Richard Ryan || Self-Determination Theory & Human Motivation

[Music] Today it's great to have Richard Ryan on the podcast. Dr. Ryan is a professor at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education at Australian Catholic University in North Sydney and Professor Emeritus in Psychology at the University of Rockchester. Dr. Ryan is a clinical psychologist and co-developer of self-determination theory, one of the leading theories of human motivation. He is among the most cited researchers in psychology and social sciences today, ranking among the top 1% of researchers in the field. Dr. Ryan has been recognized as one of the eminent psychologists of the modern era listed among the top 20 most influential industrial organizational psychologists and has been honored with many distinguished career awards. He's co-author with Edward DC of the book Self-Determination Theory, Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development and Wellness. Richard it's so great to finally have a sit down and have a chat with you. Yeah, it's got great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. My pleasure. I want to just go back to kind of trace the development of your thinking and just who you are a little bit. You know, why do you get into the field of psychology in the first place? Oh, Scott, you know, those kind of questions are always pretty complicated. It was a, for me, it was a secuitous route, but I suppose this part would interest you a lot. I was a philosophy major when I was an undergraduate. And I had a strong interest in phenomenology in particular and issues of freedom and dialectics. So that guaranteed that I was unemployed upon graduation. And so the result of that was that I was looking for a job and my wife was working in a local facility for developmental disabilities. And she said, there's a job for an aid open there. And I went there. They sent me to the wrong interview and I ended up directing a program for helping people get out of the institution and live independently. And that got me really interested in the issues of motivation and intervention. And that led me to get back into psychology. Cool. And you did your PhD in what, like, what discipline of psychology? I'm a clinical psychologist. Clinical? I got my PhD at University of Rochester in clinical. I was for many years the director of clinical training at Rochester until I went to Australia. Excellent. And what was your, like, dissertation title? Hmm. It was a really boring title. I can't tell you what it was, but they all are. But I was basically testing the idea that ego involvement will undermine your intrinsic motivation. So the more your ego's on the line, the less you'll be intrinsically motivated. So that was my dissertation. Now that's really interesting because that's a great obvious precursor to the more modern day work that you've done on motivation. And so that really did start in grad school. So who's your advisor? Well, when I started grad school, my area was clinical neuropsychology. So I was doing a lot of work in evoke potential research in that was with Rafael Clorman, who was a great advisor for me. But I converted, I guess, Ed D.C. and I were running Gishtalk groups together around the city of Rochester at the time. And we were good friends as clinicians. And then we started to talk theory. And he was already doing experiments on intrinsic motivation. And the two of us came together. So my dissertation really had moved over to our beginnings of self-determination theory. So you've really known Ed or D.C. a long time. I didn't even realize it went back to grad school. Oh, and I've been friends since 1977. So we have a long history together. That is amazing. So you know, the lot of this, well, all this stuff, this research went, came after Abraham Mazzle was passing. As you know, as anyone who was in my podcast knows, I'm a big fan of Abraham Mazzle and the human-to-six psychology era. And he really thought a lot about motivation. He never used the expression intrinsic, extrinsic. He never talked about that distinction. When did that distinction start to crop up in psychology and who were some of your major influencers early on in your career? Well, I say a big influencer. And this also applies to D.C. is Richard DeCharmes. Richard DeCharmes wrote a book in 1968 called Personal Causation. In that book, he really describes the difference between feeling like an origin, like your behind and engaged in your behavior versus a pawn, like you're being pushed around by external forces. So he was an attribution theorist in the tradition of Hyder. He was also a psychodynamic thinker. I would say he was a big influencer and he did work on, he discussed intrinsic motivation and he even discussed the hypothesis that rewards and ego involvement would undermine it, although he didn't do much work on that himself, it was really Ed who picked up that theme. So I would say it was a round, Robert White was a big influence on us. I once got the opportunity to meet with Robert White and he's well known for his idea of effectiveness, motivation and competence, motivation. So I say between DeCharmes and his ideas about autonomy and Robert White and his ideas about competence, those are kind of the theoretical forerunners for our workers. Cool. You did mention he studied philosophy. So I am curious who are some of your philosopher influences, especially in your thinking about autonomy because that's a topic that obviously philosophers have been thinking about for a really long time with issues of free will. I'm just curious if you immersed yourself in the philosophy of mind or the existential philosophy literature at all before you got into the field of psychology. Yeah, I would say that was there before my interested psychology. So I was a, that's awesome. College, a student of Hussurl. I was really interested in European phenomenology and existentialism. In particular, there was an early phenomenologist whose name is Alexander Fonder and he did a lot of work on the whole idea of what he called will or self-determination from a phenomenological point of view. So he was certainly an early influence on me. I also was steeped in the philosophy of Paul Rekor who was a later phenomenological existential thinker. I had a lot of interest in the work of Sart. But also, I analytic philosophy to some extent, the work of Harry Frankfurt on free will and autonomy has been really important. So self-determination theory, I think, has always wanted to be well anchored and conversant with its philosophical underpinnings. I think there's too few theories today that really explicitly state their ontologies and epistemologies. And I think that's something that we strongly want to do. And this has been there from the beginning. Yeah, that's evident and that's a great feature, so to speak, of your self-determination theory. Even before we get into the nuts and bolts of the theory and things are running that, I want to stay on the philosophy topic for a second because this topic that very much interests me. I had a two-part series debate with Sam Harris for this podcast about free will. And do you follow Sam Harris at all? I don't. That's fine. Well, you're excused for that. But he's very much believes we don't have free will. And you see, it's usually a straw man argument. It's usually a definition of free will that no one would ever want anyway. So I'm pretty skeptic about anybody who argues the free will idea because they usually set up some kind of ridiculous model of what free will would look like. There's no prior causes. There's no prior