Welcome back to Self-determination Theory and Introduction. Today, we're going to begin getting at the heart of what Self-determination theory is all about, which is this question, what is motivation? Now, I think all of us know what the term motivation means, it means that we can be moved into action. But I think even brief reflection tells us, we can be moved into action by many different things, we can be moved into action because we're under external pressure or forced to do something, we can also be moved into action because of internal values or a real curiosity or passion or desire to do something, so, there are many different things that can move us into action. When L. Deci and I started our work in the field of motivation, the Classical model in the field was this, it was the Skinnerian Operant Psychology Model. In Skinner's model, if you could take an organism and put it in an environment in which you had control over all the reinforcements and punishments that beset it and all the stimuli that it would be exposed to, you could control a lot of that organisms behavior, you can shape it in almost any direction that was consistent with the organism's basic nature. And so, it was a very powerful metaphor and I think it's a correct theory but mostly under the conditions under which it's tested. We didn't find it wrong in terms of how it understands a rat in a cage, the problem with opera theory is, what it says about predicting people's behavior because the problem with people is, they have choices. If they don't like the box that you've got them in, if they don't like the reinforcement contingencies that you've set up for them, they often leave your box and go somewhere else, people aren't trapped in a Skinner box in the way that would give us that kind of control. In addition, in most environments, people can escape even without leaving the environment physically. If I'm in a classroom with my students, even if I think I've got them captivated inside the room, they can be online, they can be in Facebook or they can be in social media, even right now while you're listening to me, you can be doing online shopping. We can't trap people in an environment, instead, we have to attract them to sustain engagement in the environments in which they're in. Now, it's not just the problem of choice, behavioral paradigms have often focused on how to control people through manipulating external contingencies and incentives and sometimes, those have had a negative effect that was unexpected that undermines the intrinsic motivations people all ready have to act. So, these different problems with the old school of motivation of controlling people from the outside have led to what we call a true Copernican term within the field of human motivation. In the old days, we were really focused on how to control people from the outside using reinforcement and rewards and punishments but today, the questions in motivation are really more about, why do people make the choices they make and how can we sustain them on the pathways that they do choose to act in? And, as we look at those issues, we see just how important Volitional Behavior is, how important it is when people do things willingly. And in Self-determination Theory, again, we really identify two forms of this volitional behavior, one is Intrinsic motivation, the doing things out of interest and enjoyment and then secondly, Internalized motivation, doing things out of value and because you understand the worth of that particular action. And we're really focusing SDT on the factors and environments and will facilitate or undermine this volitional type of motivation. And when we think about those factors, we use a particular word for it, we use the term "Need" or "Basic need." Now, the term need has different meanings in the English language, sometimes we use the term need just to mean something that's a strong preference, I say, "Well, I need a third vacation home or a fourth Armani suit." If I were to use the word that way, I don't mean it as a necessity, I just mean it as something that I want. But there's another use of the term need, that's the way we use it Self-determination theory, which is something that's essential to an entities growth, integrity and to wellness. For instance, we use the term need all the time in biology, we could say for instance, a plant needs hydration or water and how do we know that, well, we know it objectively, if we deprive the plant of water, if we take away hydration, we see that the plant will shrivel and die. We can say the same things about the nutriments in the soil, to find out which ones are essential and which ones are not or the value of sunlight to plants. And similarly, as a psychological theory, Self-determination theory argues that, we have some basic psychological needs which, when we get them we thrive and when we don't get them, we've showed degradation in our functioning, regardless of what our conscious attitude is toward that need. In fact, a basic need for us is something that's built into our system, it's part of our evolved nature and so, therefore, it's natural rather than acquired. This also means that the basic psychological needs will identify and Self-determination theory cut across all cultures and all age groups because they are universal to human nature. And we don't even have to consciously value these basic psychological needs for them to have functional importance for us. And because we have such a strong definition of needs and such a restrictive definition of needs, at this point in the theory, we have only three basic psychological needs: the needs for autonomy, for competence and a relatedness. And I want to say a little bit about each of these