SDT 2023: Opening Address - Richard M. Ryan

Um I thank everybody for coming here uh to this conference it's really wonderful to see everyone here it is quite a thing to be at the eth international self-determination Theory conference and it doesn't seem like 24 years since that uh conference where some some of these people were at although you were a lot younger back then jevie I got to say um there's a presser here somewhere right ah So uh first I'd like to begin with some thanks and um one of the things that we discovered because of coid is that the world became more

expensive it became more expensive to travel it became more expensive to handle a conference we actually had anticipated a smaller conference and uh this one has turned out well but we couldn't have done it without our sponsors and uh we had uh really a good well that's where the screens are a good number of sponsors That uh helped us out but one of them is uh my home institution the Australian Catholic University I really have loved their support and uh they were one of our main sponsors here immersive and motivation Works have ongoingly been sponsors

for the center for self-determination Theory and for this conference in particular and they're my second intellectual home um another program that sponsored us is all about parenting and you're going to find a Number of people here from Rania and Dubai who are part of all about parenting and I think please talk to them about their program and they're here to uh to elaborate theirs which is based in sdt I want to thank impetus which is uh operated out of Belgium and they do a lot of really creative research and uh translation of STD into organizations

and into schools and uh we have a number of other Scholars um supporters like the Guilford Uh really a wonderful publisher who supported us over the years the yagi group uh wellbees and uh and of course the center for self-determination and I I need to say this which is we could never have a conference without Shannon hofen we just wouldn't have it period And if she had not been around for 20 years neither would sdt at least at least in the hands of Ed and me that's for sure um I also want to thank my

uh uh home research group at ipe Which is the institute for positive psychology and education Emma Bradshaw Stephan o Dominico Jasper donfeld Kelly Ferber Ben Stewart will Ryan and mirel Jos who by the way joined us on her sabatical and for some reason we can't get her to leave she stays in the group she's a wonderful inspiration to us in developmental psychology and that group is a real support for me personally and intellectually and we've been amazingly productive at a time when We haven't been able to get together and we have to work remotely um

I also want to thank all my recent collaborators I'm going to talk about a lot of research today some of which I've been involved in and I just list here some of the collaborators around the world that I've been able to work with just in the recent uh three or four years I know this is not a way to really thank you all but hopefully I'll mention you when we get to the Research but I also want to um I also want to thank one other person who's not on this list which is my longtime

intellectual partner in the creation of St and that's Edward LDC and Edward could you stand up here all right I that's enough because he'll get a big head if you keep that up he deserves all of that Applause and more uh it's been a wonderful 40 some years that we've been working together and I just want to give you a little bit Of historical background on that beginning uh and it begins with a box so I started to talk with Ed about stdt and well about intrinsic motivation really because there was no sdt at the

time uh back in 19 77 and in 1978 and sometime in the spring of 1978 he and I got kind of serious about that discussion and he said well you know I have a big review paper to write in advances in experimental social psychology that's got to be a review of The whole field do you want to work on that with me and I said yeah I do so the next day he came with this box or a box just like this one and he said this is all of the literature in the field this

is all of it it's been photo copied I dug through the box and most of them were Ed's articles um and then uh there was a few smatterings from other social psychologists from Stanford and some other places and then there was a bunch of papers mostly unpublished and Correspondence from some very young Canadian scholar um Bob valeron and those papers remain unpublished today no uh Bob was really one of the first people who was really onto this idea and really uh you know I want to give him credit for being the first buyin uh to

sdt and has continued for all these times to do it so in that literature uh review we actually developed the theory of s or formalized C cognitive Evaluation Theory um and it was all done from that one box and you can see that today the the literature of sat has become a lot weigher I understand from some people who traveled with this book that it weighs six pounds right uh so that if you if your luggage was overweight and that there's a charge you can just send that bill to csdt um but uh you know

the the literature is really weighty in uh one manifestation of that is a review Article we just finished for psychological bulletin uh with my co-authors from ipe motivation group where we reviewed all the existing meta analyses that test SD assumptions that we could find and when this article was written which was more than a year ago there were 60 meta analyses that were uh published meta analyses evaluating various premises and principles of stt which is an incredible number of studies that is encompassed in that at this Point there's now I know of 72 meta analyses

that are testing basic propositions of sdt so the the point of my even bringing this up here is just to say there's such a stable and such a strong underlying framework for the basic propositions of the theory which I think gives us the advantage of uh framework off of which we can elaborate now in this early work that Ed and I were doing on intrinsic motivation I I think we knew right from the Beginning that intrinsic motivation was just the beginning because it was a manifestation of something we thought was much more important which was

the integrative tendencies in every human being when we see intrinsic motivation in a classroom or on the playground what we see is curiosity interest drive to discover the natural propensity that all of us have to grow and to become more whole and more coherent over time through connections and intrinsic Motivation is just one manifestation of that and um we also noticed how sensitive intrinsic motivation is despite its natural occurrence to social conditions it could be really undermined easily in classrooms or in workplaces or it could be promoted and facilitated and that's what led us to

trying to develop CET which was really a social psychology of intrinsic motivation things that would undermine or facilitate it and C um as uh uh to quote John Marshall Was kind of a Seedling out of which the rest of self-determination Theory grew now self- determination theory is organized by some formal mini theories six more uh uh formal mini theories and C was really all about intrinsic motivation what facilitates or undermines it in particularly the issues of autonomy and competence but we quickly move from intrinsic motivation to the study of internalization how you take in things

and become willing to do Things that are not fun or interesting or intrinsically motivated and that became the Corpus of organ or organismic integration Theory which was the second mini theory that we developed and I want to give a shout out to Jim Connell who was really instrumental in helping develop a white we also at the same time were working on um understanding more about individual differences which is how we developed causality orientations Theory But as we looked across the conditions that were supporting intrinsic motivation and and supporting internalization uh which uh came down to

support for autonomy support for competence support for relatedness we saw that under those conditions people really Thrive they have their highest well-being their most vitality and that's what led us to develop basic psychological need Theory and as we explored basic psychological need Theory We saw that some of the goals and aspirations that people have don't satisfy their needs and others seem to be richly satisfying those needs and that led us to differentiate out of U basic psychological need Theory goal content Theory or aspirations Theory and then finally the most recent theory is relationship motivation Theory

which really looks at the real importance of mutuality and autonomy support in close uh relationships and the joys and Satisfactions we get to giving uh from giving to others and from benevolence which is really part of rmt so this has been kind of a long and we call it a Brick by Brick building of a theory in the formal sense and while that's been going on many other models and theories have been spun uh off in relation to sdt there some of them are just are models and some are full-blown theories that are I would

call them companion theories to sdt that are using principles of stdt Or basic constructs in stdt to bring a lens to different phenomena like passion or Vitality or mindfulness or uh self- congruence or um any number of other variables and we're going to be seeing a lot of these other models and theories at this conference because they deeply relate to these four principles within um sdt and then finally um as Shannon mentioned sdt is a really the purpose we do this for is to help people flourish And that means that uh it's not just a

research Endeavor but it's really an attempt to bring this to the world and of course we apply STD in all these different areas of life so it's a massive amount of work but there are some fundamental things that we're looking at across all of that work and it really comes down to this fundamental question what do people need in order to really flourish and when we talk about Flourishing we mean having energy available to the self that Vitality that really is about life it uh is is the core of Life uh the ability to grow

to see new things to take interest in the world and also to have integrity to not be divided to not be in Conflict to be of one mind when we're engaged in activities so these are manifestations of flourishing and we want to know what conditions support flourishing and which ones undermine it and again in stdt we Think it's in our nature to flourish we were built to flourish every human being was built to flourish and uh and um you know this is just evident because in every culture you go to uh children play children explore

people want to learn and people want to understand things but flourishing is needs to be supported it doesn't it's not automatic it requires both physical and psychological nutrients to and that's where we came to the concept Of basic needs so we think every organism because this is an organismic theory has some basic needs some of which are physical but these there's also psychological needs if you don't get them satisfied you will not flourish even if you don't have a particular value for those uh for those needs and because of our definition of needs which we

really elaborated in the ma and Vish and about sonin and I elaborated in a chapter in the new handbook um we uh With our stringent definitions of it we really have settled on only three basic psychological needs there are probably more we certainly argue about more uh people argue about the need for meaning the need for benevolence the need for safety the need for security the need for curiosity there's a lot of other things that could be nominated as needs but these three will stand up to all the criteria that we have which is that

they are essential if any one of them is Really disrupted you won't have thriving and all of them contribute to thriving overall this so let me just say a couple things about them again I know that everybody in this room probably knows all of this stuff but I go over these fundamentals just so that we're all on the same page um competence is a is a need that is recognized in almost every major theory of motivation it's Central to self-efficacy Theory it's been Central To uh social learning theory um it's Central to us people need