thought. There's no prior input. Right. Has to come ex-Nilio. And of course, no events in the universe happen that way. So they win. If that's what free will is, they win. Yeah. I hear you, brother. I hear you, brother. Well, there's a definition. There is a certain definition one could propose that he does that he's right in that sense, in the sense he's talking about. But I do think there's a free will worth wanting. I think that the kind of self-determination you talk about in your research is a free will worth wanting. I think Daniel Dennett, the philosopher of mind who is a compatibleist would agree with that. So I do want to know, like, your conceptualization of self-determination, like, what is it? Before we get to the nuts and bolts of the needs and the nuances of the theory, let's just talk about self-determination for a sec. Because I think that's an interesting in itself of what does that mean among humans? What are we determined? We can translate it into some other terms like self-regulation, self-determination is when what you're doing is something that you feel that you're regulating. In other words, that you're also a behavior that you stand behind or self-endorse. This is why it aligns with the phenomenological view of self-determination. Because when you act with self-determination, you're acting away where you're willing to do it. And you do it volitionally. And therefore, you can be wholeheartedly engaged in what you're up to. So in that briefest form, self-determination is true volition. True volition. There's a lot of things that can arise that can pull me away from, or even fool me into thinking, I have volition when I really don't. I'm fascinated with the phenomena of cults. And I'm fascinated with the phenomena of mind control. So I guess you can have external coercion and you can have internal coercion. and people with OCD, people with lots of competing psychopathologies and things that are inner taking them away from, I would say they're higher self. So I think that maybe there's something. Yeah. You're just right Scott, which is that it's not parallel to the distinct green internal and external because you can have haduronymous forces that are within. You can have your own interjects. You can have your own internalized stigmas and pressures and biases that actually take you away from self-determination and autonomy. So the threats to autonomy are not just external, they're also in term. Yeah. And Carl Rogers talked about that interjection, I think, as the phrase he used. So that's certainly the case. We use the same phrase. Yeah. I'm sorry. Awesome. No, that's awesome. Do you use it as adapting it from Carl Rogers or just a coincidence? No, actually, you know, Carl Rogers also adapted it from where I did, which is from psychoanalytic theory. When we talk about it in interject, you're talking about a partially assimilated internalization and Rogers meant it in the same way. If I was to trace it where I got the term from, it would be from my psychoanalytic training and particularly from the work of Roy Schaefer, who really did talk about a continuum of motivations. Not too dissimilar from what we did, but we adopted it without the same psychoanalytic assumptions. This is great. Okay. So can you tell our listeners a little bit? Can you go through the motivational continuum? Let's start with just going through the motions. Sure. I mean, when you think about any action you have when you ask people, why are you doing what you're doing? There's a whole variety of answers people might give. One answer might be, I'm being forced to do it or compelled to do it by forces that are outside me. That would be coercion and it would be a form of being externally regulated. They're making me do it. I could also be seduced into doing something where the carrot that's riding in front of me or a reward. I'm now doing it for the reward. So it's still an external force that's driving me, but here it's an repetitive force. We call both of those external regulation. That's when your motivation is dependent on either the external pressure or the external rewards that are out there. If those weren't there, your motivation would go away. Another kind of motivation is, well, why are you doing that? Well, because I think I should or I'd feel bad about myself if I didn't or, you know, I feel proud of myself if I do this thing. We call those things interjection because those are internal rewards and punishments that are driving your behavior, the fear of anxiety or shame or the ego boost of inflating yourself by feeling really great. Those things are also motivating forces that we call interjection. And they're not very autonomous either because we can be pushed around just as you were just saying by those interjects. My shoes can make me do a lot of things that are not really what I value. Still again, we can do things because we're valuing them. We actually believe in them. So you know, I might do something like collect money for a cause I care about. It's no fun. It's not interesting, but I truly value it. So I volitionally and willingly do it. And we would call this identification because you're identified with your goal and your aim in that case. And that's also very volitional and highly autonomous. And finally, you know, we talk about intrinsic motivation. Now we do it. We do something just because it's inherently enjoyable and interesting to you to do. So it's also fully volitional. And so you can see here, we move from being externally controlled all the way up to being fully volitional. And this is why we call it a continuum of autonomy. But it has lots of way stations along the line of different types of motives. The further you up on that continuum and your motivation, the better the outcomes typically are the higher you're well-being, the better your performance, the more congruent you are in action, less conflicted. So many good things happened from being more autonomous end of that motivation and continue. Cool. Thank you for explaining that. And you have like a test that people like employees and companies can take to like, or is it sort of, do you have you developed any instruments? Well, we've developed a lot of instruments and some of them are for research use, you know, because our research instruments tend to be longer and because they have to get through the gauntlet of the psychometrics journals demand. But then we do a lot of work in industry. And there we use things that are really practical measures. And I have a company that I started with Scott Rigby that's called Motivation Works. And in there we measure what we call Motivation Quality very quickly with employees. But it's basically asking them, what are the drivers of your work on your job and to the extent that they're more external, you see lower quality, more innovation, less absenteeism, less good organizational behavior, poor performance. You see the opposite, the more people are really intrinsically motivated and identified with their work goals. Wonderful. Wonderful. One question I wanted to ask you on this Motivation of Continuum was Samir Neuromahamids work at Penn. He's found that a great motivating force, and I have found this personally in my life, a great motivating force is the underdog narrative feeling like you have something to prove to someone who doesn't believe in you, but you still believe in yourself. And I was wondering, where is that on the Motivation of Continuum? I mean, that's probably like an extrinsic. I put it right in there as an interject. I'm going to show them. So now you're being reactive, plus you're also trying