and you know working in factories i was a factory wrecker at the time and i read one of maslow's books and i thought oh he's at brandeis i will go see him because you know i was a kid and i didn't know any better so i went to over to brandeis and i went to his office and i knocked on

his door and somebody saw me knocking on his door and they said oh you know dr maslow's passed away so i never got to talk to him and recently somebody said to me you know if you had gotten in what would you have asked and i thought gee you know i wonder i have no idea what my young 21 year old mind would have asked at the time but i i clearly had questions for him so you know he wasn't that he was a figure in my mind yeah i love that i love that i

love that you're 21 yourself really liked abraham maslow and i uh that's wonderful um well um you know what about the higher needs well how come there aren't higher needs in your um in your model like um like the need for self transcendence or uh all or maybe it's because they're not needs you know what they're not they can be outcomes of integration however in other words you know sdt is an organismic theory it says that the fullest functioning organism is an integrated one um and a lot of these things that we see in what

you're you're calling higher needs are really highly integrated people who you know are pursuing the things that matter to them but you have you certainly have a lot of people who are high in competence autonomy and relatedness um who aren't motivated by transcendence uh this is maslow's point he actually the end of his life he distinguished between two kinds of self-actualizers uh transcending self-actualizers and non-transcending self-actualizers you probably won't like this scott but i actually think that that part of the era of humanistic psychology did humanistic psychology in the split transpersonal and transcendence versus mainstream

humanistic psychology i think really hurt that field and that's not to to in any way this uh value devalue the the idea of transcendence but it became so central in some people's minds that they kind of kicked out the rogerians and the other non-transcendent humanistic psychologists i don't know if you know about the fights at the journal of humanistic psychology and all of that stuff that happened at that time but it was a sad moment i think for the movement of humanistic psychology which you know i was not a part of i'm only saying this

as a historical number it wasn't just a pretty picture um what he was doing at the end of his career okay without uh there goes my book there's my book translation no it doesn't take away at all from the importance of that topic i'm gonna be saying that um you know it's a it's a piece of a larger puzzle of a healthy organism but when you make it and i i agree and uh that i think that they put so much stress on that and there were some more empirically minded psychologists who just couldn't go

there and they lost them from the movement yeah i see i really do see what you're saying and um yeah i try to go to the great pains to distinguish between healthy transcendence and unhealthy transcendence and healthy transcendence is very much about integrating all the other needs before you try to kind of jump jump to you know being enlightened you know the i'm enlightened and you're not effect that's narcissism not transcendence you know you know i've done a lot of work and not just me but people in sdt have done a lot of work on

the issue of mindfulness and how mindfulness relates to full functioning people i don't think of mindfulness as transcendence i think of it as being here now i think of mindfulness as really being deeply aware of what's going on in the current moment and in touch with both your interstates and with what's going on outside transcendence doesn't describe that awareness describes that i think awareness is is hugely important to autonomy you cannot be autonomous unless you first have awareness and so mindfulness you know for us plays a kind of is the ground out of which autonomy

best grows i like that you know as like it's definitely a grounding skill to have and it definitely does ground me and has been a saver a lifesaver for me in many instances true for me too you know i've had a my own involvement in in a zen practice now for some 30 years and you know really you know happy when i met uh kirk brown who brought mindfulness into the sdt framework uh in a pretty direction so i think it's been important for our um theorizing i agree and and and self-determination theory i mean

uh major kudos the extent to which has pervaded many other areas of psychology and and has in uh shown its implications in wide swaths of society so i thought uh for this latter part of our interview can i go down some domains of life and kind of talk to me about the implications so rule one relationships i mean this is one right now during covet i think that people are are very much lacking in that need i feel like that need is frustrated you know can you talk a little about um some work you've done

on uh self-determination theory and in that domain the first thing i want to say is we've been collecting a lot of data on need satisfaction during covet a lot of this work grows out of the group that's in ghent belgium so we have a lot of work on the belgian population around need satisfaction on a day-to-day basis really over uh the pandemic and the relatedness need is really hurting in a lot of people and particularly young people and so when you look at you know you asked before about why are people kind of breaking out

not following social distancing rules a lot of it is related to need frustration and particularly in a group of people in a period of life where relatedness is huge and uh so um you know first we've seen that a lot so um but anyway what was your question that was a sign well no how does sdt deal with relationships you know what are the implications of of std in the domain of relationships well you know sdt has organized a series of mini theories the latest of those mini theories uh the sixth of them is called