to feel effective in what they're doing you're not going to be motivated unless you feel like you can do something you're going to have the capacity to do it for us the need for competence is more than just being able to do something though it's seeing opportunities for growth feeling like you're engaged in something in a way that is effective or uh uh or meaningful and so in that sense it's Really also about the opportunities to develop SK an environment that supports competence is an is an environment that helps you see opportunities for growth and

for Learning and scaffolds them uh the need for relatedness again most theories many theories in Psychology have a need for relatedness um we think it's essential that people have a need for belonging for connection and um that they matter to others that you feel significant in the social group In which you sit not significant in the sense of famous or big but that people care that you are there and that you make a difference and relatedness satisfactions really come about not only because you see that other people care about you but also you get to

give to other people when you get to give to other people you feel that sense of connection and belonging and it's very satisfying to the need for relatedness and finally um the third Need that we focus on is the need for autonomy and this is probably the most differentiating aspect of self-determination Theory from any other perspective that's uh in the world of psychology because we uniquely think that people have a basic need to feel behind the behaviors they engage in that they self- endorse what they're doing and they do not feel that what they're doing

is imposed on them or forced on them autonomy is really prominent in uh Uh activities that are authentic and intrinsically motivated because these are things that we're doing because we want to do but when you also have autonomy for the things that may not be fun for your work for your vocation for the responsibilities you have in life you will be more fulfilled in doing those and and better at doing those things we as we'll see in the evidence because when you're autonomous you're fully full-heartedly engaged in what You're doing autonomy is not an easy

concept for the field of psychology because it's a specific concept and in colloquial use we sometimes might use other words that are not the same for autonomy so some things that autonomy is not it's not the same as Independence Independence is not relying on other people for a need or for support or provision or for guidance but with autonomy you could willingly and self- endorse getting guidance help Or support from somebody else so you could be autonomously dependent it's also true that you could be autonomously independent when you say to others you know I'd like

to do this on my own or I'd like to try this without getting help from others so you can be autonomously independent there's no direct relationship between autonomy and dependence although we do know the following thing which is people are more willing to depend on others who support Their autonomy um it's also not the same as separateness so some people criticize sdt's idea of autonomy as it's uh individualistic and separate but there's nothing about uh autonomy that has to do with separateness in fact I think if each of us reflects on our own life what

are the most autonomous things we do they have to do with loving other people loving our family caring about other people these are things we do willingly And we self- endorse so there's no relationship here between being more separate and being more autonomous in fact what we find is the more autonomous people are the more pro-social they are the more they care about other people rather than the less that they do and finally autonomy is not about Freedom even though sometimes that word sneaks into our vocabulary but freedom is really about the absence of restrictions

or constraints on a person but you could Have complete Freedom meaning have no constraints on you but also have no autonomy because you don't have a purpose a sense of what to do a direction or a thing that you're willingly engaged in so Freedom alone does not give you autonomy it also requires value and purpose so these are distinctions are really critical to our measurement and to our interventions and that's why I bring them up in some detail and I just want to I should Mention here that if we look for the philosophy of autonomy

that underlies self-determination Theory it's very rich both analytic Traditions like uh uh Marilyn fredman in uh uh feminist analytic philosophy uses a definition of autonomy that's very akin to ours but you can also derive this from the existential literature like books like Paul RoR freedom and nature gives a similar definition to the one that we use we are very philosophically grounded Uh because it's very important to us to Define autonomy well well so when we look at the broad Strokes of self-determination Theory it really says that people have three essential psychological needs and if they

get those needs satisfied and fulfilled they will show signs of thriving they'll show signs of integration Vitality well-being and when those needs are thwarted and people feel frustrated in those needs then we see The other side of human nature which is we see more defensiveness more compartmentalization uh more antisocial behavior and L integrity and when we're doing this work and I look across the landscape of STD this morning we're going to see that basic psychological needs can be supported or they can be thwarted at many levels uh they can be uh uh supported or thwarted

interpersonally so in the parent child relationship in the Manager worker relationship in the coach athlete relationship there can be support or undermining of basic psychological needs but also true in organizations some organizations and educational cultures and institutions may be thwarting needs even independent of the players within them at societal levels we live in environments that are heavily technological which can be both supporting and thwarting needs as I'll get into later but also our cultures and Our religions will also differentially support or thwart basic psychological needs a lot of people do not like to talk about

cultural differences in need support but that's something we can study because we have a pretty clear criteria of what satisfies of basic psychological needs so we can look at differences in religions in Societies in families in cultures in schools in any level of institution to see how they're doing in terms of the promotion of human Thriving and finally in in TR personally we can have an impact on our own uh thriving because we can engage in agentic activities we can engage in cultivating mindfulness and awareness we can do things that uh bring about our own

self- selection into environments that are needs satisfying so from a personal perspective there's much we can do to enhance our own flourishing as I hope to touch on today So let me see just going to go over a couple basic ideas in stdt that will be throughout this conference and one has to do with even how we look at the idea of autonomy so when people have autonomy they are highly motivated and they are willingly doing what they're doing and the opposite of autonomy is tonomy when something is imposed on you or something other comes

at you and makes you do something you weren't willingly doing and so we have a taxonomy of motivation That goes from very nonautonomous all the way up to very autonomous with some substations along the way and way down at the bottom of the motivation Continuum is a motivation and a motivation is when you're just not motivated to do something because either you don't know how or you can't do it you lack competence or you don't have value or care for it which is you have no autonomy for the activity either one of those can lead

to a motivation and a Motivation of course has a lot of negative consequences in medy settings just next up on that Continuum is what we call external regulation and external regulation is when you do something because there are either external contingencies that are bringing you to do it or uh inter um interpersonal pressure making you do something so rewards contingent rewards can be externally regulating even if you want the rewards you're still do it for The reward so the external environment is controlling that behavior and when you do something out of uh pressure or uh

from someone else you're doing it because you feel coerced into doing it and you're afraid of the negative consequences external regulation is a really powerful form of motivation it's what behaviorists studied for 50 years before stdt came on the scene and we think that they're right about most of it one of the things that behaviorists And sdt agree on is if you rely on external regulation to motivate people you have to keep doing it forever because there's no maintenance and transfer of external regulation once you start motivating people through that means you've got to keep

it up and typically you have to escalate your rewards and your punishments in order to maintain Behavior over time so it's not about its lack of power to motivate it's its inability to be maintained and Transferred over time that makes this a very impoverished form of motivation in addition people typically in external regulation do the very minimum they need to do to get to the reward or get to the punishment even next up on this Continuum is uh what we call injection and this is a really important form of motivation because it's pervasive all of

us have a lot of it probably in this room an injection is when you do Something because you're putting internal pressure on yourself you'll feel anxiety and guilt if you don't do it or you'll feel self-aggrandizing and swollen if you do it well so injection is also a very powerful form of motivation and again one of the reasons that it has a weakness from our point of view is it's it revolves around internal conflict and also it's not very sustainable if you're powering Yourself by injection you need to keep succeeding Because the minute you start

running into really bad rough spots and challenges that's when injection starts to fall apart into disregulation and disengagement in activities so as we get up to the autonomous end of the Continuum of autonomy we one state way station is what we call identification and identification is when you um consciously uh endorse the behavior that you're Engaging in you you are aware of its value and this is what leads you to do it so you don't have to be intrinsically motivated if you think an activity is important and valuable you will be identified in doing it

and this is a very sustainable form of Regulation because it's not dependent on the fluctuations of the external environment and finally uh intrinsic motivation which is where we started is doing something because it's enjoyable and Because it's fun and because it's challenging and because it's uh you can feel satisfaction inherently in engaging the activity and as I said before this is a great form of motivation it really results in Rich performance and many different settings it's just that it can be undermined by the wrong kind of administrative environment so if you move up this Continuum

we see empirically uh in qualitative studies in quantitative studies in experimental Studies we see as you move up this Continuum of motivations you get more positive results on many different outcomes and there's a lot of evidence that this is indeed a Continuum that it forms a Simplex model that um that these things are way stations along the way I'm not going to go into all the psychometric stuff on this but there's a lot of literature on this what I do want to show you is just one demonstration of this that comes from a meta analysis

by Howard at all that was published in 2017 I believe so I think we had this at the last conference one of the things they did in their meta analysis is they took uh a massive amount of data on uh where people had filled out uh surveys of all the different uh types of motivation for an activity and then they put it into a multi-dimensional scaling and then they did a one-dimensional multi-dimensional scaling so if you look at the bottom of the screen you see uh the Continuum that Falls out in the multi-dimensional scaling with