to live up to a standard that's really being externally defined in that case. You know, this is like-- But it feels so good. But it feels so good to crush your competition once who doesn't believe in you. It may. It seems like a pretty empty goal. I mean, if that's the kind of basis of somebody's overall motivation, I think that it's pretty limited as a goal. You know, like I would rather not have somebody become a PhD in psychology because they want to prove to their mom that they're good. I'd rather that they've obbed the field of psychology and cared about the content of that field, that they were more concerned with their understanding of the field than the grades that they got or the credentials they obtained. I mean, these kind of-- I'm not saying that those are not motivating goals, but they're kind of an impoverished form of motivation because the goal is pretty superficial. And then it can be pretty easily undermined. I think that-- I would push back at that for a little bit and say that maybe at certain points in people's lives, it serves a really good purpose. You know, when I was younger, I was a special ed as a kid. And, you know, none of my teachers or anyone believed in my intellectual potential. And I had to generate this kind of FU attitude from within. I mean, it's the only thing that saved me, Ryan. You know what I mean? It's the only thing that saved me to be like, you know, I'm going to prove to them that I do have some kind of intelligence. Now, I do agree that a more mature intrinsic to the right of your continuum someday, you want a morph and which I did, thankfully, I don't still feel like I need to prove anything to anybody. But I do think as a child, it's served its purpose. Well, you know, again, I'm not going to argue that it's not a motivation. It is. It sits in the middle of our continuum with something that shows some some some energizing functions. But think about it, Scott, wouldn't it have been better? Had you had people who actually did care about where you were headed, believed in you, supported you for that growth? I mean, there would have been a much nicer motivational path to the same outcomes than the one that you outlined. And I'm not saying that you had to compensate for some bad motivational circumstances. Obviously, I don't know because Samir's research and I'd love to send you this paper that Samir just published this paper. He's at Wharton. He actually contrasted two motivations, narratives. One is the underdog, but the other is the favorite narrative, which is like people always believed in me and then I made it. And he found that the underdog one increased performance better than the other one. So that kind of turns on its head a little bit. The narrative as we tell ourselves, you know, maybe some are. I can believe that. I can believe that in a short term experiment. I can believe that or I totally get it as a dynamic. I don't think it's a sustainable dynamic as a sustainable making a living and being really engaged in your field. If it's all about your ego proving, I think it's going to not sustain itself. Did you see the last dance by chance? No, I didn't. Michael Jordan is known for, of course, Michael Jordan is. He is known for creating imaginary foes to keep him sustained. So to him, I would, I was, I get out, push back, I've had certain contexts. Maybe like NBA sports, you know, like it might be sustainable to like keep like, you know, being like, I'm going to prove I'm going to prove them wrong. You know, it might be, might be. I don't think you'd explain Michael Jordan's persistence. I'm not saying he doesn't create a game for himself and doesn't pump himself up in these ways. Those sound like ways to get himself intrinsically motivated to present. and I can't imagine that that would be a basis for the career of Michael Jordan. - You'd be surprised, but I do think that not maybe not that alone, he obviously does have intrinsic love for the game. I mean, without the intrinsic love for the game, it seems like hard to be sustainable. I mean, can't you have multiple of these motives at once? - Actually, our subtermation model says you almost always do. So when I'm involved in my work, to some extent, it's intrinsically motivated to some extent, it's coming out of value, which is some extent I'm interjecting, need to do well and beat myself up if I wrote a poor article. So you have multiple motives always going. And what we look at is, where's the relative's autonomy in that? 'Cause it's a balance of those things. But they certainly coexist and they coexist within every, almost within every act. It's hardly any-- - Humans are messy. - Pure, intrinsic, yeah. And we have multiple motives usually going. And but when some become predominant, it can undermine the quality of our overall actions. And that's again, if I get back to you, I don't doubt that people pump themselves up the little ego games like that. I don't think it's, if that's where your main motivation is sitting, it's not gonna end up in a high quality motivation over time. Okay, so let's go into some of your, the needs, the major needs of software-termish theory and how you selected them. Why'd they make the cut? - Well, you know, we didn't start out with a theory of basic psychological needs. We started out with a narrower theory of what are the things that facilitate or undermine intrinsic motivation. And we found that context that supported people's autonomy and supported people's feelings of competence were the things that really drove intrinsic motivation. And then when we started to look at internalization and what are the things that lead people to deeply internalize the values of their culture or the people around them, it was feeling about autonomy, that they, you know, that reading autonomy supported, that they could feel competent to do the things that were being asked of them. And then third, that they felt closely connected to others. So autonomy, competence, and relatedness popped out really strongly for the basis of internalization. And as we were studying these things that feed into high quality motivation that all of our studies were showing that when you had autonomy, competence, and relatedness, you also had high well-being, all the indices of flourishing. And that's when we started to move toward a theory of basic needs that a full functioning person is, has their volition, has that sense of efficacy and feels socially connected and propulsive in what they're doing. So those things congeal in a full functioning person. So they seem like necessary conditions for wellness. And so as we've looked in settings like workplaces, classrooms, health clinics, psychotherapy settings, we see all three of those needs really being potent drivers of the wellness outcomes that are there. So I can say really empirically we came to these as three basic needs. But there's also a deductive portion of it. SDT is what we call an organismic theory. It grows out of the organismic psychological tradition. And in that, when you think about what is a healthy organism, it's organism that's moving in the direction of differentiation and integration, which means that it's moving in a direction of greater self-regulation of autonomy and greater effectiveness in its environment. And if it's a social organism, greater integration. So those three concepts, autonomy, competence, and relatedness fall deductively out of organismic thinking, as well as inductively out of what we found in all of our research and motivation. - How much did you sort of consult Maslow's writings on the basic needs and, you know, yeah, like there's