We've been discussing the issue of wellness and health from an SDT perspective. In the past few sessions, we've been showing evidence that the more people have their basic psychological needs satisfied, the higher their well being and their health, and the more those are frustrated, the lower those outcomes are. Now, we have a further question though, which is how is it that people are fighting these satisfactions on a day-to-day basis? In SDT, we think a lot of this has to do with the goals you're pursuing, or the activities you're engaged in in life. Not all goals are equal. Some are very need-satisfying, and some, even when you're successful at them, may not lead to basic needs satisfaction. For instance, you could be really successful at doing school work which you don't have autonomy for engaging in. So, even when you are successful at it, you get A in courses that you didn't want to take in the first place, we don't think this will necessarily lead to wellness. On the other hand, when you succeed at something that you greatly value or you have a good deal of autonomy for, this indeed enhances wellness quite a bit, because you're accomplishing an aim that's also one that's dear to your heart. So, we don't think all goals are created equal. In fact, we think that the life goals people are pursuing will be predictive of wellness in part mediated by the impact they have on basic psychological needs satisfaction as the graphics that you're looking at demonstrates. Now, this view in SDT again, fits with the Aristotelian point of view that we spoke of earlier that goes under the rubric of eudaimonia. Because remember that Aristotle argued that, what's most satisfying in life, the thing that will lead to the greatest flourishing is when people are pursuing the virtuous exercise of their capabilities and potentialities, when they're pursuing the things that are intrinsically worthwhile. Now, this is an empirical claim, Aristotle saying that when you pursue the things that are of intrinsic merit, this will lead to greater happiness and flourishing and we think that he's right about that. It does so through basic needs satisfaction. Now, Aristotle thought further that a lot of people in pursuing happiness, pick up the wrong goals. They adapt the wrong goals. He in fact said, "When it comes to pursuing the good and the happiness to judge from most of their lives, many people are off." He says most people and here he says, "They really the people who are most vulgar, suppose that the goals of life are about pleasure. They favor a life therefore of consumption." But he disagrees that this will work for people. He says the people who are going to be happiest in life are those and I quote here, "Who have cultivated their character in mind and kept the acquisition of external goods within moderate limits." The people who are unhappy and again I quote, "Are those who have managed to acquire more external goods than they can possibly use, but they're lacking in goods of the soul." If you look at that last line of Aristotle's, you might think this is just a description of our modern culture, that we have many material goods, but are often lacking in the goods of the soul. Nonetheless, cultural messages are often telling us that the route to happiness, the route to wellness is through having more, that you can purchase happiness, that it's important to consume. If you have the right image or you have the right amount of money or you have the right amount of status at these things alone will make you happy. Again, this is against the Aristotelian claim, but is Aristotle. Right? Our first studies in this area really happened to the 1990s and they were collaborative efforts between myself originally and Tim Castle, who's now at Knox College. In those first studies, Tim and I wanted to ask the question, are people who are pursuing materialistic goals are really after financial wealth, are they really less happy in life than people who put less importance on that as Aristotle would have argued? So, we asked people in several samples, what are the most important things that you're pursuing your life? Some people said it was relationships, some people said it was giving to their communities. We also asked people about pursuing their health, pursuing personal growth and then finally we asked them about materialism and financial success. We found in those early studies that the more importance people put on financial success and material acquisition, the less happy they were in life. The more they had symptoms of anxiety, the more they had symptoms of depression, the less they reported vitality. This is a phenomenon we called, The Dark Side of the American Dream, because it seemed that the more people were after in material goods, the less they were feeling pleasure in life even when we control for how much they had attained those material goods. So, we went on to pursue this in a more deep way looking at additional goals. In the next studies that we did which really began around 1996, again, with Tim Castle, we examined seven goals in people's life. We looked at how important they felt personal growth was, how much they thought personal relationships were important, how much they thought community was important and how much they thought health was important. These are all things we called intrinsic goals, because we thought pursuing any of these goals would be things that would be very directly related to psychological mean satisfaction. On the other hand, we looked at three types of extrinsic goals: The pursuit of money, the pursuit of fame and the pursuit of attractive image. We called those extrinsic goals, because we thought those at best be only indirectly to basic psychological needs satisfactions and their pursuit might even interfere with those satisfactions. Then we went around and polled people about the extent to which these various goals were important to them and looked at their well-being. The graph that you're looking at now is just a random urban sample from the city of Rochester, New York. We went door to door and we just knocked on doors and we asked people to fill out surveys for us of what they were valuing and aspiring to accomplish in their lives. Then we also did a health survey with each one of them and the results were really impressive even to us at the time. Well, the results here show is that people who are putting an emphasis on intrinsic goals, on their community, on their relationships, on their personal growth, they were showing greater self-actualisation, higher vitality, fewer depressive symptoms and even fewer physical symptoms. The opposite was true for people who were emphasizing extrinsic goals in their life. Just wanting more fame, more money, a better attractive image was associated with more unhappiness, less vitality, more physical symptoms, more feelings of depression and sadness. This same pattern has been now replicated across the world. Samples had been done in Russia, in German, in Korea, in Israel, in Belgium, in Nigeria, in Brazil, in Iceland, in many, many other countries and the patterns turns out to be the same. Not only that, it's been shown across different age groups. Even as young as elementary school kids who are more extrinsically focused in their life goals tend to be less happy than kids who are pursuing more intrinsic goals. This pattern is also there in teenagers, in young adults, in older adults, even in retired persons. It's also true whether we're sampling business people, medical people, people in sports, really any field of endeavor, the same pattern seems to hold. In fact, Fred Grouzet and others led a worldwide study, a 15 countries study just to look at the pattern of goals and what they found is that the relationship of intrinsic and extrinsic goals is they are across the world. First of all, intrinsic goals tend to be opposed to extrinsic goals across the world as shown by circumflex modelling and this really means that the more you're pursuing the one kind of goal, the intrinsic goals, the less you're likely to be focused on extrinsic goals and vice versa. The more you're after money, fame and image, the less you're going to be focused on community, on relationships and on personal growth. Of course, this has well-being consequences as we've argued. So, when people are pursuing extrinsic goals, they tend to get less satisfaction of autonomy competence and relatedness, and this is the reason that the extrinsic goal pursuits lead to more unhappiness. On the contrary, when people are pursuing intrinsic goals, there's higher need satisfaction and better wellness that accrues.
