Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness

769 Pages·2017·31.93 MB·English

by  Richard M. Ryan

SELF-DETERMINATION THEORY
Also Available
Handbook of Mindfulness:
Theory, Research, and Practice
Edited by Kirk Warren Brown, J. David Creswell,
and Richard M. Ryan
Self-Determination
Theory
Basic Psychological Needs
in Motivation, Development,
and Wellness
Richard M. Ryan
Edward L. Deci
THE GUILFORD PRESS
New York London
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from
the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4625-2876-9
About the Authors
Richard M. Ryan, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, Research Professor at the Institute for
Positive Psychology and Education at Australian Catholic University, and Professor of
Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology at the University of Rochester. Dr. Ryan is
a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological
Science, the American Educational Research Association, and the Society for Personality
and Social Psychology. He received distinguished career awards from the International
Society for Self and Identity and the International Network on Personal Meaning, as well
as a Shavelson Distinguished Researcher Award, presented by the International Global
SELF Research Centre, among other honors. An honorary member of the German Psy-
chological Society and the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of
Thessaly in Greece, he is also a recipient of a James McKeen Cattell Fund Fellowship
and a Leverhulme Fellowship. Dr. Ryan has also been a visiting professor at the National
Institute of Education in Singapore, the University of Bath in England, and the Max
Planck Institute in Berlin, Germany.
Edward L. Deci, PhD, is the Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor in the Social Sciences
at the University of Rochester, with secondary appointments at the University College
of Southeast Norway and Australian Catholic University. Dr. Deci is a Fellow of the
Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the
Society for Personality and Social Psychology, among other associations. His numerous
honors include a distinguished scholar award from the Society for Personality and Social
Psychology, a lifetime achievement award from the International Society for Self and
Identity, and a distinguished scientific contribution award from the Positive Psychology
Network. He was named honorary president of the Canadian Psychological Association
and is a recipient of a James McKeen Cattell Fund Fellowship.
v

Preface
When we began the project of developing self-determination theory (SDT), it was with
a particular paradigmatic concern in mind. Both as researchers and clinicians, we felt
there was a need for a Copernican turn in empirical approaches to human motivation and
behavior change, finding the dominant approaches to these topics focused not on under-
standing how organisms naturally learn, develop, and self-organize actions, but on how
they could be controlled to behave or change using external contingencies and cognitive
manipulations. To us, this was a science pointing in the wrong direction. Our interest
was not in how motivation can be controlled from without, but instead in how human
motivation is functionally designed and experienced from within, as well as what forces
facilitate, divert, or undermine that natural energy and direction.
The publication of this volume represents for us, if not the culmination of this effort,
at least a further touchstone in providing a general paradigm for researchers and practi-
tioners who are interested in active human functioning and wellness. Herein we hope to
have provided a comprehensive statement of self-determination theorizing and the most
up-to-date review of research since our initial volume together in 1985.
Having said that, from our personal viewpoint, this book remains unfinished. That
is not because we didn’t try. We have been writing and revising each year, synthesizing
the experimental and field research, the intervention results, and new theoretical exten-
sions emerging around the globe. But each year there has been an enormous amount of
new material to consider, with ever more studies appearing and additional phenomena
being addressed. Finally, we simply had to surrender to the idea that this book must be
published, however incomplete. The SDT community of researchers has been too active,
too diverse, and too generative, reducing any attempt to review the theory as a whole to
merely a snapshot of where the research and theory are at this particular moment.
There are many people who can be held responsible for this incessant growth of
research in SDT, which has continually outpaced our ability to summarize it. But most
generally we lay the blame upon the large and still growing community of SDT scholars
who share information, methods, and practices through the Center for Self-Determination
vii
viii Preface
Theory (CSDT) website (www.selfdeteminationtheory.org) and at our triennial SDT
International Conferences, held thus far in Rochester, New York (twice); Ottawa, Toronto,
and Victoria, Canada; and Ghent, Belgium. This network of international scholars from
more than 40 nations has been challenging, refining, and extending SDT’s propositions
in ways we had not imagined when we began this theoretical endeavor.
