Self determination theory autonomy
Self-Determination Theory of Motivation - Center for Community Health & Prevention
URMC / / / Our Approach
Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is a theory of motivation that has been applied in many life domains such as health, sport, education and work. Health is an intrinsic goal for us all that is strongly influenced by our habits and lifestyle choices. Motivation—energy directed at a goal—plays a big role in our lifestyle choices and in our ability to make sustained changes as needed to maintain our health.
According to SDT, all of us have three key psychological needs as depicted graphically below. When our social environments, including the places where we receive health care, are more supportive of these psychological needs, the quality of our motivation is more autonomous. Alternatively, when our psychological needs are not well met or even thwarted through our social interactions, the quality of our motivation is more controlled.
Researchers have found through many studies that when people are more autonomously motivated, they are more likely to achieve their health goals over time.
Read on to learn more about the science behind Self-Determination Theory.
Motivation
Early ideas of motivation simply suggested that you either have it (you are motivated) or you don’t (you are not motivated, or unmotivated). However, more than 40 years of research has shown that motivation is much more complex than this. The quality of motivation (autonomous or controlled) is key to both satisfaction and sustained success in achieving one’s goals.
Motivated behavior can be driven by rewards, punishments and internalized pressures from others. It can also be fueled by deeply held values or interest and enjoyment of the behavior itself. In simple terms, people can feel more pressured or controlled to behave in a certain way or they can feel they have a choice in how to behave.
For example, people can be driven by:
- Reward: People might try to lose weight because their employer will pay them to lose weight.
- Punishment: People might try to lose weight because their insurance company will raise the cost of their health insurance if they don’t lose weight.
- Internal Pressure: People might try to lose weight because others have told them they should lose weight or they will be upset with them.
- Value: People might try to lose weight because they want to be healthier and be a positive role model for their kids.
- Interest/Enjoyment: People might try to lose weight because they really like exercising and eating in a healthy way.
When people are mainly motivated by rewards, punishments, and internal pressure, they have a harder time initiating and maintaining their behaviors over the long term. However, when people are more autonomous—that is, when people are motivated more by their
value for the behavior, or by their interest and enjoyment of the behavior—they tend to be more persistent in their behavior, feel more satisfied, and have higher well-being overall.
Psychological Needs
Self-determination theory suggests that all humans have three basic psychological needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—that underlie growth and development.
- Autonomy refers to feeling one has choice and is willingly endorsing one’s behavior. The opposite experience is feeling compelled or controlled in one’s behavior.
- Competence refers to the experience of mastery and being effective in one’s activity.
- Finally, relatedness refers to the need to feel connected and a sense of belongingness with others.
The social environment (e.g., family, friends, co-workers, health care professionals, culture, etc.) can promote or get in the way of people’s strivings by the extent to which they support a person’s basic psychological needs.
- Autonomy is supported by attempting to grasp and acknowledge the person's wishes, preferences and perspectives, conveying understanding of their point of view, providing a rationale for engaging in a behavior, and providing choice in how to behave.
Supporting someone’s autonomy also means refraining from trying to control or pressure them to act in a certain way. - Competence is supported by providing the person with optimal challenges and opportunities (specific goals that are challenging enough, but not overwhelming), encouraging their sense of initiation (try it out!), providing structure (for example, evidence-based health recommendations) to mobilize and organize behavior and providing relevant feedback.
- Finally, relatedness is supported when others are involved and show interest in the person’s activities, are empathic in responding to their feelings and convey that the person is significant, cared for, and loved.
When these needs are optimally supported, evidence suggests that people are more autonomous in their behaviors, are more likely to persist at their behaviors, and feel better overall.
Here at the Center for Community Health & Prevention, our approach is focused on providing you with evidence-based information and supporting your psychological needs so that we can help you discover what works for you on your journey to making healthy changes in your life.
This material is based on the following references:
- LaGuardia, J. 2017. Self-determination theory in practice: how to create an optimally supportive health care environment. Middletown, DE. Independently published 2017.