no self-actualization as a specific need in your theory. And I just want to, like, do you consider any of his? - Well, I think organismic theory says that there's an inherent propensity towards integration, which is very close to the self-actualization idea. And certainly Rodger's idea of self-actualization was also an integrated idea. So I think there were some parallel ideas over there. You know, for myself, you know, Maslow was an author, I read as a kid, so, you know, 'cause I was so much older. So for me, he was like a person I read as a teenager and I wouldn't say he wasn't influential, but he was influential more in the sense of like, pointing to possibilities in the field. Then in terms of formal theory. You know, I very much think that the humanistic spirit in focusing on self-actualization has some kinship with SDT's idea of an active individual who's moving in a direction of integration all the time. So there are similar spiritual sense. - I agree. - Oh, I agree. And I think the integration piece is so essential. I was wondering how you incorporate the integration piece into self-determination theory because you one could have, you know, could score high in the needs for relatedness, competence, autonomy, but still not be particularly integrated as a whole human, right? - I don't think that's so. You know, again, when we're thinking about needs satisfaction, if I think about a setting in which somebody has all three of those needs setting, it's almost by definition that they're integrated in their functioning there. 'Cause if I have those needs satisfied, that means I'm pursuing the things that matter to me, that I value, that I interest me. So I have volition, I have connection and social support because I have the relatedness and I'm feeling efficacious. You know, I can't see in that anything other than a pretty integrated person. - Are there any needs that you're considering adding to the picture? Yeah, I'll just ask that question. And you have your, you know, we've always had an open list. So, you know, we came out with a 10th of the theory of three basic needs by the early 90s, we were sort of in that place. And we've always kept a list open for people to nominate other things. One of my former students, Tim Kasser, at one time tried to put security into the list, but as we looked at the need for security, we found that kind of in line with Maslow thinking, "Here, it's really a deficit need." It's really something that rears its head when you don't have it. But if you have it, it's not very prominent and it's not all that enhancing. So it doesn't predict wellness. It's kind of like a necessary, but not sufficient condition for some things to happen in your life. So security was one that we tried to bring in to meet criteria, but didn't meet those criteria. More recently, Frank Martella from Finland joined our group in Rochester when I was still there. And often was interested in benevolence and altruism as a possible basic psychological need. And I will say, exploring that the evidence has shown really how much of a wellness enhancer benevolence is where people acro benevolence, they are typically doing so autonomously, so they're satisfying their autonomy, they're typically feeling effective. So they're getting some confidence needs that are connecting with people. But they are also getting some kind of warm glow of benevolence, which has its own unique effect on wellness. And we found that over and over again. So although benevolence doesn't fit all the criteria we have for what a basic need is, it certainly is an enhancement, wellness enhancer. And it's a big part of how people find meaning in life. So yeah, I would agree with that. I support adding that tier list. I don't know if you have heard about my book, Transcend, that came out recently. I have. I have. I'd love to send you a copy. And perhaps we could compare contrast and really nerd out someday and get in the weeds in a way that our listeners probably don't want to listen to right now. But-- You know, my tendency is always to nerd out. My tendency is always to nerd out. So you have to stop me when I go there. Oh, I love it. Oh, no. That's my tendency, too. I'd love to maybe just discuss with you some needs that I've added that aren't in your theory. And maybe you have good reasons for that. And maybe I need to rethink things. Maybe you need to rethink things who knows. But one thing that I was really excited about the benevolence thing is I did add that as a separate need from the need for connection. I did separate those out in my revised hierarchy of needs. And I've been developing a scale with my colleagues called the Light Triad Scale. I don't know if you've come across that at all. That's a great idea. I think as opposed to the dark triad. Yeah, exactly. Have you come across it at all in the lecture? I have not. So I'll send you that paper. And yeah, I think that really does capture more. Will we call it a benevolent orientation towards others to try to transform it in? I don't know if you've seen-- we have a meta-analysis that shows that pro-social behavior and anti-social behavior are strongly predicted in meta-analysis by autonomy and control. So when people have autonomy, they tend to be pro-social. We think of that as the default in human nature. And under controlled circumstances, they tend to be more anti-social. And I think it fits with this overall idea. I won't even go there about the COVID masks people who don't want to be. controlled for having to wear masks or having to get vaccinations and what that controlling does to those people's personalities. We'll just not talk about that at all. But yeah, I hear what you're saying. Yeah, so I would propose a humb and I say this humbly, I have the utmost respect for your work. But I think maybe it means to consider adding the need for exploration as I add in my revised hierarchy of needs in your model, because we do find that is a separate need. Let me just say a couple of things about that though. I mean, I'm happy to consider all needs. But problem with calling something like exploration a basic need is that it's really something that happens in certain domains and times and it doesn't cut across all of the types of things we typically explain with basic needs. When people are in an exploratory mode, they're typically getting a high satisfaction of the need for confidence. When they're truly an exploratory mode, they have a lot of volition behind that. And so there's a lot of our ready basic need satisfaction going on in exploration. And so to have it be its own basic need, you'd have to say, well, exploration is part of all the different behaviors people engage in. And it's nice to know all of those. And I think that's. I think I could make a case that it is. My colleague, Colin, the young and I are writing a paper, well, it's taking a long time to finish it, but how are the need for exploration? I mean, it's aimless. It's aimless in a lot of ways and goalless. And I would actually argue that it's a separate, a clearly distinct from the need for competence and mastery. And I would even go so far and I know you're going to totally disagree with me on this. And it's totally fine. Please feel free to disagree on anything I say. But I would actually make the case that the need for competence is tied to ego and self-esteem. And it is. It is if it's a control competence. In other words, if I can distinguish. If what's driving my competence is the kind of ego involvement we were talking about before, then indeed. But there can be a more. So you think. So you can distinguish between