relationship motivation theory and so it's really an explanation of what what are the ingredients of a high quality relationship and one of the things we argue in sdt is you can it's not just warmth closeness being nice being supportive those things don't make for an intimate relationship there also has to be autonomy support it has to be a care about the self of the other and an interest in the promotion of this has got to be kind of an agopic theme within a relationship for it to be super high quality and that's what our data

shows which is that it's only in autonomy support of relationships that you have true intimacy and you know this is kind of suggested in some other theories of relationships but sdt makes it explicit and looks at the way in which controlling motives are controlling tendencies and ego involvements really really do create problems in relationships and just want to credit here particularly chip knees work at university of houston because he's done a lot of great work in this area this idea of autonomy supportive environments is um has really pervaded the literature greatly especially in the workplace

i i see it everywhere in the workplace literature which is um exciting you know that more people are talking about that um did you uh what did you think of dan pink's book drive well you know dan came when he wrote drive he came to rochester to interview ed and me he spent a few days wonderful that's how he got the basis for that book um you know the book basically explicates autonomy competence and he uses the term purpose as opposed to relatedness so he has autonomy i think his autonomy mastery purpose are the three

things he comes away with uh but you know he took away relationships yeah but i took that away i um you know it's become a very popular view people often times will sort of say with your pink's theory of this oh that's ridiculous so i get a little tweaked on that but i actually really appreciate dan's work on this because he helped popularize and he helped bring some of the message of this research to the organizational field and we want that you know so i think popular writers play a huge role in helping translate nerdy

academic work like ours and self-determination theory into the practical world so i totally appreciate the book drive yeah because it's really um it's become a it was a popular book and it was it had a lot of implications for the workplace a lot of people adopted in the workplace i'm just wondering in your own your own world your own research you know how much do you intersect with uh the workplace do you do you do consulting personally oh yeah ongoingly actually i started a company in 2003 with scott rigby who was a former phd student

and we still write together on issues of mindfulness and uh or and human relations kind of things but scott i started a company called motivation works we measure the motivational climate or the work climate within companies uh we we do interventions to help managers become more autonomy supportive so you know very much so were always on the front lines of that kind of work and it's hugely important because you know we spend so much of our time in our workplaces and uh there should be places for thriving and uh they can be under the right

right circumstances yeah i feel like a lot of i fear that a lot of workplace is still a very outdated model of what it takes to motivate people intrinsically they're not they're not thinking how can we motivate people intrinsically i feel like they're not a lot of a lot of companies aren't even even thinking of that question there's like how do we motivate people yeah i think this is relates to some of the findings we have in sdt though when people are put under controlling pressures they often respond with controlling solutions for the people who

are around them and so you see within organizations a lot of times when you have a controlling manager they'll even say well it's not the way i want to be but they're making me and they point up above you see this kind of downhill uh control thing going so you know changing uh company climate is a big test because you have to do it at multiple levels of the company you can't just be you know go in here and tweak one manager it's a it's about a whole climate it's not an atmosphere and uh whole

culture yeah well this uh segways into a topic i'm very much interested in education and uh and educational culture talk about you know designing a system to get the worst out of people we've that's what we've done in our american education system and around the world um yeah have you uh sorry what do you say i said really around the world i mean yes in the u.s but yes elsewhere too yeah for sure for sure but there's so many clear implications of your theory for the young adulthood identity development self-esteem and their authenticity um you

know all things that we don't uh focus on developing was in students that we we we should um yeah so what are some of your thoughts on uh those linkages well just the first thing is is that you know if we had a goal for schools their context of development and you'd want them to be places where children are helped to flourish to become all that they can be later and and to be able to discover what matters to them and to develop the tools so they can pursue it that's not at all the way

schools are framing their goals they're talking about get more stem students get high achievement scores on the standardized tests for um you know they they've really lost the threat of what what are the values and the goals that we should have in a place where we put our children for multiple hours every day and you know to me the goal of school is to create a an interested engaged and enabled an empowered student and the factors that would go into that are quite different than the ones that we're currently using which are focused around evaluations

grades and social comparisons that's for that's for that's for darn sure um well i mean what what what can we do look you know how can we uh promote this more in schools no i think one of the values of psychological research is we are looking at the techniques that teachers can do within classrooms that can make them more motivating and engaging places for students but then you know teachers can only do that if they themselves have the support and the room for autonomy to create those kind of engaging atmospheres so that you know the

research really shows when you've got autonomy support from your principal you can be a more engaging teacher when that principal has autonomy support from their superintendent they can have a better school climate and superintendents need of course the support from their boards and from their governments we have a lot of dumb policies in place in the united states and australia and in a lot of countries that have high stakes standardized testing being that gauge by which schools are judged and this drives the worst kind of classroom behavior because it has everybody focused on a very