- Ntoumanis N, Ng JYY, Prestwich A, Quested E, Hancox JE, Thøgersen-Ntoumani C, Deci EL, Ryan RM, Lonsdale C, Williams GC. A meta-analysis of self-determination theory-informed intervention studies in the health domain: effects on motivation, health behavior, physical, and psychological health. Health Psychol Rev. 2021 Jun;15(2):214-244. doi: 10.1080/17437199.2020.1718529. Epub 2020 Feb 3. PMID: 31983293.
- Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. Self-determination theory: basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. 2017. NY: The Guilford Press.
Relevant Team Publications
- Mayo NL, Russell HA, Holt K, Williams GC. Implementation of a self-determination based clinical program to reduce cardiovascular disease risk.
Journal of Health Psychology. January 2022. doi:10.1177/13591053211068124
Theory – selfdeterminationtheory.org
Overview
People are centrally concerned with motivation — how to move themselves or others to act. Everywhere, parents, teachers, coaches, and managers struggle with how to motivate those that they mentor, and individuals struggle to find energy, mobilize effort and persist at the tasks of life and work. People are often moved by external factors such as reward systems, grades, evaluations, or the opinions they fear others might have of them. Yet, just as frequently, people are motivated from within, by interests, curiosity, care or abiding values. These intrinsic motivations are not necessarily externally rewarded or supported, but nonetheless they can sustain passions, creativity, and sustained efforts. The interplay between the extrinsic forces acting on persons and the intrinsic motives and needs inherent in human nature is the territory of Self-Determination Theory.
Self-Determination Theory (SDT) represents a broad framework for the study of human motivation and personality. SDT articulates a meta-theory for framing motivational studies, a formal theory that defines intrinsic and varied extrinsic sources of motivation, and a description of the respective roles of intrinsic and types of extrinsic motivation in cognitive and social development and in individual differences. Perhaps more importantly, SDT propositions also focus on how social and cultural factors facilitate or undermine people’s sense of volition and initiative, in addition to their well-being and the quality of their performance. Conditions supporting the individual’s experience of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are argued to foster the most volitional and high quality forms of motivation and engagement for activities, including enhanced performance, persistence, and creativity. In addition, SDT proposes that the degree to which any of these three psychological needs is unsupported or thwarted within a social context will have a robust detrimental impact on wellness in that setting.
The dynamics of psychological need support and need thwarting have been studied within families, classrooms, teams, organizations, clinics, and cultures using specific propositions detailed within SDT. The SDT framework thus has both broad and behavior-specific implications for understanding practices and structures that enhance versus diminish need satisfaction and the full functioning that follows from it. These many implications are best revealed by the varied papers listed on this website, which range from basic research on motivational micro-processes to applied clinical trials aiming at population outcomes.
Meta-Theory: The Organismic Viewpoint
SDT is an organismic dialectical approach. It begins with the assumption that people are active organisms, with evolved tendencies toward growing, mastering ambient challenges, and integrating new experiences into a coherent sense of self. These natural developmental tendencies do not, however, operate automatically, but instead require ongoing social nutriments and supports.
That is, the social context can either support or thwart the natural tendencies toward active engagement and psychological growth, or it can catalyze lack of integration, defense, and fulfillment of need-substitutes. Thus, it is the dialectic between the active organism and the social context that is the basis for SDT’s predictions about behavior, experience, and development.
Within SDT, the nutriments for healthy development and functioning are specified using the concept of basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. To the extent that the needs are ongoingly satisfied, people will develop and function effectively and experience wellness, but to the extent that they are thwarted, people will more likely evidence ill-being and non-optimal functioning. The darker sides of human behavior and experience, such as certain types of psychopathology, prejudice, and aggression are understood in terms of reactions to basic needs having been thwarted, either developmentally or proximally.