a more exploratory form of mastery competence from an ego form. Do you think? Yeah. You know, it gets back to what's motivating your activity. Very interesting. And yeah, so let's talk about self-esteem because I do actually posit the need for self-esteem as its own thing. And I've read great papers you've written on this arguing why you didn't include self-esteem in your model. And I think you've made great points. You know, they're very wise and very Buddhist way of thinking about it. And I was wondering if you could unpack a little bit why you didn't include self-esteem in your model. And then maybe I could try to defend why I did in my model. But I'd love to hear some of you were thinking about that. Well, self-esteem gets used in some different ways. But typically you measure self-esteem. You're getting it's a positive self-concept that people have. And there's no doubt that it's good to have that positive view of yourself and your social relations that gets measured with self-esteem measures. But if you're engaged in life in a way that has autonomy, if you feel connectedness with other people, if you feel effective at what you're doing, you have self-esteem. But that means it's a derivative. It's an outcome of these other satisfaction that we have in life. But if you're motivated to get self-esteem, we call that ego involvement. I mean, why am I concerned about how I'm being evaluated or how I'm in my good or in my bad. I went just a very fact of entering into those questions and those comparisons has moved me away from a more autonomous kind of functioning. But when I'm functioning well, I'm not one, I mean when a person is functioning well, they're not wondering how am I doing? How do I compare to the others? Am I great? Those questions don't even come up because you are feeling good. So self-esteem is an evaluative stance with respect to yourself. I mean, this is one view of it. And that's not a basic need. It grows out of certain kinds of social situations. And sometimes it's actually a harmful problem to be focused on self-esteem. Yeah, this is a really interesting question, motivation versus need. I mean, I think I try to make the case that I do believe self-esteem is a need. It is a fundamental need. You see catastrophic failures, depression, etc. with very low levels of self-esteem. So certain minimum threshold, it seems to be required of a healthy self-esteem versus a narcissistic self-esteem. But also, I include need for safety in my model because I think it's a need. But I actually, I very much take your point. I think it's an excellent point about if you're if your primary motivation is self-esteem. And that does maybe can note a sense of disintegration in the system to a certain degree. So I absolutely agree with that. And it actually, you raise an interesting question about individual differences, something I'm interested in very much. You know, people have even in all three of your needs, some people very dramatically the extent to which they want connections, you know, their lives or people varied dramatically, extent they want autonomy and competence. So, you know, what have you found from an individual difference perspective? Are there things that like are the better predictors of things in life than others, you know, from a variation perspective? Well, the first thing is that people will vary in terms of their self-reported preference or care about autonomy related to circumference. One of the good things about SDTs is it's a functional theory. It says it doesn't matter whether you like or care about those things. If you don't have them, you show the deterioration functioning associated with theory predicts. And when you do have them, even if you say it doesn't matter to me, having them enhances your wellness. So this is a functional theory rather than a preference theory. And we even show that preferences don't really change those results much. There's no interaction between getting your needs met and predicting wellness and whether that's what you thought you wanted. So, you know, there's that I think that's really important because when we're thinking about needs, we're not talking about people's values, we're talking about the requirements they have to be full function. By the way, just decide to kind of tell you one quick side story. Oh, please. Yeah, of course, of course. It was somewhere around 19. I'm going to say 72 that, you know, because you asked me about Maslow. I had read some of his books at the time. I had dropped out of college and I was living up in Cambridge and just reading a lot and, you know, working in factories. I was a factory record at the time. And I read one of Maslow's books and I thought, "Oh, he's at Brandeis. I will go see him." Because, you know, I was a kid and I didn't know any better. So I went to over to Brandeis and I went to his office and I knocked on his door and somebody saw me knocking on his door and they said, "Oh, you know, Dr. Maslow's passed away." So I never got to talk to him and recently somebody said to me, "You know, if you had gotten in, what would you have asked?" I thought, "You know, I wonder." I have no idea what my young 21-year-old mind would have asked at the time, but I clearly had questions for him. So, you know, he wasn't that he was a figure. Yeah. I love that. I love that. I love that. You're 21 yourself. You like Abraham Maslow. And I, that's wonderful. You know, what about the higher needs? Well, how come there aren't higher needs in your in your model like the need for self-transcendence or all or maybe is because they're not needs? They're not. Maybe they can be outcomes of integration, however. In other words, you know, STT and the organismic theory, it says that the fullest functioning organism is an integrated one. And a lot of these things that we see in what you're you're calling higher needs are really highly integrated people who are pursuing the things that matter to them. But you have you certainly have a lot of people who are high in competence, autonomy and relatedness who aren't motivated by transcendence. And this is Maslow's point. He actually the end of his life, he distinguished between two kinds of self-actualizers. Transcending self-actualizers and non-transcending self-actualizers. You probably won't like the Scott, but I actually think that that part of the era of humanistic psychology did humanistic psychology in. The split, trans-personal and transcendence versus mainstream humanistic psychology, I think really hurt that field. And that's not to to in any way this value, devalue the idea of transcendence, but it became so central in some people's minds that they kind of kicked out the Rosaryans and the other non-transcendent humanistic psychologists. I mean, I don't know if you know about the fights at the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and all about stuff that happened at that time, but it was a sad moment I think for the movement of humanistic psychology, which you know, I was not a part of. I'm only saying this as a historical note. Sure, it wasn't just a pretty picture of what he was doing at the end of his career. Okay, well, there goes my book. There goes my book. And I'm just like, No, no, it's not taking away at all from the importance of that talk. Like I'm only saying that, you know, it's a piece of a larger puzzle of a healthy organism. But when you make it-- And I agree. And I think that they put so much stress on that, and there were some more empirically minded psychologists who just couldn't go there, and they lost them from the movement. Yeah, I see. I really do see