a intrinsic at the top of that Continuum going all the way down to a motivation and the Continuum looks very similar whether you're looking at school environments or work environments or just general samples so we did a really kind of fun experiment that I want to tell you about that's under review now um and this was led by Stephan o d nio who's somewhere up here in the front rows here um and uh He wanted to he was really the initiator of this within our research group although it occupied all of us for some period

of time uh this uh it was called a bass Awards analysis and a bass Awards analysis is a hierarchical uh factor analysis where you're trying to do as many hierarchical factor analysis as you can do till you get down to facets that have no meaning anymore so you're trying to take uh scales and scales and dump them into uh as smallest fastest as you Can Define so what we did here is we took all the measures of motivation we could find in the field of psychology and we brought them into one data pool and there

there were 1,343 items measuring motivation across all these different scales that we assembled there were 175 subscales from 100 questioners that we entered into this analysis we administered it to lots and lots of people did this back as analysis and we ended up with 26 Different motivational facets and you can see those motivational facets on the left hand side of the screen yeah left hand side of the screen um and uh these are the ones that just came to arrive now again there was no theoretical basis for this this is just an empir uh exploratory

empirical method to get uh clear facets and then what we did is we subjected these facets to a multi-dimensional scaling and our hypothesis was that if we look across All these different facets even though they're derived from other uh theories and other questioners they we will find the motivation Continuum underlying it and so what we did in the in the uh MDS is to enter in our typical motivation measures and you can see them in here arrayed along the MDS so all of these different facets form a Continuum that goes from a motivation really on

the left hand side all the way up to intrinsic motivation on the right hand Side with many different little facets in the middle so if you look at something like self-criticism it's going to fall in the middle near negative interjection if you look at something like avoiding shame it's going to fall somewhere down to the left hand side or an injection if you look at something like competition or wanting to be famous it's going to fall on that middle ground there are many different way stations but the point is that underlying all Motivation is some

amount of relative autonomy that can be located and can be determined and can be entered into empirical analysis so there's been a lot of work since the last uh conference and as I said we were looking at a lot of meta analysis so I'm going to use a few meta analyses in order to U um illustrate what's going on in stdt but this is a one that was again led by Josh Howard and I think it what yeah came out in 2021 on this Continuum in with respect to student motivation and they found 344 samples

over 200,000 uh um participants are involved in this meta analytic analysis um and in this meta analysis we looked at 20 different uh 26 different performance outcomes or outcomes of well-being and performance related to education so we're not going to go over all 26 of those outcomes here I just want to give you a general sense of what happens in this data so you can see here In the metaanalytic data uh a motivation is uh positively related to maladaptive outcomes and maladaptive outcomes being things like absenteeism Dropout and tension anxiety depression and boredom as is

external regulation as is inter trajection so all the controlling forms of Regulation uh along our Continuum have uh positive relationships with Mal adaptive outcomes in schools and negative relations with uh adaptive outcomes like performance and engagement And efficacy and Mastery so we see this crossover effect as you move up in autonomy you get more adaptive outcomes As you move down in autonomy you get more maladaptive outcomes in a general sense and even grade point average which is really not a focus of sdt because I think we care more about Wellness than we care about grade

point averages but even grade point averages because that requires motivation and wellness and uh uh and uh energy and effort you can see Grade point average is correlated with uh relative autonomy and more important to us is this which is what about student well-being and ill-being and when students are having more intrinsic motivation and more identification they express higher well-being when they're more amotivated or more externally regulated they show more ill-being and this again is across many many different studies as sdt predicts what this meta Analysis shows is that both intrinsic and identified motivations are

related to higher performance and well-being interjected motivations only weekly related to persistence and performance goals and it's negatively related with some well-being outcomes and external relation regulation generally unrelated to Performance so when you think about all the pressures all the external regulators all the rewards all the punishments all the detentions all the Other things that were're doing to try and promote performance what we see empirically is they don't have a positive impact on that and we might think about other ways and we will think about other ways to motivate this pattern that we see in

schools is also evident in other settings and I'm just going to cite work settings here this was a another meta analysis that was recently done by Ana vanen broke and her colleagues and what they show is very Similar patterns here again they divided up outcomes into adaptive and maladaptive outcomes in the workplace and desirable outcomes were things like your affective commitment to work negative outcomes were things like uh uh absenteeism turnover intention and what you can see here is that same pattern the more autonomous the person's motivation uh the more positive and adaptive are their

outcomes desirable are their work outcomes and the opposite True uh for more controlled motivations autonomy even has made a difference in coid and I kind of want to bring up a couple of studies um stdt researchers very got very involved in coid and if you look in the sdt website you'll see a section where there's a lot of coid studies uh there's studies on uh people's willingness to get vaccinations there's studies on people's willingness to adhere to health guidelines uh there's studies on people's willingness To put an app in their phone that would allow them

to be contact traced and other kinds of issues that came up during the co era where autonomy would really make a difference and I'm just going to cite one set of studies that comes from a uh a dissertation that I've been on y wat shoot uh who's here I told him I was going to steal slides from his dissertation even though he hasn't defended yet um so he he couldn't say no um uh but he was part of a large Project out of gent University that was called the motivation barometer project and it's a Herculean

project that they undertook there and I put some numbers here which is during the coid period they collected surveys from almost half a million participants across 110 waves of study so it's a massive data collection that has a lot to reveal to us I just wanted to bring out a couple things and the first thing is is that when it came to to willingness to be Vaccinated and you ask people's motivations for it if you said autonomous reasons to get vaccinated in other words that you thought it was of personal value I think nobody thought

it was intrinsically motivating uh yeah but you thought it was a personal value that was positively predicted of your uh willingness to get a vaccination control motivation was negatively predictive of that and this was true at both within person and between person levels so if You fluctuated in your own motivation your uh intention to vaccinate would fluctuate along with that looking at population level statistics it when we look at what had people autonomously motivated to get uh vaccinated it wasn't just supportive things it was also the sense of threat if you saw the severity of

disease as high you were more autonomous ly willing to get vaccinated so we see here that part of autonomy is having a really good rationale so only People who believed in the severity of the illness would be likely to be really willingly engaged and so uh pce perceived severity here was a strong predictor of autonomous motivation over time and autonomous motivation when autonomous motivations were higher this turned out in this data set to predict um higher vaccination rates and I'm sorry predicted lower vaccination rates so people who were autonomously motivated to engage in Health rated

behaviors um were less likely to get infections and that was less likely subsequently to relate to hospitalizations and the opposite was true for people with control motivations people with more control or as people had more control motivations that led to higher infection rates and that led subsequently to higher hospitalizations among predictors of hospitalization rates in Belgium the Motivation barometer became one of the if not the most accurate predictor that was available is that right m is that right I think he says he thinks so he's not sure um but I think it was one of

the most predict of uh uh indices for subsequent hospitalization which just shows you how important motivation is at a population level when we're facing a crisis like this Yim I thank you for letting me use some of the slides from your dissertation and I won't uh There'll be no repercussions so I'm always about autonomy support um anyway these were just a smattering of findings to to suggest the following General belief that we have in STD and empirically sustained belief I think which is that autonomous motivation is is really a beneficial thing the more we can

be autonomous the more we sustain our engagement in Behavior the greater our commitment to goals the better our performance the more our satisfaction And wellness and as we'll see the more we're pro-social rather than antisocial so in stdt we're always thinking well how can we bring people up to Greater autonomy and how can we prevent them from being lowered in their autonomy because psychologically thwarting needs leads to lower autonomy and psychologically supporting needs leads to Greater autonomy so when we do that here again we have competence what does competence Support look like when we want

to help people with competence we want to provide structure and structure is a very big word in this conference structure means scaffolding you're providing the ladder on which people can climb as they develop and they learn so scaffolding is a really important part of this and feedback is really important because we can't get confidence unless we get feedback both positive and negative from other people but feedback Has to be aimed not at controlling us not at getting us to certain outcomes but rather at informing our efficacy so we call good feedback information because it's really

about helping you know how to do things better praise is good praise helps us feel more competent but not if the praise is about our abilities or uh about uh our individual uh betterment over others it's rather really works when it's about specific things that a person does when You praise their specific accomplishments or their specific efforts this increases perceived confidence and again when they see opportunities for continuing growth people feel more confidence relatedness support we might think this is easy but it is always it's not so easy it's not just about warmth and hugs