narrow outcome and then they have to use controlling means to get students to to meet those outcomes and everybody loses in that task so what can we do we can change policy we can get rid of high stakes standardized testing right now there's no value to it in any school pearson should be embarrassed that they do these things because what's happening with high stakes standardized testing is it it by putting high stakes behind these outcomes it leads schools to be more pressuring of students in a way that doesn't help them learn so we're spoiling the

very ingredients of positive learning by having these imposed score goals stem this focus on stem everyone must be a stem student well i'm sorry but if you look around the world humans are a diverse lot and we need all kinds of people with all kinds of different skills and driving everybody down a narrow road for college prep and science courses is really a way of damaging the self-esteem and the motivation and the engagement of so many of our students you know we have to get off of these fetishes there's not enough stem jobs for all

the people we graduate now but even more so there's a lot of things that students aren't learning in school that would really help them navigate life better and instead we're focused on giving them yet another calculus course before they leave high school i i don't see these things as being well thought through in terms of social policy yeah it's a good point i i i i do think that that statistic basic statistics should be mandatory for everyone though because you see a lot of people with with no training in stem whatsoever um making lots of

outlandish claims and that does impact everyone you know you know in this climate today why you know it's so basic because we face them every day so that's a practical skill because you're reading statistics every day in the newspaper learning about basic financial skills would be great in high school i'm learning about things that you actually use in mathematics would be great for a lot of students who aren't going that same college stem route we're forgetting about the fact that schools should be places that help students grow and develop the skills they need in life

and instead we're focusing them on the things that industry told somebody at some point they wanted that's not a way to organize our educational worlds yeah yeah so we could probably agree on the basics like basic scientific reasoning i think is important to a certain degree yeah um but but no i hear you we're we're robbing people these kids have their autonomy um and that's in the service of trying to get them the highest scores on their stem tests we're driving out the arts we're driving out the music we're driving out the things right bring

kids to school and have them feel at home and engaged uh you know we're over testing them we're drilling we're just doing all the things that motivation research now for three decades or four decades has been telling us is backfiring and the results are are clear i mean this experiment has been going on for 30 years the high stakes standardized testing experiment and it's an utter failure by anybody's measurement i challenge anybody who hears this broadcasted tell me any positive evidence they have for how high-stakes standardized testing has helped our schools our children our teachers

or anybody there is no evidence there is no value there's just a way of testing companies making money and spoiling the cultures of our schools hmm i don't have a strong opinion look i'm right there with you there needs to be a major overhaul oh man have you have you made contact with the field of positive education you know um there's these yeah and and you know in i'd love to get your thoughts what what do you think of positive psychology in the field because you're not actually you didn't like start off in like positive

psychology yet you've you found yourself in in the field of positive psychology i mean people in the field love you you know and they talk about you all the time and they they incorporate what you're doing into the work they're doing so i was just wondering you know what what you're thinking is of that the emergence of that field for positive psychology and in sydney you're right is that right is that right okay the institute at uh australian catholic university is called the institute for positive psychology and education that's and that's our okay oh that's

cool wow very good you know but you did but you know what i'm saying yeah sdt was around before the movement called positive psychology began so we were i think we already had as our central question what are the things that help people flourish and that is the same central question that positive psychology asks and so indeed i think we have a lot of relationships to the scholarship and the activities of people who are in positive psychology i don't identify as a positive psychologist because i'm also a clinician i'm interested in psychopathology and human degradation

and human oppression both sides of this coin not just the flourishing but also what are the harms how are we doing harms to people and self-determination theory is really a theory about both aspects of that it's it gives explanations for the etiology of various mental distress and disorders it also gives a map of how to help people flourish and what they need to be at their best absolutely you talk about the factors that promote healthy psychological and behavioral functioning how can self-determination help bring peace to the world reduce aggression increase altruism and bring out the

best in humans well we've moved a lot recently in the direction of looking at what we call pervasive environments and their effect on people so how do the political structures and economic structures of the world have an impact on people's well-being through their basic psychological needs so just an instance of this is that if you have a country where the wealth is distributed really unequally we find that well-being is lower controlling even for overall wealth and we see that in there that's because wealthy inequality has an impact on people's perceptions of autonomy and competence and

