>> It's a real honor and pleasure to introduce you to the two founding fathers of Self-Determination
Theory, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan.
Rich and Ed have laid a true ethical foundation, and as a group of SDT scholars, we are facing
the challenge to further expand the framework and refine it in many different directions.
So Rich and Ed, by this point, I'm getting all thrilled to hear you give your opening
address here on this fifth international conference on SDT, and so I would like to very much welcome
you here.
The floor is all yours.
>> RICHARD RYAN: I'm really pleased to be here; I'm pleased to see all of you here.
I'm pleased to see that people from 38 countries have come here to participate in a dialogue
about these ideas.
So we're here to talk about self-determination today, and I'm not quite sure where we're
going to go with that, but we welcome you to Rochester because this is a place where
dialogue about Self-Determination Theory really began.
I want to say one thing - why I think Self-Determination Theory has grown particularly big recently.
And that's because we take a point of view on behavior that was unusual in our field
and there has really been a real turn in the way that people think about human motivation,
and when I say that, we call it a "Copernican term" in the same way that at one time, people
thought the Earth was the center of the universe and the sun revolved around it.
At one time in our field, this was the model of motivation that most of us learned and
were socialized to.
This model of motivation, and it's not a wrong model of motivation.
It's actually a very powerful and potent model of motivation - if you have an organism and
you've got complete control over the organism's environment, you can, with rewards and punishment,
get that organism to do almost anything.
Not anything but almost anything, and 50 years of behavioral research, I think, attests to
the power of rewards and punishment in such an environment.
It's not that that theory is wrong; the problem is, it's not the metaphor, it's the reality
of a cage, which is, most of us are not in a cage in the same way.
We might be controlled by rewards and punishments or the contingencies that somebody puts us
under, but if we really don't like it or it becomes particularly aversive, at least for
many of us we can leave the cage.
So we don't have to be subjected to that and what the issue in modern motivation has to
recognize that people do have choices.
They go in directions that they want to go and we need to understand the basis within
people that's moving them to make this choice or that choice.
So the study of motivation today is really the study of why people choose what they do,
and once they make that choice, what's going to sustain them on that path whether that
path be something that we want them to do or not want them to do.
Our three basic needs are autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
We've heard some things about them today, but I'm just going to briefly say what they
are.
For us, relatedness is feeling cared for and connected to others.
It has to do with a sense of belonging, a feeling that you matter to the other people
that are there.
And relatedness is enhanced not just by people treating you warmly and including you, but
it's also enhanced by your giving to them and your being able to matter in their lives.
That's part of what helps us feel connected, so it's not a one-way street in relatedness
- it has to do with both, and again, we'll show evidence to that effect.
Competence is really commonly studied in psychology.
Most theories in psychology would probably agree with us on this one point, which is
competence is essential to wellness - to feel effective in your environment, to have some
sense of mastery of the things that are important to you is very, very important and environments
can have a big impact on that experience.
And then finally, autonomy, which has been probably the most controversial but also the
most central of our psychological needs in the sense of research and our integrative
missions, so to speak.
Autonomy refers to behavior that is self endorsed that you agree with and find congruent within
yourself.
And so, autonomy here means that you feel choiceful, self-initiating, and when you're
fully autonomous, you're whole-heartedly behind the thing that you're doing.
And again, because of that wholeheartedness, that's why performance tends to be better
when you're acting out of autonomous motives.
It's been very important to us to clarify autonomy as not some other things, and the
main one that I want to point out is that it's not about independence.
So, the term autonomy sometimes can be used as independence.
If you look it up in the dictionary, some definitions will have it as independence,
but in Self-Determination Theory, we define independence as not relying on other people
for goods or for needs or for support.
So if you're independent, you're not turning to other people, but you could be volitionally
independent.
You could be autonomously independent.
That means you can say "I want to do something on my own.
I don't want to rely on others in this task."
But you could also be autonomously dependent, where you go to others for help.
When I turn to Loretta for help in our department, usually I'm doing that volitionally and out
of autonomy.
I want the help of another person.
When I go to see my physician to heal me, I say "I'm sick, could you heal me?"
She has the expertise to do so, so I'm autonomously dependent in those situations.
We can also say that in the same sense, autonomy is not about individualism either, because
I could be autonomously individualistic if I value individualistic kinds of arrangements
between people, but I could equally and probably more likely be autonomously collectivist,
because there are good reasons to be collectivistic that I could internalize and have that be
the core of my value system.
So, while some people have tried to say collectivism is not congruent or compatible with autonomy,
we say just the opposite - the best collectivisms are those where people are volitionally participating
in collective good, and we can see that in societies that are heteronomously collective,
we see a lot of instability and poor well-being.
And societies that are autonomously collective have a very different picture.
Finally, autonomy is not about not having demands or rules or inputs from the outside.