First, from early on in the formulation of SDT research, Canadian scholars have
played an especially prominent role. Robert Vallerand, Luc Pelletier, and Richard Koest-
ner enriched SDT through both basic and applied research. They are today joined by
creative researchers across Canada, including, in random order, Fred Grouzet, Philip
Wilson, Marc Blais, Frederick Guay, Genevieve Mageau, Mireille Joussemet, Isabelle
Green-Demers, Celene Blanchard, Kim Noels, Michelle Fortier, Natalie Houlfort, Claude
Fernet, Caroline Senécal, Gaëtan Losier, Cameron Wild, Jacques Forest, Lisa Legault,
Marina Milavskaya, and the many others who have made Canada a major center for
SDT. Three of our six SDT conferences have been held in Canada, attesting to the fact
that it continues to be a strong center of SDT research.
In the European community, SDT is similarly thriving. In Ghent and Leuven,
Maarten Vansteenkiste, Bart Soenens, and their many colleagues, including Bart Duriez,
Bart Neyrinck, Wim Beyers, Anja Van den Broeck, Luc Goossens, Beiwen Chen, Stijn
Van Petegem, and the late Willy Lens, have stimulated an enormous amount of new
research on developmental and clinical processes associated with need-supportive and
need-thwarting environments. Their highly original work is often longitudinal or experi-
mental and has contributed greatly to the theory. Nearby in the United Kingdom, schol-
ars such as Martyn Standage, Ian Taylor, David Markland, Helga Dittmar, Joan Duda,
Kou Murayama, Simon Sebire, and Kimberly Bartholomew have explored SDT formula-
tions in varied spheres. In Norway, Hallgeir and Anne Halvari and their collaborators,
such as Anja Olafsen, have extended SDT findings in organizations, sport, and medicine.
Indeed, all around Europe are colleagues who have embraced SDT, including scholars
such as Andreas Krapp, Bruno Frey, Nicola Baumann, Athanasios Papaioannou, Symeon
Vlachopoulos, Nicholas Gillet, Rashmi Kusurkar, Martin Olesen, Mia Reinholt, Leen
Haerens, Pedro Teixeira, Marlene Silva, Frank Martela, Stefan Tomas Güntert, Margit
Osterloh, Isabel Balaguer, Philippe Sarrazin, Phillipe Carre, Alexios Arvanitis, Krzystof
Szadejko, and Juan Alanso.
In Israel, especially centered at Ben-Gurion University, Avi Assor, Guy Roth, Haya
Kaplan, Idit Katz, Yaniv Kanat-Maymon, Moti Benita, and others have built yet another
major SDT research hub. They have opened up new territory in areas of parenting and
education and have made theoretical breakthroughs in basic SDT ideas about internaliza-
tion and regulation in development, emotion regulation, and relationships.
In Asia, scholarship on SDT has been robust and increasingly active. In Singapore,
the Motivation in Education Research Lab (MERL) includes scholars such as Woon Chia
Liu, John Wang, Bee Leng Chua, Youyan Nie, Caroline Koh, Mingming Zhou, Coral
Lim, and Masato Kawabata, who have applied SDT to multiple domains, but especially
to education and sport. In Korea, Hyungshim Jang, Johnmarshall Reeve, Woogul Lee,
Ayoung Kim, and other scholars have been advancing SDT in terms of its analysis of
teaching and learning processes and interventions, as well as exploring the neurological
underpinnings of autonomous versus controlled motivations. In Japan, Shigeo Sakurai,
Tadashi Hirai, Nobuo Sayanagi, Takuma Nishimura, Ayumi Tanaka, and Quint Olga-
Baldwin; and in China, Shui-fong Lam, Jian Zhang, Ye Lan, Liang Meng, Wilbert Law,
Qingguo Ma, Qin-Xue Liu, and Junlin Zhao are just a few of many Asian colleagues
applying SDT to important problems, from language learning to Internet use.