relatedness it directly impacts their sense of the people around them their competitiveness with them and it has an impact on well-being so we we're asking the question a lot now what kind of political and economic structures are the best at fulfilling people's basic psychological needs and therefore producing well-being and you know some of the findings have to do with the perception that you have rights and uh and privileges within a society and that you're not stigmatized and you're not excluded these things matter a lot to people's well-being again through their basic psychological needs again the

distribution of wealth matters a lot so i you know i think when we're trying to look at how can we create a good society we have to look at both macro structures and family structures both it's not just you know the local proximal influences on that and so changing the world yeah i mean it's by trying to hold public policies and forms and structures to the criteria of are they good at meeting basic psychological needs man the world needs this so much right now help save the world rich help save the world yeah well i

think we're all trying to do that and i think i think it does matter you know sdt is a is a a theory about change and it's we've always aimed to be very practical so one of the good things about the theory is it's not just oh these are things predict outcomes but we also have interventions to help increase relatedness to help increase autonomy to help increase feelings of competence um and you know ideas about how to make that actually happen in life and of course you know if a theory doesn't really make a difference

to society then why have it uh i mean i've had some some professors who are very pure pure scientists who argue uh the opposite they'll say a good scientist actually shouldn't get involved in in uh applying their work they should just try to do the best science they can do so i i've heard it from both ends you know i i can get that if you're uh if you're an astrophysicist but if you're a medical scientist don't you care about the implications of your findings aren't you trying to find the cure to this problem or

that problem if you're a psychological scientist isn't it about the state of human beings that your inquiry is concerned so it's not a neutral science even if you think you're being neutral when it has no practical value then you're using up society's resources for something that may have no practical value um so i i can't agree with that i i think in the human sciences we're asking questions that have import for human humanity and we don't have all that much time to be fooling around either yeah yeah i mean that could stay the second race

and look at what we're leaving the next generation so we have to solve some of these problems now and we need to definitely feel that urgency we're doing that yeah yeah i definitely feel that urgency too and i mean that's my own bent as well but i'm just telling you like in grad school and various points in my life when i've wanted to apply my work i've gotten pushback from uh you know from academics you know saying that that's not my business um so i mean it's refreshing to hear what you're saying but i'm just

letting you know that's not the the pervasive view well the place that you leave your values out is when you're doing that basic research you try and bring a dispassionate critical eye to that and i believe that in sdt we do that it's not that we judge everything with a value lens it's in your basic research you apply the scientific method which means you think seriously about your data you're self-critical in it but when you think about the purposes of why we do any of our work you're going to leave values out of it i

i i don't understand that as a life position yeah i hear you um you look you've done so much you and you've applied this std theory to such diverse environments we already talked about work organizations education but you've also applied to health sport and exercise domain video games virtual environments can you tell me what you're uh really excited about right now that you're working on i know that you have a neuro lab so you really get into neuroscience work tell me whatever to ending this interview that you're really excited about right now they were well

you know as you say you know we work on both the mechanistic end so we're interested in the uh neurological underpinnings of autonomous behavior and of close relationships so that's what we're doing in our labs at sydney but on the other end we're interested in the macro structures how economic structures and how wealth distribution uh social policies affect people's well-being too so uh and everything in between so you know one of the things i think the values have a broad theory like sdts it allows you to ask questions at every level of analysis but it

also then demands that you find evidence at every level of analysis that can be coordinated in with the spirit of consilience and i you know i think that's our drive so um i think my problem scott is i'm interested in too much my problem too brother i'm pretty passionate about a lot of things uh within uh within the field but right now we're just finishing uh the uh new oxford handbook of self-determination theory research uh great i'm just finishing with all the chapters in it there's 55 chapters in that book all on different topics associated

with self-determination theory reading those over what i'm really excited about is that there's a community out there of you know hundreds and hundreds of psychologists who are using sdt in earnest and who are becoming better experts in all the subject areas than me or ed or anybody else who's been there so what i'm excited about is that there's a new generation of self-determination theories who are a lot smarter than me i love that i really appreciate your humility and i appreciate just your legendary work in the field there's no there's no other way of putting

it it was a true honor and delight for me to chat with you today and i just want to thank you so much for being on my podcast thanks scott thanks for having me love to come back sometime especially after i read the dream and this book cause uh then we then we can uh have a discussion in detail and nerd out about all that now now that would be so much fun so uh yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna get that shipped out to you and and we can run it for that task thanks thanks

rich that's great thanks for listening to this episode of the psychology podcast if you'd like to react in some way to something you heard i encourage you to join in the discussion at the psychologypodcast.com that's the psychologypodcast.com thanks for being such a great supporter of the show and tune in next time for more on the mind brain behavior and creativity [Music] [Music] you