The issue of autonomy is really whether we concur with and find them legitimate and meaningful.
So if I go to the airport here and I'm in the front of the airport and the TSA person
wants to search my bags and says "Open your bags" - it's a command, it's a demand.
Can I be autonomous in following?
Oh yes, I can if I believe in the value of the security that's there.
If it becomes arbitrary or seemingly unnecessary, maybe now I don't feel it's so legitimate
and I might not feel autonomous in that situation.
My point only being that autonomy is not about whether the input comes from the outside but
it's rather whether you concur with that input as it comes to you.
So again, we're going to see that distinction a lot, and this brings me back to the core,
broad strokes of this theory, which is we argue that there are these three basic psychological
needs, and when they are satisfied, this leads us to the highest quality of motivation we
can have, which is fully volitional.
It also enhances our wellness and our social relationships as we've seen in some of the
talks today.
We are mainly a psychological theory.
our core theory is about human experience and the issue of human experience having an
impact on all the things that we do - on our behavior, on our health, on our wellness and
our social relations.
Our focus is on human experience as the fundamental core of what we study because we're fundamentally
psychologists.
So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Ed so he can begin on intrinsic motivation
processes.
[applause]
>> EDWARD DECI: The first thing I want to say is that it is overwhelmingly wonderful
to see all of you people here.
When you think about the important turn that Rich was speaking of, of moving from motivation
as a wholly outside the person concept to something that begins inside the person, the
only place you can start, if you're thinking in that way is intrinsic motivation.
It is the prototype of internal, autonomous motivation.
so of course the research started with intrinsic motivation which went against the grain of
what was happening in psychology at the time.
But so what?
Going against the grain is a pretty good thing sometimes.
So intrinsic motivation: it really means doing an activity because you find the activity
interesting and enjoyable.
it satisfies the basic psychological needs, which Rich just laid out for you.
It's the prototype, really, of willingness and choice.
Intrinsic motivation promotes learning and revitalization, not only for children but
across the lifespan.
However, it is the play of children that is the perfect, perfect example of intrinsic
motivation.
Who has ever had to motivate a child to play?
It's all right there in our nature to be active and play as an expression of our inherent
act of nature.
In contrast to intrinsic motivation is extrinsic motivation, and what that means quite precisely
is doing an activity because the activity leads to some separable consequence.
Rewards, avoidance of punishment, trying to gain social approval - whatever it is.
Now, those are both kinds of motivation.
Intrinsic motivation is.
Extrinsic motivation is.
They energize behavior, and together they stand in contrast to amotivation or being
unmotivated.
Amotivation means that you have no intentionality to behave, and when that's the case, you don't
behave very much.
Now, early on we were interested in a question.
We've got intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.
And early on, we got interested in the question of whether these two types of motivation are
additive or perhaps interactive.
A few people in psychology and a few people in economics would just say any kind of incentive
or any kind of motivation, even if there are kinds, who cares if there are, because they
just all add up together to give you the total amount of motivation, or the total amount
of incentives that are operating in that kind of situation.
But we weren't sure that that was necessarily the case and so really the empirical work
started with this very question.
So that was the reward study.
Some have been talked about already, both in terms of neuroscience and in terms of psychology,
at least mentioned in the earlier talks.
But the first reward studies with humans showed that giving college students money for working
on interesting activities actually led the students to be less interested in the activities
than they were before or than other people were who were doing the same activities without
rewards.
It was controversial at the time.
That was kind of the heyday of behavior modification where everybody looked to rewards as a way
of motivating, but that's not so bad that it's controversial because that gets a lot
of research going.
And by the very late 1900s, Richard Kessner, I don't know where he is but I saw him earlier,
and Rich Ryan and I looked at all the studies.
We found 128 published studies looking at the effects of rewards on intrinsic motivation,
and sure enough, the undermining effect held strong for tangible rewards.
There are limitations here and there and nuances, of course, but the primary message is yes,
indeed, it's the case that rewards, tangible rewards, could undermine intrinsic motivation.
Applying that in the realm of healthcare, for example, a study by Arlen Moller, who's
also here someplace, I saw him earlier.
He looked at the issue of rewarding people for sustained healthy behavior change.
He did an interesting thing in this, which is he looked at people's motivation for financial
rewards, for wanting to attain that, the degree for which that's an important motivation for
people.
And he's got some people who are very high in that type of motivation and some that are
very low, and what he finds is that initially, everybody shows a little bit of, in this particular
instance of weight loss, a lot more was the case for people who were low in financial
motivation than those who were high.
But the even more interesting thing is, those people who were high in financial motivation
for doing this actually gained back all the weight and some more besides - that's the
top piece of the graph that you see over there - whereas people who were low in the strong
desire for financial rewards actually lost a lot more motivation and it maintained, in
fact, increase over time.