Preface ix
The University of Rochester has been a long-time base from which we launched the
Motivation Research Group, and we have many people to thank in Rochester for friend-
ship and support over the years. Perhaps a large part of the problem of SDT’s growth
should be laid at the doorsteps of our former doctoral students, visiting scholars, and
postdocs at Rochester, who have stimulated the various advancements of SDT by asking
driving questions and mastering the best methodologies over our multidecade, Friday-
afternoon, free-ranging discussions. Again, we have too many former Rochester-based
scholars to recognize, but the following are just some of the inspiring people who have
worked directly with us in what, we hope, was experienced as an autonomy-supportive
research atmosphere: Wendy Grolnick, Tim Kasser, Ken Sheldon, Kirk Brown, Arlen
Moller, Geof Williams, Chantal Levesque-Bristol, Christina Frederick-Recascino, Holley
Hodgins, Virginia Grow Kasser, Jessica Solky-Butzel, Chip Knee, Nikki Legate, Jen-
nifer La Guardia, Valery Chirkov, Jaine Strauss, Jesse Bernstein, Heather Patrick, Rob-
ert Plant, Netta Weinstein, Andrew Przybylski, Veronika Huta, and Youngmee Kim.
Paul Adachi, Cody DeHann, Patricia Schultz, Thuy-vy Nguyen, Behzad Behzadnia, Özge
Kantas, and Myunghee Lee are among those currently working with us in Rochester. We
have also grown through our collaborative work with Rochester faculty past and present,
including Jim Connell, Chris Niemiec, Harry Reis, Ron Rogge, Ellen Skinner, Martin
Lynch, Laura Wray-Lake, Diane Morse, and Randall Curren.
In reflecting on our Rochester associates, we also must acknowledge the loss of
fellow Rochester scholars Cynthia Powelson, Cristine Chandler, Michael Kernis, Allan
Schwartz, Jack Davey, Louise Sheinman, and Allan Zeldman, each of whom contributed
to our thinking and our spirits, and who remain alive in our hearts.
The Australian Catholic University has more recently become a new home for our
studies. Within the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education (IPPE) at ACU, we are
forming new discussions of the organismic processes on which mindfulness and auton-
omy must be based. Herbert Marsh and Rhonda Craven were especially instrumental in
bringing us to Sydney. Australia more generally has become a particularly vibrant con-
tinent for SDT research. Scholars on the east coast include Chris Lonsdale, Stefano Di
Domenico, Rafael Calvo, Dorian Peters, Paul Evans, Gordon Spence, Gary McPherson,
Anne Poulsen, Jenny Ziviani, and David Wadley. On Australia’s west coast, Nikos Ntou-
manis, David Webb, Marylène Gagné, Martin Hagger, Nikos Chatzisarantis, Eleanor
Quested, and Cecilie Thogersen-Ntoumani, among others, are creating a new and vital
concentration of SDT scholarship in Perth.
Outside these centers of SDT research, scholars in the United States and many other
countries have contributed to research on the basic principles, utility, and generalizability
of SDT. Often working alone or in small groups are scholars such as Lennia Matos in
Peru; Cicilia Chettiar in India; Athanasios Mouratidis, Omar Simsek, Ahmet Uysal, and
Zumra Atalay in Turkey; and Ken Hodge and Maree Roche in New Zealand, as well as
U.S. researchers such as Patricia Hawley, Todd Little, Michael Wehmeyer, Sam Hardy,
Erika Patall, Dan Stone, and Benjamin Hadden, all doing work that is extending SDT.
There are also many, many others, and we apologize sincerely to all, wherever your
places of study, if your names are not included in this acknowledgment. We do very much
appreciate your work. Because SDT is focused on basic human needs and the diversity of
ways they are expressed and satisfied, the hope is to continue to test its applicability and
utility across economic contexts and cultures, and the kind of broad international and
multidisciplinary involvement SDT has received is critical to this mission.
As SDT is becoming ever more global, its center of gravity remains at the CSDT,
under the care of Shannon Robertson Hoefen Cerasoli. Shannon has enthusiastically and