[MUSIC] As I mentioned in our last session, SDT is a very broad, or a macro-theory of human motivation and wellness. Tries to pull together many different phenomena under a single framework. We can ask the question, just to begin with, about why do we have a theory at all, isn't science really about collecting facts? Well, one thing we know from many studies and philosophy of science is, you can pile up a lot of facts, and that doesn't necessarily create knowledge. You really need theory to organize facts, theory helps to tell you what facts belong together, how they relate to each other. And it even frames the questions that you're likely to ask, as a scientist. Consider, for instance, that many people in the the field of psychology begin their own theoretical work with a metaphor of humans as machines, or sometimes humans as computers. If this is your metaphor, or your starting point for theorizing, it leads you to ask certain kinds of questions. Like, how was that machine programmed, or how can you control that machine from the outside? And you could see that this leads to a particular kind of focus, within psychology, on environmental events and their impact on the behavior of people. We start with a different metaphor in self-determination theory, which is the metaphor of the organism, or people as living things. And when you start with that kind of idea for your theorizing, it comes to frame very different kind of questions. First, a living thing, we already know to be active, to have its own internal principles of growth and development. And we know that living things are always moving in a direction of assimilation and greater integration, over time. They move, in fact, in the direction of greater self-regulation and coherence, as long as they're alive and healthy. So when we use the metaphor of living things, we're concerned with not so much with how we control them from the outside. But what are the internal forces that are active within organisms, and then what are the needs they have to stay healthy and well? Now, this idea of the organism being the central metaphor for theory has been embraced not just by psychologists, but within organismic biologic itself. In fact, some of the great names in theoretical biology consider themselves organismic theorists. People like Bertalanffy, Jacob, Maturana and Varela, Lazlo, Mayr, Gottlieb, Kauffman, are all theoretical biologists who embraced the organismic paradigm, with its notion of an active, assimilative entity. Now, organismic psychologies have also been really important to the field. In fact, most of the grand personality theories in psychology have been organismically oriented. And so here we think about the cognitive developmental work of Piaget and Werner, who argued that the very nature of life was assimilation and organization. Or Carl Rogers, who makes central to his humanistic theory the actualizing tendency. Or Sigmund Freud, and all the psychodynamic people who followed from his work, whose emphasis is on the ego, and its synthetic function of its integrated tendencies. All of these organismic theories really see healthy functioning increasing organization over time. The development of the person in the direction of greater competence and effectiveness. A movement toward more autonomy and self-regulation, and greater social connectedness and integration. Really, this movement is in two directions that Andreas Engel, the famous theorist, once called the directions of toward autonomy, and the directions toward homonomy. Integration both within, and integration without. This, then, frames the central questions of SDT. In fact, our central question is the following, which is, what is it that people really need to flourish? In our view, and in the organismic view more generally, people have, already in their natures, all the ingredients they need to flourish. In other words, they're already oriented by their evolution to move in a direction of greater differentiation and integration, once they're alive and functioning. And when they're flourishing, there's vitality, there's always growth, and there's integrity. But this movement in the direction of autonomy, self-regulation, and integrity is by no means automatic. It requires certain kinds of supports and nutriments from the environment. In the same way that a physical entity, like an oak tree, which begins with an acorn, has physical needs in order to mature into its actualized form. So, too, the human psyche has particular needs, which, when satisfied, will lead to its fullest growth. When we use the term need, in a sense, we mean something that's essential to a living entity's growth, integrity, and wellness. So for instance, we know that plants need water, they need sunlight, they need minerals in the soil, if they're to grow. And if you deprive them of any one of those ingredients, you will see a failure to thrive in the plant itself. Well, similarly, when we talk about basic psychological needs, we mean things that are essential to the integrity, wellness, and growth of the individual, psychologically. And here, [COUGH], we see these in the same way as something that's objectively required. Whether people care about autonomy, whether they value relatedness, whether they're invested in competence. If they don't have the satisfactions that are associated with each of those constructs, they will not thrive. And so our definition of needs means that they are things that are natural, rather than acquired. We don't learn to have needs, they're already built into us. They're universal, rather than culturally-specific, because the things that we will label as basic psychological needs will apply across all cultures and developmental periods. And you don't really need to have a conscious, or a specific value for these needs. It's the satisfaction of them, versus the deprivation of them, that predicts the outcomes in people. Now, we have such as stringent definition of what constitutes a basic need, that we really have a very short list, we have three. We say there are basic needs for relatedness, to feel cared for and connected with others. To have that sense of belonging, and that you matter in the social universe. That feeling of competence, which is that you are effective at what you do. That you feel like you can control outcomes that are important in your life. And finally, the need for autonomy, which we'll spend most of our time focused on here. And autonomy is the need to have your behavior self-organized, or to be able to endorse and stand behind what you do. When you're autonomous, your actions are congruent, and they're supported by both your head and your heart. And so, what we're going to be looking at in this course is really a dialectical framework of a living organism, with very specific needs. In interaction with an environment that either supports or frustrates those needs, with effects on wellness and development, as a result of that. We will find that when social contexts are supportive of basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, we see all the hallmarks of healthy organismic functioning. Including more volitional engagement, higher-quality behavior, more vitality, more happiness, and greater mental health. So as we depart on this journey of SDT research, we'll see how important the role of basic psychological needs are, in enhancing our living engagement, and our thriving in life. 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