what you're saying. And yeah, I try to go to degrade pains to distinguish between healthy transcendence and unhealthy transcendence. And healthy transcendence is very much about integrating all the other needs before you try to kind of jump to, you know, being enlightened. You know, I'm enlightened and you're not effect. That's narcissism, not transcendence. What you know I've done a lot of work, and not just me, but people in SDT have done a lot of work on the issue of mindfulness and how mindfulness relates to full functioning people. I don't think of mindfulness as transcendence. I think of it as being here now. I think of mindfulness as really being deeply aware of what's going on in the current moment, and in touch with both your interstates and what's going on outside. Transcendence doesn't describe that. Awareness describes that. I think awareness is hugely important to autonomy. You cannot be autonomous unless you first have awareness. And so mindfulness, you know, for us plays a kind of, is the ground out of which autonomy best grows? I like that. You know, it's definitely a grounding skill to have, and it definitely does ground me and has been a saver, a life saver for me in many instances. True, true for me too. And I've had my own involvement in the Zed in practice now for some 30 years. And I'm really happy when I met Kurt Brown, who brought mindfulness into the SDT framework in a pretty direct way. So I think it's been important for our theorizing. I agree. And self-determination theory, I mean, major kudos, the extent to which it's pervaded many other areas of psychology and has shown its implications in wide swaths of society. So I thought for this latter part of our interview, can I go down some domains of life and kind of talk to me about the implications? So one relationship. I mean, this is one right now during COVID, I think that people are very much lacking in that need. It feels like that need is frustrated, you know. Can you talk a little about some work you've done on self-determination theory in that domain? The first thing I want to say is we've been collecting a lot of data on needs satisfaction during COVID. A lot of this work grows out of the group that's in Gantt Belgium. So we have a lot of work on the Belgian population around needs satisfaction on a day-to-day basis really over the pandemic. And the relatedness need is really hurting in a lot of people and particularly young people. And so when you look at, you know, you asked before about why are people kind of breaking out, not following social distancing rules? A lot of it is related to need frustration and particularly in a group of people in a period of life where relatedness is huge. And so, you know, we've first received that a lot. So, but anyway, what was your, what was your question that was aside? Well, no, no, how does SDT deal with relationships? You know, what are the implications of SDT in the domain of relationships? Well, you know, SDT is organized a series of many theories. The latest of those many theories, the sixth of them is called relationship motivation theory. And so it's really an explanation of what are the ingredients of a high quality relationship. And one of the things we argue in SDT is you can, it's not just warmth, closeness, being nice, being supportive. Those things don't make for an intimate relationship. There also has to be autonomy support. There has to be a care about the self of the other. And an interest in the promotion of this has got to be kind of a topic theme within a relationship for it to be super high quality. And that's what our data shows, which is that it's only an autonomy support of relationships that you have true intimacy. And you know, this is kind of suggested in some other theories of relationships, but SDT makes it explicit. And looks at the way in which controlling motives or controlling tendencies and ego environments really, really do create problems in relationships. And so I credit here particularly Chip Nees' work at University of Houston because he's done a lot of great work in this area. This idea of autonomy, supportive environments has really provided the literature greatly, especially in the workplace. I see it everywhere in the workplace literature, which is exciting, you know, that more people were talking about that. What did you think of Dan Pink's book drive? Well, you know, Dan came, when he wrote drive, he came to Rochester to interview Ed and me. He spent a few days. Wonderful. That's how he got the basis for that book. You know, the book basically expliquates autonomy, competence, and he uses the term purpose as opposed to relatedness. So he has autonomy. I think his autonomy mastery, purpose are the three things he comes away with. He took away relationships. Yeah. But I took that away. I, you know, it's become a very popular view. People oftentimes will sort of say, "Well, it picks theory of this." Oh, that's ridiculous. No, I get a little tweaked on that, but I actually really appreciate Dan's work on this because he helped popularize it. He helped bring some of the message of this research to the organizational field and we want that. So I think popular writers play a huge role in helping translate nerdy academic work like ours and self-determination theory into the practical world. So I totally appreciate the book drive. Yeah, because it's really, it's become a, it was a popular book. It was, it had a lot of implications for the workplace. A lot of people adopt it in the workplace. I'm just wondering in your own, your own world, your own research, you know, how much do you intersect with the workplace? Do you do consulting personally? Oh, yeah, I'm going. Actually, I started our company in 2003 with Scott Rigby, who was a former PhD student in the field. And we still write together on issues of mindfulness and human relations kind of things. But Scott and I started a company called Motivation Works. We measure the motivational climate, but the work climate within companies, we do interventions to help managers become more autonomy supportive. So, you know, very much so we're always on the front lines of that kind of work. And it's hugely important because we spend so much of our time in our workplaces and they should be places for thriving. And they can be under the right circumstances. Yeah, I feel like a lot of, I fear that a lot of workplaces still have a very outdated model of what it takes to motivate people intrinsically. Yeah, they're not thinking how can we motivate people intrinsically? I feel like there are not a lot of companies aren't even thinking of that question. There's like, how do we motivate people? I think this is related to some of the findings we have in STT that when people are put under controlling pressures, they often respond with controlling solutions for the people who are around them. And so you see within organizations a lot of times when you have a controlling manager, they'll even say, well, it's not the way I want to be, but they're making me and they point up, have you see this kind of downhill control thing going? So, you know, changing a company climate is a big task because you have to do it at multiple levels of the company. You can't just be, you know, go in here and tweak what manager. It's about a whole climate, an atmosphere and a whole culture. Yeah. Well, this segues into a topic I'm very much interested in education and educational culture. Talk about, you know, designing a system to get the worst out of people. That's what we've done in our American education system and around the world. Yeah, have