needs and why it's so important to volitional motivation and wellness. The first of these needs is the need for competence, and competence are need that everybody has to feel effective and capable in the activities that they're engaged in, in life that are important at all. And there's no theory of human motivation or wellness that doesn't have competence, it's pretty central to it, so, this isn't a way at least controversial of our basic psychological needs. I would say an SDT, when we think about competence, we think of it as not just being able to attain an outcome but rather to experience growth, to have a sense that you're developing skills, that you're extending your abilities and this is what really satisfies the deep need for competence. A second need in Self-determination Theory is the need for relatedness, we argue that for people to be optimally functioning and motivated in any setting, they need to feel connected with and belonging in the atmosphere in which they're in. They have to have the experience that, I matter, that I'm significant in some way in this group or in this particular setting. And the sense of relatedness can derived both from the experience of being cared for but it also can be derived from the fact that I can contribute and I matter in this group because there's something I can give back, so both give and take within social groups creates this idea of relatedness. The third basic psychological needs is the need for Autonomy, and when we use the term autonomy, we really mean the term volition here or voluntary, because when you're autonomous, you're willingly doing what you're doing and you endorse your own actions. When you're autonomous, you typically experiencing a high degree of interest or value in what you're experiencing and the opposite of autonomy is what we say is, heteronomy or feeling controlled by forces that are alien or outside of yourself. People don't like to feel coerced, they want to feel like they're the self organizers of their action. Autonomy is so important in SDT, I also want to tell you a couple of things that it's not. First of all, in SDT, we don't use the term autonomy in an equivalent way to the word independence. Independence for us is that, you don't rely on other people for help or for guidance but in SDT we recognize that you can willingly or autonomously turn to others for help or for guidance. In fact, we find that the healthiest adolescents are those who are autonomously dependent on their parents who willingly turned to them for advice and for guidance. In any case, you can be autonomously independent or autonomously dependent, so we don't want to have these two terms confused. Similarly, we can say that, there's no equivalence between autonomy and individualism, and there's no opposition between autonomy and collectivism, and you can be autonomously individualistic if you really believe in the value of self over group, but you could be autonomously collectivistic if you really believe in the value of the group over the self and put a priority on it. And in that sense, we've seen both heteronomous collectivism and autonomous collectivism, people can be forced into collectivistic situations but we find across the world there are many people who willingly and autonomously engage in collectivistic behaviors. Another point I'd want to make is that, to be autonomous doesn't mean that there aren't demands on you or they're not even requirements for your behavior but you can be autonomous in following a command or a requirement as long as you concur with that commander or requirement. If I'm on my way here and I'm stopped by a traffic police person because there's an accident on the road up ahead, I willingly stop for that officer, because I believe in the value of traffic laws but someone who hasn't internalized the value of traffic laws or of legal authorities doesn't stop autonomously, they only feel controlled in that moment. So, autonomous is about the legitimacy of the commands and the restraints that you're under. And finally, I want to say that autonomy is not the same thing as freedom, even though we use those terms equivalently some times. The term freedom in our theory really means that there's an absence of constraints or a release from constraints but just taking away constraints doesn't supply people autonomy. Typically, if you take away constraints, for instance, in a classroom setting, what you would get is simply chaos because you haven't given the students in the classroom a mission or a purpose or a goal to be striving for autonomously. So, autonomy is not the same thing as freedom, freedom can be a circumstance which conduces to autonomy but it doesn't fully provide it. Now, these three basic needs are going to be really a core topic throughout the rest of this course because we're going to argue that people to be functioning optimally need to feel autonomy, competence and relatedness. There's probably some other essential ingredients to human wellness and optimal motivation and we argue all the time about whether there's a fourth or a fifth theory but these are the ones that had been empirically sustained across 40 years of research at this point and have shown themselves to have both predictive value and a great deal of practical value in interventions and in everyday life. So, in this course, we're going to see how these three basic needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness produce the very outcomes that we're concerned with here of high-quality, motivation and wellness and in the next lecture, we are going to be turning directly to the role of autonomy, competence and relatedness and producing a phenomena of great interest to us, Intrinsic motivation.