and good things although those things are really good and I appreciate all the hugs that I get here at this Conference uh um relatedness is also uh supported by our active and caring involvement with other people by the time by the attention that we give them by the uh um uh dedication of time and resources we give to other people warmth and inclusion matters but it's also when our friends and our colleagues are facing challenges that we show them patience I can't emphasize enough how much patience is a part of relatedness support we're not pressuring

other People to be other than they are and as I said before opportunities giving people opportunities to contribute to be a part of something helps them feel belonging and relatedness and finally in autonomy support autonomy support always begins with trying to understand the other person's perspective we don't make decisions or pressures or uh demands on people unless we know something about the situation that they're in so for Instance in par parental autonomy support it's taking a consideration of the child's experience in a man in a managerial situation it's taking interest in your employees viewpoint on

a new assignment or the way things could be done when you're supporting autonomy you're seeking the input uh from the other person you want their ideas you want you want them to participate in the activity so they can feel ownership in agency over what they're doing and You're minimizing the use of controlling language and the next thing I'm going to say is maybe the one of the most important elements of autonomy support which is if you're going to demand something of somebody that's not intrinsically motivating you need a rationale you need to have a good

reason for it we none of us can autonomously do something unless we have a reason for doing it that we buy into that we believe in so you know telling a Child that do your homework because it will be on the test that's not a good reason it doesn't Supply a rationale telling people to vaccinate or or else they will get uh won't be able to get some privilege is not a way to motivate them because it doesn't provide a rationale for why vaccination would be a good thing rationale is hugely important in the support

of autonomy uh can't say that enough and finally supporting autonomy means empathizing with people When they run into challenges or failures rather than being critical or evaluative in those moments now I'm just going to say a couple things about autonomy support particularly in the world of parenting because I think in stdt we might all agree that parenting is the world's most important job because this is where all of our future Generations are coming from and in our model of parenting we've always emphasized three basic uh Supplies that parents can give people which is the support

of their autonomy their time and involvement and structuring the environment so that it's a safe and easy place for a child to grow where they can feel challenges are optimal rather than overwhelming but I want to point out that when when we think about those things they're not just Direct effects it's not just that autonomy support predicts autonomy satisfaction or that Structure predicts competence if you're going to provide structure and involvement it has to be done in an autonomy supportive manner so autonomy support again begins with um am joer and Wendy grck recently used the

word consideration it begins with a consideration of the child's perspective before you do anything to a child you consider what's this going to mean to them what are they going to feel as we do this thing And if you have that in mind when you provide structure it's got to be structure that's appropriate to that child because you'll be doing it with respect to their particular needs that you've considered and when you're involved you're going to be involved in a way that's not having them feel controlled or push around or helicopter parent it's going to

be a level of involvement that's responsive to what their experience is so autonomy supports The necessary holding ground for the structure and the involvement that would be uh proceeding from it and uh I stole sold this uh this diagram from John Marshall Reeves chapter on c um because I think he was trying to emphasize that this is really uh the the conceptual way we've always thought about it which is that if you don't have if you have involvement then it's controlling involvement it will have negative effects rather than positive effects if You give structure but

it's done in a directive and controlling manner it will have negative rather than positive effects these have to be embedded in autonomy support just to show an illustration of that this is a recent study from Richard Ker's group and I Richard are you here is Richard here anyway Richard Ker's group uh and what they were looking at was uh was uh children's progress in goals across a school year and whether Parents are helpful in those goals and what they found is that first of all if you have an autonomy supportting parent you're more likely as

a student to turn to that parent for help with your goals and we have found this across a lot of things you don't turn to controlling people for for help you turn to people who you think will support your autonomy and so people are more likely to turn to an autonomy supported parent for help and if that parent helps that helps in Their goal progress and if they help in an autonomy supported manner it helps in the person's autonomy so what they found is that there was a positive change in well-being and progress and goals

under conditions where parents were involved but that involvement was autonomy supportive as they put it goal support from parents was associated with better well-being across the school year as long as the support was delivered in an autonomy supportive Manner now the whole issue of autonomy matters right from the beginning of children's development and this is a a a study that I think really illustrates that well uh by uh nakum and colleagues here and what they did is that prenatally they asked mothers what is your reason for having a child and some mothers were more autonomous

in their reasons for having a child than others and others were more controlled in their reasons and of Course this is a really Salient issue in our country today in the United States today because we have laws about trying to force women to have children or to demand that they have children under certain circumstances and so I found the study particularly relevant but when mothers make the decision to be auton make the autonomous decision to have children it turns out that they're more autonomy supportive later and less controlling but mothers who've made a Control decision

to have a child are more likely to be controlling in their interactions with child subsequently and that's related uh to more internalizing and externalizing problems so we see that right even from the uh from conception onward the issue of how autonomously we're engaged in relating to our children matters a lot of evidence in sdt has shown that autonomy supported parents really give a lot of resources to their Children one of the things that develops in children who have autonomy support is more executive functioning or or more efficient executive functioning and there was a recent uh

now there's a number of empirical articles on this but there was a recent theoretical article trying to explain why that's the case and um so in in this article Carlson points out that an autonomy supported parent gives choice to their child wherever possible and when you give a Child a choice you're getting them to reflect on their agency you're you're telling them you are an agent and you have a choice now and it creates a meta process of thinking about the choice and also the realization of your own agency and as you go into new

situations and you have another choices you're now exercising that executive function again and what happens is executive function strengthens over the time and we know that executive functioning is predictive Of academic performance of social success of of a number of self-regulatory outcomes and here we see that it's largely a function of a certain kind of parenting interaction in which you allow your child to feel that sense of agency um of course we know that autonomy supported parents this is a meta analysis was in uh two 16 uh uh is related to better academic performance so

this is uh uh Ariana Vasquez and Patel's uh meta analysis we see higher academic achievement and autonomous motivation and health from parents who are more autonomy supportive and I can't emphasize enough that if you have a good relationship with a child it's it's in part because you've taken their point of view that you've listened to them and there's a new line of research that has really come out of Neta wiins lab and guy and Neta have been doing a research on uh High quality listening which is really what is essential to autonomy Sport and high

quality listening uh with adolescence turns out to lead your adolescent to be more willing to talk to you and more willing to disclose to you if you don't engage in high quality listening you won't have those benefits and your relationship improves as well with high quality listening their work on high quality listening by the way cuts across a lot of different areas and It shows that high quality listen listening reduces Prejudice in people high quality listening leads to closer relationships high quality listening leads to more disclosure there's so many good things that come out of

high quality listening that this is really an advancement in Ro in relationship motivation Theory but here in the parenting domain listening to your children is a big step on having closeness with them so recently we did a Meta analysis of the parent domain and this was uh uh led by Emma Bradshaw and here we looked at all the studies we could find of Parental autonomy support and control and its impact on children's outcomes and we looked at these uh both as a function of region of the world age of the child reporter of the autonomy

support and the outcomes and across all these different uh ways of cutting the data we see two fundamental facts across the world across ages across parent Types when parents support autonomy children have higher well-being across the world across ages across parenting types when parents are controlling children have more ill being now I know that may not sound profound to many of you but there are people all over who are continuing to justify punishment continue to justify corporal punishment continuing to say well autonomy supports fine except when your kid misbehaves no that's not true there's no

evidence Anywhere for positive effects of controlling parenting and so uh while it may seem obvious to us in stdt it's not obvious to the rest of the world that it's really important that we bring that message around in schools autonomy support and control matter um uh as well and teacher teachers and parents matter to school atony support and this is a meta analysis that was recently done by Bureau at all it came out in 2022 and in Their meta analysis what they show is that teacher and parent autonomy support are predictive of higher student motivation

higher student need satisfactions when parents and teachers are autonomy supported there's higher relatedness higher competence and higher autonomy and autonomy and competence in particular predict more autonomous School motivation uh another recent meta analysis by Diego v v gonalez and others Uh did U was on physical education and they show a very similar pattern here which is that at least teacher autonomy support is predictive of basic need satisfaction and that in turn is associated with higher quality motivation and with more adaptive outcomes we know that teachers on an everyday basis make a difference in student motivation

on a daily basis if a teacher uh inquires about your interest on a daily basis if a child if a teacher Gives you a sense of choice if on a a daily basis a teacher provides rationals for the things you're doing or allows you to ask questions about your what you're doing your autonomy for learning goes up on that day so it's an everyday effect that teachers have and it's a strong effect over time and that's led to the desire to do interventions in schools and I want to give uh a lot of credit here

to John Marshall reev who's uh been able to uh put together some uh Um easily replicated interventions in schools and try them out in many places in a recent report they uh reported out 51 intervention studies and 48 of those 51 produced significant intervention effects uh that were generally of a large size on student motivation and one of the things we see in the interventions with teachers on helping them support student autonomy is what when they internalize that style of teaching not only do their students have Higher well-being but they themselves have higher well-being teachers