you, sorry, what do you say? I said, really around the world. I mean, yes, in the U.S. Yes, elsewhere too. For sure, for sure, but there's so many clear implications of your theory for the young adulthood, identity development, self-esteem and their authenticity. All the things that we don't focus on developing was in students that we should. And so, what are your show me your thoughts on those linkages? Well, just the first thing is that, you know, if we had a goal for schools, their context of development and you'd want them to be places where children are helped to flourish, become all that they can be later and to be able to discover what matters to them and to develop the tools so they can pursue it. That's not at all the way schools are framing their goals. They're talking about getting more STEM students, getting high achievement scores on the standardized tests for, you know, they've really lost the threat of what are the values and the goals that we should have in a place where we put our children for multiple hours every day. And, you know, to me, the goal of school is to create an interested, engaged and enabled an empowered student. And the factors that would go into that are quite different than the ones that we're currently using which are focused around evaluations, grades and social comparisons. That's for darn sure. I mean, what can we do? How can we promote this more in schools? - I think one of the values of psychological research is we are looking at the techniques that teachers can do within classrooms that can make them more motivating and engaging places for students. But then teachers can only do that. If they themselves have the support of the room for autonomy to create those kind of engaging atmosphere. So the research really shows when you've got autonomy support from your principal, you can be a more engaging teacher. When that principal has autonomy support from their superintendent, they can have a better school climate and superintendents need, of course, the support from their boards and from their governments. We have a lot of dumb policies in place in the United States and Australia and a lot of countries that have high-stakes, standardized testing being engaged by which schools are judged. And this drives the worst kind of classroom behavior 'cause it has everybody focused on a very narrow outcome. And then they have to use controlling means to get students to meet those outcomes and everybody loses in that task. So what can we do? We can change policy. We can get rid of high-stakes, standardized testing right now. There's no value to it in any school. Pearson should be embarrassed that they do these things. Because what's happening with high-stakes, standardized testing is it, by putting high stakes behind these outcomes, it leads schools to be more pressuring of students in a way that doesn't help them learn. So we're spoiling the very ingredients of positive learning by having these imposed score goals. - No, I'm not talking about that. - And you're not talking about me. - STEM, this focus on STEM. Everyone must be a STEM student. Well, I'm sorry, but if you look around the world, humans are a diverse lot. And we need all kinds of people with all kinds of different skills and driving everybody down on narrow road for college prep and science courses, is really a way of damaging the self-esteem and the motivation and the engagement of so many of our students. And we have to get off of these fetishes. 'Cause there's not enough STEM jobs for all the people we graduate now. (laughs) But even more so, there's a lot of things that students aren't learning in school that would really help them navigate life better. And instead we're focused on giving them yet another calculus course before they leave high school. I don't see these things as being well thought through in terms of social policy. - Yeah, it's a good point. I do think that statistic, basic statistics should be mandatory for everyone though, because you see a lot of people with no training in STEM, whatsoever, making lots of outlandish claims and that does impact everyone in this climate today. - Well, you know, it's just so decent. - It's a good thing because we face them every day. So that's a practical skill, which is really statistics every day in the newspaper. Learning about basic financial skills would be great in high school. Learning about things that you actually use in mathematics would be great for our students who aren't going that same college, STEM, root. We're forgetting about the fact that schools should be places that help students grow and develop the skills they need in life. And instead we're focusing on the things that industry told somebody at some point they wanted. That's not a way to organize our educational worlds. - Yeah, yeah. So we could probably agree on the basics, like basic scientific reasoning, I think is important to a certain degree. But no, I hear you, we're robbing people, these kids are their autonomy. And that's tragic. - In the service of trying to get them the highest scores on their STEM tests, we're driving out the arts, we're driving out the music, we're driving out the things. - Right. - Bring kids to school and have them feel at home and engaged, we're over-testing them, we're drilling, we're just doing all the things that motivation research now for three decades or four decades has been telling us is backfiring. And the results are clear. I mean, this experiment's been going on for 30 years, the high-stake standardized testing experiment and it's an utter failure by anybody's measurement. I challenge anybody who hears this broadcasted, tell me any positive evidence they have for how high-stake standardized testing has helped our schools, our children, our teachers or anybody, there is no evidence, there is no value. There's just a way of testing companies making money and spoiling the cultures of our schools. - I don't have a strong opinion about this though. (laughs) - Well, man, look, I'm right there with you, there needs to be a major overall. Oh, man, have you made contact with the field of positive education? There's these, yeah. And I'd love to get your thoughts. What do you think of positive psychology as a field? Because you're not actually, you didn't start off in positive psychology yet, you found yourself in the field of positive psychology. I mean, people in the field love you. And they talk about you all the time and they incorporate what you're doing into the work they're doing. So I was just wondering what you're thinking is of that, the emergence of that field. - You're good for positive psychology in sending me to writing. - Oh, was that right? Is that right? - Wow, yeah. - The Institute of Australia, the University's called the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education. That's our, that's our, - Okay. - Oh, that's cool. - Well, very good. - I know, but you know what I'm saying? - Yeah. - SET was around before the movement called positive psychology began. So we were, I think we already had as our central question, what are the things that help people flourish? And that is the same central question that positive psychology asks. And so indeed, I think we have a lot of relationships to the scholarship and the activities of people who are in positive psychology. I don't identify as a positive psychologist because I'm also a clinician. I'm interested in psychopathology and human degradation and human oppression. Both sides of this coin, not just the flourishing, but also what are the harms? How are we doing harms to people? In self-determination theory is really a theory about both aspects of that. It gives explanations for the ideology of various mental distress and disorders. It also gives a map of how to help people flourish and what they need to be at their best. - Absolutely. You talk about the factors that promote healthy psychological behavioral functioning. How can self-determination help bring peace to the world, reduce aggression, increase altruism, and bring out the best in humans? - Well, we've moved a lot recently in the direction of looking at what we call pervasive environments and their effect on people. So how do the political structures and economic structures of the world have an impact on people's well-being through their basic psychological needs? So just an instance of this is that if you have a country where the wealth is distributed really unequally, we find that well-being is lower, controlling even for overall wealth. And we see that in there that's because wealth inequality has an impact on people's perceptions of autonomy and competence and relatedness. It directly impacts their sense of the people around them, their competitiveness with them, and it has an impact on well-being. So we're asking the question a lot now, what kind of political and economic structures are the best as fulfilling people's basic psychological needs and therefore producing a well-being? And some of the findings have to do with the perception that you have rights and privileges within a society and that you're not stigmatized and you're not excluded. These things matter a lot to people's well-being again through their basic psychological needs. Again, the distribution of wealth matters a lot. So I think when we're trying to look at how can we create a good society? We have to look at both macro structures and family structures both. It's not just the local proximal influences on that. So changing the world, yeah, I mean, it's by trying to hold public policies and forms and structures to the criteria of, are they good at meeting basic psychological needs? - Man, the world needs this so much right now. Help save the world, Rich. Help save the world. - Yeah, well, I think we're all trying to do that. I think it does matter. SDT is a theory about change. We've always aimed to be very practical. So one of the good things about the theory is it's not just all these things predict outcomes, but we also have interventions to help increase relatedness, to help increase autonomy, to help increase feelings of competence. And an idea is about how to make that actually happen in life. And of course, if a theory doesn't really make a difference to society, then why have it? - I mean, I've had some professors who are very pure, pure scientists who argue the opposite, they'll say a good scientist actually shouldn't get involved in applying their work. They should just try to do the best science they can do. So I've heard it from both ends. (laughing) - I can get that if you're an astrophysicist, but if you're a medical scientist, don't you care about the implications of your findings? Aren't you trying to find the cure to this problem or that problem if your a psychological scientist isn't it about the state of human beings that your inquiry is concerned? So it's not a neutral science, even if you think you're being neutral. When it has no practical value, then you're using up societies resources for something that may have been used. no practical value. So I can't agree with that. I think in the human sciences, we're asking questions that have import for humanity. And we don't have all that much time to be fooling around either. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the state of the college and look over leaving them next generations. We have to solve some of these problems now. And we need pride. I definitely feel that urgency for doing that. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely feel that urgency too. And I mean, that's my own bent as well. But I'm just telling you, like in grad school and various points in my life when I've wanted to apply my work, I've gotten pushback from academics, you know, saying that that's not my business. So I mean, it's refreshing to hear what you're saying. But I'm just letting you know that's not the the pervasive view. Well, a place that you leave your values out is when you're doing that basic research, you try and bring up this passionate critical eye to that. And I believe that in STT, we do that. It's not that we judge everything with a value lens. It's in your basic research. You apply the scientific method, which means you think seriously about your data, yourself critical in it. But when you think about the purposes of why we do any of our work, you're going to leave values out of it. I don't understand that as a life position. Yeah, I hear you. Well, you've done so much. And you've applied this STD theory to such diverse environments. We already talked about work organizations education, but you've also applied to health, sport, and exercise domain, video games, virtual environments. Can you tell me what you're really excited about right now that you're working on? I know that you have a neuro lab, so you're really getting to neuroscience work. Tell me whatever to ending this interview that you're really excited about right now. They work on. Well, as you say, we work on both mechanistic and so it's the neurological underpinnings of autonomous behavior and of close relationships. So that's what we're doing in our labs at Sydney. But on the other end, we're interested in the macro structures, how economic structures and how wealth distribution, social policy is affect people's well-being too. So and everything in between. So, you know, one of the things I think the values have a broad theory like STT is it allows you to ask questions at every level of analysis. But it also then demands that you find evidence at every level of analysis that can be coordinated with the spirit of conciliates. And I think that's our drive. So I think my problem, Scott, is that I'm interested in too much in my problem too, brother. I'm pretty passionate about a lot of things within within the field. But right now we're just finishing the new Oxford Handbook of self-determination theory research. Great. I'm just finishing with all the chapters in it. There's 55 chapters in that book, all on different topics. So say the self-determination theory. Reading those over what I'm really excited about is that there's a community out there of, you know, hundreds and hundreds of psychologists who are using STT and earnest and who are becoming better experts in all the subject areas than me or anybody else who's been there. So what I'm excited about is that there's a new generation of self-determination theories who are a lot smarter than me. I love that. I really appreciate your humility and I appreciate just your legendary work in the field. There's no there's no other way of putting it it was a true honor and delight for me to chat with you today and I just want to thank you so much for being on my podcast. Thanks Scott for having me. I'd love to come back sometime especially after I read the trend. I'm gonna send it to you. Yeah, then we can have a discussion into tale and nerd out about all that. Now, now that would be so much fun. So yeah, I'm gonna get that you're going to be on to and we can really nerd out. Thanks, thanks Rich. No, that's great. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thepsychologypodcast.com. That's thepsychologypodcast.com. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior and creativity.