have higher well-being when they are more autonomy supportive and I really love the the diagram that John Marshall and uh and uh uh s Chon put in their article here which is because I think it captures what autonomy support in schools is about because it begins with a fundamental attitude in fact in every sphere it begins with a fundamental Attitude of I'm going to care for the self of the other person here and if I start with that fundamental attitude then the other things about how to promote intrinsic motivation and how to promote internalization will

fall out of that again it always begins with that issue of empathy recently we uh put together some of us led by John Marshall put together a book that details in uh uh the type of intervention and the evidence support for that intervention So that you it can be practiced in any school or any place uh without our stt expertise being there um and so I encourage you if you're interested in stt interventions to check out this book because we're doing a lot of interventions and we're doing a lot of studies in schools we're developing

a lot of new tools with that sdt and in this conference you're going to see these tools displayed in different ways one of the new tools is a is a um really A behavioral checklist that has come out of an analysis of all the different interventions that have been done with stdt um and Ahad LED this uh task and if you look at this analysis what you'll see is that we've gone through all the different interventions that are out there pinpointed the specific behaviors that are associated with autonomy competence and relatedness support and detail those

both at a general level and at a very specific level so they can be Used in classroom ratings and behavioral ratings and other um intervention uh studies another thing that's been recently introduced into this area of education is uh an elaboration on the Dual uh on the Dual process model of need support and need uh thwarting to what's called a triart model and this is recognizing that teachers can be autonomy supportive which uh activates a lot of positive motivational and affective Tendencies they can be Controlling which activates Defiance and a lot of uh other uh

uh negative Tendencies but they can also be what they what's called here dormant they can create an environment in which there's nothing motivating happening and what you have is disengagement and so you really see these three different outcomes comes from these different styles of of defiance just disengagement and then engagement which is really coming from autonomy support and finally I just want to say another tool that's out there is uh the circumplex model that comes uh from really the Belgian group here and it's a circumplex model which is combining both autonomy support and structure and

a dynamic model which I think shows very well that if you have high structure without autonomy support you're not promoting engagement but when you have both autonomy support and structure that's a sweet spot in both reducing a Motivation and enhancing engagement so these are measurement tools and modeling tools that can be used both in interventions but also to measure outcomes uh from interventions that I think you'll be seeing a lot of at this conference when we're doing work with teachers typically the focus is on the teachers impact on students but no one can work in

schools without understanding that teachers themselves are under a lot of pressure and a lot of Control and a lot of times they don't feel much autonomy for their own activity as teachers and we know that when this is a meta analysis by Gavin schl that came out in 2020 we know that when teachers have need satisfaction in their jobs they are more autonomously motivated and this leads to higher well-being and less teacher distress and more autonomy supportive teaching so a finding we find over and over is when teachers are Getting their own needs satisfied and

when they have autonomous motivation they tend to be more autonomously oriented in their own teaching Styles but they don't in many settings teachers aren't feeling that kind of support they're feeling under pressure from high stakes testing they're feeling under pressure from policy makers to get certain outcomes happening in school they're getting pressure to cover certain kinds of material and this is Leading to a demoralized state in many many teachers and we can see uh this is a study from Australia that was done by Rebeca Coy and what she was Finding is that if we look

at turnover intentions in teachers we see they're coming about from 2 things one is thwarted autonomy so when they have leadership that doesn't respect their autonomy in the classroom this is leading them to want to disengage from the profession and when they don't feel relatedness to Their colleagues when there's not enough time when there's not enough uh structure for people to feel collegial in the workplace this leads them feeling isolated and less likely to keep up their job on the other hand autonomy supportive leadership leads to feelings of growth and vitality and lower turnover intention

again when teachers are supported when they have autonomy their propensity and this has been shown in Many many studies this is just one recent one from an and colleagues their propensity is to be more autonomy supportive in their own teaching and to get better outcomes so when we think about what stt is showing in the sphere of Education we're showing that students are more engaged when they're supported in their autonomy when their basic needs psychological needs are being met and they're doing less well when they're Feeling pressured controlled and disrespected as agents within the classroom

we know a lot about the conditions that produce both thriving and performance in classrooms but it's really poorly matched by the policies we see in most countries supporting education just want to give a couple examples of that one thing we see around the world not just in the United States but we see it in China we see it in Australia we see it in England we see it In many countries is that there are tests that are such high stakes for educators that they focus their curriculum and their teaching on the outcomes of those tests

and in doing so they crowd out the possibility for all supportive classroom practices because they have an agenda regardless of student interest regardless of where the students are at the moment to cover certain material and get to a certain place so teachers have no control over That and students have no control over that and both get demoralized as a result of it if you walk into any classroom almost anywhere around the world today what you see is ubiquitous evaluation every day children are being tested every class classroom they're being tested they're getting quizzes and even

sometimes when they call them formative quizzes they send the scores home to their parents to make sure that there's high stakes behind them if Imagine that every day at our own workplaces we went through what our children have to go through in their schools of being evaluated graded and sometimes shamed on an everyday basis for who they are as they engage in activities we wouldn't do that we wouldn't have any workplaces that would Thrive under those conditions but this is what we do to children so I just want to point out that stdt has a

really strong research base about what promotes Both learning and wellness in schools and we need to advocate for policies that allow teachers to do those things in classrooms which uh is not happening uh at the moment and I hope part of the discussion we have in the workshops and some what we're doing here because I know we have some really uh engaged Educators here in this audience is what can we do to change these policies around the world um just getting back to the Workplace again we know from meta analyses that uh um that leader

autonomy support makes a great deal of difference to employees When leaders are more autonomy supportive employees show increased autonomy competence and relatedness and this relates to more autonomous work motivation again fitting with general stt principles and this results in better work outcomes lower uh distress more work engagement more positive work behaviors like Organizational citizenship and more General well-being there's a recent review paper that Marilyn g and her colleagues put out that I think is just a wonderful review and I refer you to it if you're interested in this domain that appeared in nature reviews in

which they look at STD variables in relation to a number of uh workplace outcomes like leadership styles and you can see that transformational leadership style for instance is related to uh basic need Satisfactions and higher autonomy where transactional leadership styles uh are not are negatively related to those outcomes uh we can see how job characteristics like demands or flexibility have a positive impact on uh on need satisfaction and motivation so it's a comprehensive review but I think it backs up a lot of what we've argued which is the climate in a workplace makes a huge

difference in terms of both worker productivity and wellness and Luckily as in the same as in the education sphere manager autonomy support something we can successfully and efficaciously interv intervene on this is just one uh manager training study that came out just recently that uh I liked because it came from Iran and uh it's cabam Meer they did a training with uh supervisors in a workplace and they show the irradiating effects on employee motivation that come from managers having adopted more Autonomy supportive techniques over time going back this way so one of the places that

uh uh at motivation works with my colleagues we've been particularly interested in is in healthcare and nursing because we do a lot of work in hospitals and um uh and uh Medical settings and one of the things we've seen over Co 19 is a lot of burnout and turnover in nurses in particular and in stdt there's been a lot of studies in nursing so I just Thought I would bring a few of those to the surface because of their timely relevance and um this first one here is uh by nichas Gile and colleagues and what

they were looking at here is a is a structural equation model uh outcome here but perceived manager of style for nurses is related to their need satisfaction in the workplace and their job satisfaction Vigor dedication and absorption just looking at this in another way you can do this as a daily Diary study and this was a study that was done with Chinese nurses by um M and colleagues and they in a daily diary study they're showing that daily autonomy support and meaning at work are the things that are really driv I mean I'm sorry pro-social

opportunities are the things that are driving meaningful work and engagement in nurses on a day-to-day basis and finally we can look at it through U higher level uh statistical techniques this is uh in This particular case this an application of bifactor analysis uh to look at the prediction of nurse outcomes and we can see here that Global motivation and in particular autonomous uh s variable in this are predictive of positive outcomes in nurses like less emotional exhaustion but those global uh uh um need supports are also predictive of higher motivation and particularly intrinsic motivation in

nurses which is related to these outcomes as well so we can see looking At this through various measurement Styles we can see that autonomy and nurses makes a great deal of difference so too it does in doctors this is a national survey that was led by arand Mohler and others where you can see that autonomy uh in doctors is predicting of their General Health and absence of depression lower burnout and their intentions to their Le lower intentions to leave medicine so stdt has been applied a lot More in medical settings and you're going to see

some of that here at the conference I I know uh uh Greg goldner Alan newfeld Rashmi kusar other people are going to be talking about the impact of the training and supervision atmosphere on medical professionals across the field and uh it's just an area of of a lot of new growth and it it goes along with the work we've already been doing in medical settings on adherence and compliance in patients um I'm not going to go over a lot of this data here because we've talked about it in past conferences but stdt has been responsible

for a lot of interventions with patients uh in their Healthcare and there have been randomized control trials in areas of smoking sensation physical activity weight loss diabetes management medication adherence healthy diet dental hygiene where are using autonomy supportive and competence supportive and relatedness supportive Techniques in our interventions leads people to have uh better adherence and Better Health outcomes when we're more autonomy supportive as practitioners whether it's as a clinical psychologist or whether it's as a oncologist or whether it's as a GP or we're more autonomy supportive our patients show more intrinsic motivation and a more

identified motivation for Change and that's really going to be the sustainer of that over time there's two recent Meta analyses looking at outcomes from STD based interventions first one led by Niko dumanis uh and what they show is that across sdt interventions uh the uh sdt interventions are successful at predicting the sdt process variables in a relatively strong way and predictive of or as relatively Moder way and predictive of change at the end of interventions as well and this was followed up by a metaanalysis by Sheeran at others in 2020 in which they looked At

just uh those things that were I'm sorry these are just the randomized control trials and what they show here is that across uh uh all studies but across physical activity uh across sedentary behaviors diet smoking Sensations screen time uh Dental Care you all these different areas uh there's been successful interventions to increase patient motivation for adherence and and uh Health outcomes and and Sheran they do a meta Antica process Model in which uh they show that sdt-based interventions increase people's autonomy and competence and that's uh part of what mediates the more successful outcomes for them

so moving out of healthcare from minut I want to go to the area of technology and St has been involved in the study of technology for a while and if we think about our lives today they're it's we're pervaded by technology we have apps and phones and Probably most of you in the room have checked your phones at least once during this talk if I go on any longer it'll be all of you um we'll be checking your phone so we have Technologies On Us near us we have TVs we have monitors we have Technologies

watching us all the time we have them uh link to our credit card so technology is everywhere for us and it's part of our culture when we started studying technology we started with I guess I'm going to call it a simple area Which is video games we started video games because we saw everybody was playing video games back in the early part of the century and we thought they must be motivated to do that there must be something about video games that makes that so and so uh Scott Rigby and Andy shilsky and I started

studying video games in particular and what we showed is that it uh F they fell in line with basically cognitive evaluation Theory predictions which is that video Games that have features that help you feel competent like uh easy onramp or uh victories that can come about pretty easily if you have those kind of features in games those things will increase your perceived competence if you have choice if you can personalize uh your your characters if you can choose your own Road throughout game this will give you more autonomy features like that will increase uh that

sense of autonomy in a game and these Things together predict sustained interest and enjoyment in a video game now most people who play video games they just get enjoyment and fun out of them and I know a lot of people like to demonize video games but for most people they're just entertainment there are some people who are vulnerable to overuse in games and when we account for that in St we do it through what we call the need density hypoth we say that people who are vulnerable to overuse in Games are people who get a

lot more need satisfaction in games than they're getting in the rest of their life if you're not getting need satisfaction in life games have a strong gravitational pull why is that because when you design a game you can make it um intensely need satisfying you can have an immediacy of need satisfaction because it happens right there in the game you can have a consistency of it that you can't have in the real world not everybody will Respond to you but you can make non-player characters be very responsive to a player uh and there's a consistency

of feedback and and support within a game so you get high density of need satisfaction in a game and that's not true in most of our Lives most of our Lives get sporadic little uh supports for our needs so studies of the need density hypothesis have proliferated and I'm just going to show you a couple of them this is done by Allan and Anderson And what they show is it graphically as need satisfaction in Life Starts go below to go below the level of need satisfaction you're finding in games you are now at risk for

inter uh for internet gaming disorder uh this is a a study in China by uh Wang and others and what they show is basically the same pattern that people who the amount of time that children and these are young children these are in grades three through six The amount of time that they're spending on the Internet is a function of lower need satisfaction in life and higher need satisfaction when they're on the internet and uh this um and Lou and colleagues also in a somewhat older group here this is ages grade 7 to 11 they

show basically the same pattern with pathological inter what they call pathological internet use again I want to remind you internet use is not pathological playing games is not Pathological technology is not pathological but there are vulnerabilities that technology can reveal in us because of other impoverishment in our life and I just want to give one illustration of Technology not being all bad uh some of you may be binge Watchers on TV um I'm not really a binge Watcher because I can't sit still that long but um there are people who are binge Watchers and sometimes

that's faces social criticism Because of being a binge Watcher you know you say hey I watched 25 shows last night nobody says oh great for you there's an accomplishment but it does turn out that uh at least the the recent study by Erman and uh deanland found that binge watching turns out to be very needs satisfying satisfies autonomy competence and relatedness needs you you feel autonomy because you get the choice to keep watching if you feel like it you Get sense of relatedness because you're connected to the characters in the show and sometimes you're binge

watching with your partner and you get confidence because you get to understanding of the show and typically shows are really engaging and not that difficult to to master so you get basic need satisfaction it increases your well-being the only only thing wrong with binge watching is guilt because it turns out that binge Watching is crowding out other activities in your life and you know what it's crowding out and you feel guilty about that and that's where the uh injection starts to come in and maybe taint your enjoyment but my main point here is not all

technology is bad and you know feel free to binge watch it looks like it's a good thing as we moved into technology we really been interested in how we can uh harness our understanding of basic psychological Needs and the sustaining of Engagement with technology into motivational design and I want to recognize particularly here I've been working with rapael calvo and his colleagues at Imperial College London on issues of motivational design and uh this is a diagram by Dorian Peters which just kind of lays out the basic format here which is if you understand that autonomy

competence and relatedness are drivers of sustained engagement you want to design your uh App or your game or your uh your device to meet those needs and and provide that user satisfaction Scott Ry and I uh tried to pull out the elements of games that are responsible for making games fun into e-learning tools and how you can incorporate them into e-learning tools and we have kind of a a list of things that would be autonomy supportive features competence supportive and relatedness supportive features and when They are incorporated into educational material such as Eames they can

increase in people's intrinsic motivation this is a uh study by um um Luca Zeno and what they showed is that a mobile uh device teaching biology creates more intrinsic motivation than the standard textbook approach to it partly because it's uh it's in instilling in people more intrinsic motivation and more perceived confidence we can study any app we can study any technology in terms of Its um opportunities to yield or to frust to yield need satisfaction or to frustrate needs and there's a new studies looking at these taxonomies across apps I just want to say we

have a general model that we developed we call the Medics model it's motivation engagement and thriving in user experience and our notion here is that we when we evaluate a technology we not only want to look at its impact on a person uh in at the interface as they Engage it do they feel competent in interfacing with that technology and using it does it have the tools available that they would choose to have but also not only that but does it have an impact how does it have an impact on the Tas that they do

does it increase their autonomy and their competence for the tasks that they do as they engage in that activity does that have an impact on their life in a way that's either satisfying more needs or less or Satisfying less needs and ultimately what's happening from Technologies in society so what we're trying to do is look at need satisfaction and motivation at every level of interaction with technology all the way from adoption all the way up through uh its effects on your life I'm just going to give one simple diagram out of a study we just

published looking at four different uh Technologies here we were looking at uh at uh Facebook at Tik Tock at Noodle and Blackboard to see what needs they satisfied and as you might expect Facebook is all about relatedness Blackboard and noodle are about competence enhancement and Tik Tock well it's about everything that's why they're banning it in Montana so I'm going to skip here to yet another topic because we're talking about life and how people live and Sh I guess sometime right there's no clock up Here I just say that um um so um a term

you hear a lot in sdt is the term udonia It's a Wonderful term it's a term that comes from uh Aristotelian philosophy and uh what it really refers to is a good life living a good life a udon Life Is A Life That's fulfilling it's satisfying and it's one that in Aristotle's view was one where you're exercising your potentials and your capacities and your virtues you're being the fullest human being you can be when You're being UD dionic and when Aristotle was making these claims he was saying the best life will be a life in

which you're exercising virtues in which you're developing your capacities and you're pursuing the things that are intrinsically valuable now that's not a philosophical statement it's an empirical statement it's a claim and St has been in some ways testing this claim and we've been testing it a lot through goal contents Theory so goal contents Theory says that when you pursue intrinsic goals they're going to be associated with more basic psychological need satisfaction and they will lead to enhancements of Wellness but when you pursue extrinsic goals the satisfactions that will follow from that are less reliable now

when we first began this work I began this work with uh Tim caser back in the uh a long time ago back in the 90s um at some point our interest was really in materialism as a starting Point materialism being something we thought would not be very need satisfying uh even if you were successful at being materialistic it wouldn't satisfy your autonomy competency relatedness so it wouldn't produce well-being as opposed to something like investing in your personal relationships if you're successful at developing a loving personal relationship that's going to have a strong impact on your

basic Psychological needs and that's going to increase your Wellness so internic and externs goals should have different impact and if we have different life goals to the degree that they're important they will shape our Wellness uh through their ability to either Foster or frustrate our basic psychological needs and so there's been uh many many studies that have been done on this I'm just going to show one model that comes from nishimura and Suzuki and A Japanese population where holding intrinsic aspirations was positively related with basic psychological needs and therefore related to life satisfaction a wellness

outcome and the opposite true of extrinsic aspirations and I show this very simple model because this is the the simplest model underlying uh GCT but we can see this in many different spheres this is a recent study of Physicians and their uh well-being in the workplace that was led By Aron Mohler and what he shows is that when Physicians have intrinsic aspirations which most do they want to do good for the world they want to help their patients they want to uh relate well to other people so these intrinsic aspirations to the degree that they

espouse those they have higher need satisfaction in their medical workplaces they have higher autonomy competence and relatedness and this is helpful to all the mental health outcomes that arand Was studying here they're less susceptible to depression uh and um I can't even read that anyway they're better off um another study that was done from the Gent group during the uh Co was was looking at older adults and how older adults were thriving or not thriving during uh the coid period and in this study we can see here that older adults intrinsic goal attainment whether they

had reached intrinsic goals was Associated not only with better better outcomes and lower loneliness but with greater meaning and this was something that helped sustain them through the co and just another recent study this is uh um Lisa manginelli was looking at materialism which is where really really started our work and what she shows in this uh in this study is that materialism doesn't seem to promote need satisfaction but it does promote need frustration and this is associated with Lower well-being outcomes um we'll see some other data just like this here at this conference so

this pattern of intrinsic and extrinsic goals of living a life that's focused on extrinsic things versus intrinsic things shows the same results all across the world at this point since we started this stuff in the 1990s over 35 National samples have tested this hypothesis it's been tested in teens in adults in uh aging adults in In every age group and it's been tested in every field turns out that intrinsically oriented people are better off in education nursing Sports and academics but also so even in fields like business and law so even in a field where

extrinsic motivation might be part of the uh kind of daily discussion focusing and having your interest really on extrinsic motivation uh is associated with more well-being I mean lower well-being so we did a meta analysis on This uh recently came out in uh jpsp it was led by Emma Bradshaw looking at all the data we could find on GCT intrinsic and extrinsic goals and it verified what we've claimed all along is that relative intrinsic goal valuing is associated with greater well-being and this is true across countries no moderation by countries and no moderation by uh

socioeconomic status of participants one excellent example of an intrinsic goal is the goal of helping And being benevolent to other people and this has become a strong interest in uh STD in part uh spurred by uh a Finnish psychologist Frank Martell who came to visit our group when uh when he was a young scholar and he insisted that benevolence was a basic psychological need it stood right up there against autonomy and competence relatedness as a fourth need he's sitting here in the front row still defying me still uh so we started to study uh benevolence

and Its impact on people and I'm just going to say Frank was involved in a few studies that uh we talked about at the last conference that showed that uh when you engage in pro-social Behavior it enhances all three of your basic psychological needs autonomy competence and relatedness even if you never get to meet the beneficiary even if you never see the positive aspect of your effect he we showed in studies that uh basic psychological needs are associated with More meaning and greater well-being and people who are benevolent not only had this High basic need

satisfaction but sometimes they even showed what we call a warm glow from uh from being benevolent which added variance to well-being above and beyond the three basic needs so just some summary points from there is that benevolence seems to enhance wellbeing being and vitality and meaning in large part through the fact that benevolence satisfies our three Basic needs and that it's also got its own kind of inherent satisfactions now we also study the dark side in stdt and Nikki legate is our uh main leader on studying the dark side she she likes to really do

studies no uh Nikki did a stud series of studies really with the following hypothesis if benevolence satisfies people's basic psychological needs does malev undermine them and we did some experimental studies to show that when You're assigned to ostracize somebody the very fact of complying with ostracizing somebody else leads you to feel less autonomy and less relatedness and therefore more distress uh when people are put in a position to ostracize somebody else if they get a chance they'll try and repair that wrong because they do feel distress from ostracizing and even if you feel justified in

you're excluding or ostracizing somebody else uh her data Suggests that um it still hurts you in terms of your psychological needs and your well-being so hurting others seems to have a negative effect across the board on people this tells us a lot about human nature because stdt maintains that it's easy to internalize and to integrate pro-social behaviors and to feel autonomous and doing them and it's very very difficult to internalize and engage in malevolence without being Defensive compartmentalized or need frustrated in some way or another to partly demonstrate that fact we did a meta analysis

recently that uh was led by James Donald and appears in Psych bulletin 2022 we took all the studies we could find about people's antisocial or pro-social behavior and looked at the motivations that underlied it and what you see in the meta analysis is that controlled motivations are associated with antisocial Behavior but autonomous Motivations are associated with pro-social behavior this may seem again obvious to people in this room but it's a really important point about human nature which is the antisocial behaviors almost always controlled it comes about from pressure or frustration not from autonomous choices people

make now one of the implications of this is if we create environments in which people's autonomy is supportive we should see less antisocial Behavior we Should see less violence we should see less Intergroup conflict between people and there is evidence emerging for that and I'm just going to cite one set of studies here that comes from uh chion and reev and uh hon Yang and Herb Marsh who published a these studies in American psychologist recently showing that interventions that encourage teachers to be more autonomy supportive have another effect which is they reduce bullying and victimization

in classrooms And they increase bystanders willingness to intervene so if we create an environment in which people feel need supported and feel autonomy supported we can expect less bullying less violence less victimization and this is not just true in schools it's also true in workplaces we see in workplaces with more autonomy support more organizational citizenship more knowledge sharing and less organizationally destructive behaviors Very similarly the environments in which we find ourselves have a great deal to do with who we become even if they're not proximal environments and so so much of our St work has

been looking at what we call proximal interpersonal environments teacher to student parent to child manager to worker coach to um to athlete but pervasive contexts the cultures the economic systems we live in the religious systems we uh uh include Ourselves in also have an impact on us because they can thwart or support our basic psychological needs and in the chapter with Cody Dahan in the handbook we kind of summarized this in the following model which is that pervasive environments that Supply us with basic resources can support our basic psychological needs and lead to well-being but

in societies where people are deprived of those resources or deprived of basic freedoms they will not Show that kind of thriving uh Frank and uh colleagues did a study uh of European countries first of all just to look at what is the impact of basic psychological needs satisfaction on well-being and this was across I think 27 with the 27 countries in Europe and what this chart shows is various predictors of well-being and I just want you to look at the comparative size of the effects of psychological needs satisfaction relative to things Like income or relative

to age or relative to gender or religiosity it's massive effects shows the importance of basic psychological needs for well-being across countries and if you look at something like what determines happiness you see basic psychological needs are strongly correlated with happiness in fact they predict it what about money doesn't money create happiness well you see a very weak positive correlation between Income and happiness but when you put those into a regression equation and let uh both psychological needs and money explain that you see that the impact of money the positive impact of money itself is largely

accounted for by the fact that when we have more money we can get more need satisfaction we have more choices in life we're more easily connecting with other people we can feel more confident so even the money effect is largely accounted for by the effects Of money on basic psychological needs but there are many other sources uh to that as well another way we've been looking at that is uh to apply the social theory of John RWS and some of you may know John RWS has uh having developed a very influential theory of justice and

in rw's theory of Justice he argued that a just Society is one that's run on just or what Fair principles things that would be fair for everybody so uh in his Theory of distributive justice he says a just Society we've B with there's a fair distribution of social goods Fair distribution of wealth of opportunities for growth and uh pursuing what matters to you of Liberties and Privileges and of bases of self-respect of not being stigmatized not being uh uh treated with prejudice uh so what we did in our lab and again this is led by

uh Emma Bradshaw Emma it's good you're sitting in the front here because I keep Pointing at you um but uh we we um Emma and Cody danan and others in our group created a what we call a formative measure of uh of raws um uh primary Goods because he had detailed what those are and Randy cerran is a philosopher who helped us develop this uh formative measure and what we found is that uh we could create a measure of primary Goods that was uh made up of basic rights of standards of living of of self-respect

and freedom from Prejudice and of having The rights to run for office those things all matter but when we look at the impact of primary Goods on Wellness we see it's mediated by basic psychological needs by basic psychological needs satis factions and thwarting so in societies where we have more rights more privileges uh more supports we have higher well-being because those societies are fostering greater uh basic psychological need satisfaction wrong way uh another uh Influential theoretical approach is What's called the capabilities approach and this is uh Nobel laurat uh amateen Martha nusb are two of

the more famous philosophers behind the capabilities approach and both both of these philosophers all they different in different ways argue that uh that people need basic functional capabilities that have to be evenly distributed across the society things like Education Human Rights access to Nature and if you have Those things you can have a UD dionic life so they're both UD dionic theorists and in some early studies that we did uh this was led by Cody danan and uh Emma Bradshaw again uh we see that capabilities are related to uh well-being outcomes again mediated by basic

psychological needs well in those early studies we had used a a kind of primitive measure of capabilities uh that came from the capabilities group and they developed a new measure AR not At all developed a a new measure that's called the oap 18 and so we subjected that to our uh psychometric analyses and when we looked at their 18 items we found three basic factors one factor that was well-being itself and two factors that looked like freedom of expression I'm free to to express the things that I want to express in life and another that

was freedom from discrimination I will not I don't have to worry about uh where I would have a Job or getting a job or have discrimination of that sort and we can see that freedom of expression predicts basic psychological need satisfaction which mediates very positive life outcomes but people people who are feeling uh not freedom from discrimination have more basic need thwarting and frustration and that leads to worse outcomes we've been extending this model and uh Kelly furber who's a a a a doctoral student at ACU uh just gave Me this work so it's kind

of hot off the press or we're looking at indigenous and non-indigenous Australians and one of the things we find with indigenous Australians is they report significantly higher uh uh concerns with prejudice and discrimination but they report no differences in freedom of expression and what we can see here is that freedom of expression AC um is related to basic psychological need satisfaction whereas feere of discrimination is related to uh Need frustration and these things are in term predictive of outcomes indigenous Australians are some of the most oppressed people in the world um certainly of native groups

in the world and it's really important for us to find ways to help them Thrive more groups uh groups make a difference for us and again we're talking about pervasive environments and most of us identify as being part of some group I might be part of STD but other people Might be part of uh a political Community or a religious community or a sexual orientation Community the groups we belong to and identify with have an impact on our well-being and Frank kakenov and his colleagues recently have been looking at what they call Collective autonomy do

you feel like your group has a freedom of expression do you feel like your group has choices and uh or do you feel like your group is being oppressed or put down or having Prejudices turned against it and across uh a number of different studies that are part of this article the chains of my people our chains on me this is a quote from Martin Luther King uh they found that when people perceive their group as being constrained or discriminated against it hurts their own sense of autonomy and their own well-being and uh another study

that was uh from kakenov group was it's called free to fly the rainbow flag they showed That when there's discrimination or there's perceived discrimination against lgbtq people that those people suffer in terms of their own sense of autonomy and their own we wellbeing since we're standing here in the State of Florida I have to say about this study because this is a state in which there's been a lot of political messages conveyed against lgbtq plus people that would be exactly of the description in Frank kakenov study here which is hurting the Well-being of those individuals

within the culture that's so criticizing them in fact I I I just going to add this following thing I'm not sure that we would have had the conference in this V you had we known who this governor was three years ago on the on the other hand I do love this venue uh I want to move to a just a final topic here and so far I've been really talking all about how the Environment has an impact on us how uh how our organizations our cultures our economics but we can have a big impact on

ourselves and a big new area of study within stt is what we can call Proactive flourishing the things we can do to enhance our own wellness and of course one of the biggest things that we've studied in this regard is mindfulness and I'm going to spend a couple minutes on that but there's a number of other initiatives within St that have to do With how we support our own flourishing uh one of them is uh integrative emotion regulation work uh by Guy Roth and colleagues uh looking at how when we approach negative emotions and integrate

them that increases our well-being as opposed to suppression or uh reframing or disregulation which has negative effects another um I think really active area of research is on reflection and autonomous Solitude so Solitude is a really interesting area of study because Many times people associate Solitude with loneliness but autonomous Solitude when we choose to be alone is an opportunity it's an opportunity for reflection for consolidation for integration of our personalities and uh triy W and uh and Netta Weinstein and others have been showing some of the benefits of positive Solitude uh in our well-being another

thing we can study is what we call need crafting is how we can shape our daily lives in terms of uh new Uh putting into inserting into them activities that are needs satisfying and inventorying our daily lives to find the things that are really frustrating to our needs and eliminating from those so being actively selective about what we do in our lives um uh there's there's a lot of things I gu want to go back to benevolence if we want to increase our own well-being the best way to do it is to try and increase

somebody else's so these are reliable Ways but I guess my personally I've been most involved in this particular topic which is mindfulness mindfulness is the open and receptive awareness of what's occurring in the moment and that may not sound per profound but it's very deeply a part of what is required to have autonomy within a person if you don't listen to what's going on externally or internally you don't hear your heart you don't allow The feelings that are there to surface you don't uh you don't receive the present then you can't make good decisions and

choices because you really don't know what's going on so we think of mindfulness as an important ground for autonomous behavior and uh Kirk Brown and I started studying mindfulness back uh at the turn of the century uh here and you know we did a lot lot of different studies this is one I show a lot which is a daily diary study showing That on days when a person is more autonomous they also are more mindful or I should put it the other way when days when they're more mindful they're also more autonomous um and this

is true both at a trait level but it's also true at the daily level um that state mindfulness covaries with autonomy and recently we did a a new factor analysis came out in 2020 led by James Donald in which we looked at the relationship of mindfulness to each of the forms of Motivation along st's taxonomy of motivation and you can see a perfect gradient going on here which is uh that mindfulness is negatively associated with a motivation and with external regulation it's kind of mixed unreliably associated with injection it's positively associated with identification and positively

associated with intrinsic motivation you can see the uh the effect sizes the pooled effect size at the bottom for autonomous And controlled motivation I can't say enough how important is because it says that part of the ways in which we can exercise autonomy ourselves is to begin by being mindful of what we're doing make real choices by uh by bringing about awareness now this is just that same diagram again so we wrote a theoretical review paper recently um um James Donal and Emma Bradshaw and I that just made this argument which is that the more

Mindful we can become the more likely we are to engage in autonomous self-regulated behaviors and that's going to lead to better outcomes both for ourselves and for everyone around us because we know mindfulness is strongly associated with more pro-social Behavior I want to now summarize with some takeaways from what I've talked about here I know it's been kind of a rambling curval linear trip here through different topics of sdt um but there are Some things i' I'd like to conclude with and the first thing is that people from every background from every culture are prone

to growth they have intrinsic growth Tendencies with them integrative Tendencies within them that's what our human nature is all about but those things can be undermined or they can be supported by the environments in which we find ourselves all behaviors can be looked at as having some relative degree of Autonomy and more autonomy is associated with more integration and better outcomes and we do know that we get more autonomy by supporting people's basic psychological needs the goals we have what we aspire to what we're after in life will affect our basic psychological needs too and

the more we're pursuing things like money fame or uh Power the more we can find that those things don't satisfy basic psychological needs even when you're effective at them even when You're successful at them they don't reliably lead to need satisfaction where pursuing intrinsic goals things like uh quality relationships giving you to your community being benevolent these things reliably lead to better well-being outcomes so we know too that uh it's not just these proximal environments that affect us but also our pervasive environments our cultures our religions our economic systems and we can be proactive with

Respect to those things if you look across the course of human history as wetel and others have recently shown it's people exercising their autonomy against constraints that have changed history in the positive direction and we each have that capacity and part of what SAT is studying is that proactiveness within our human nature now we're at this conference here and I just want to say say a final thing about this conference which is as Martin Said I think this is an unusual conference we come here to study one framework and its applications to advance one framework

in its applications because the framework is very big and it has room for a lot of different viewpoints in it but when we're here at this conference unlike many conferences where I have to go and debate and defend stdt at this conference we get to talk about how we can do it better how we can make the Methods better how we can make our studies better how we can improve our qualitative inputs our quantitative inputs how we can do our interventions better how we can change the world better and we can do that best by

cooperating with each other to help us uh develop the best science we can now I know we have a lot of research here and we have a lot of people who are interested in practice here and sometimes they seem like different Fields but in stdt I think we think research is essential to good practice we need a really strong evidence base and that's why we emphasize so strongly research methods but there's no sense in having a good evidence base if you don't have good practices to disseminate if you don't have things that are making the

world better so I'm hoping that over the next few days you all will be contributing to making this world better by contributing to St so thank you very [Applause] much