Formal Theory: SDT’s Six Mini-Theories
Formally, SDT comprises six mini-theories, each of which was developed to explain a set of motivationally based phenomena that emerged from laboratory and field research. Each, therefore, addresses one facet of motivation or personality functioning.
1. Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET) concerns intrinsic motivation, motivation that is based on the satisfactions of behaving “for its own sake.” Prototypes of intrinsic motivation are children’s exploration and play, but intrinsic motivation is a lifelong creative wellspring. CET specifically addresses the effects of social contexts on intrinsic motivation, or how factors such as rewards, interpersonal controls, and ego-involvements impact intrinsic motivation and interest. CET highlights the critical roles played by competence and autonomy supports in fostering intrinsic motivation, which is critical in education, arts, sport, and many other domains.
2. The second mini-theory, Organismic Integration Theory (OIT), addresses the topic of extrinsic motivation in its various forms, with their properties, determinants, and consequences. Broadly speaking, extrinsic motivation is behavior that is instrumental—that aims toward outcomes extrinsic to the behavior itself. Yet, there are distinct forms of instrumentality, which include external regulation, introjection, identification, and integration. These subtypes of extrinsic motivation are seen as falling along a continuum of internalization. The more internalized the extrinsic motivation, the more autonomous the person will be when enacting the behaviors. OIT is further concerned with social contexts that enhance or forestall internalization—that is, with what conduces toward people either resisting, partially adopting, or deeply internalizing values, goals, or belief systems. OIT particularly highlights supports for autonomy and relatedness as critical to internalization.
3. Causality Orientations Theory (COT), the third mini-theory, describes individual differences in people’s tendencies to orient toward environments and regulate behavior in various ways. COT describes and assesses three types of causality orientations: the autonomy orientation in which persons act out of interest in and valuing of what is occurring; the control orientation in which the focus is on rewards, gains, and approval; and the impersonal or amotivated orientation characterized by anxiety concerning competence.
4. Fourth, Basic Psychological Needs Theory (BPNT) elaborates the concept of evolved psychological needs and their relations to psychological health and well-being. BPNT argues that psychological well-being and optimal functioning is predicated on autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Therefore, contexts that support versus thwart these needs should invariantly impact wellness. The theory argues that all three needs are essential and that if any is thwarted there will be distinct functional costs.
Because basic needs are universal aspects of functioning, BPNT looks at cross-developmental and cross-cultural settings for validation and refinements.
5. The fifth mini-theory, Goal Contents Theory (GCT), grows out of the distinctions between intrinsic and extrinsic goals and their impact on motivation and wellness. Goals are seen as differentially affording basic need satisfactions and are thus differentially associated with well-being. Extrinsic goals such as financial success, appearance, and popularity/fame have been specifically contrasted with intrinsic goals such as community, close relationships, and personal growth, with the former more likely associated with lower wellness and greater ill-being.
6. Relatedness, which has to do with the development and maintenance of close personal relationships such as best friends and romantic partners as well as belonging to groups, is one of the three basic psychological needs. Relationships Motivation Theory (RMT), the sixth mini-theory, is concerned with these and other relationships, and posits that some amount of such interactions is not only desirable for most people but is in fact essential for their adjustment and well-being because the relationships provide satisfaction of the need for relatedness.
However, research shows that not only is the relatedness need satisfied in high-quality relationships, but the autonomy need and to a lesser degree the competence need are also satisfied. Indeed, the highest quality personal relationships are ones in which each partner supports the autonomy, competence, and relatedness needs of the other.
Other Topics of Interest
As SDT has expanded, both theoretical developments and empirical findings have led SDT researchers to examine a plethora of processes and phenomena integral to personality growth, effective functioning, and wellness. For example, SDT research has focused on the role of mindfulness as a foundation for autonomous regulation of behavior, leading to both refined measurement and theorizing about awareness. The study of facilitating conditions for intrinsic motivation led to a theory and measurement strategy regarding vitality, an indicator of both mental and physical wellness. Work on vitality also uncovered the remarkable positive impact of the experience of nature on well-being.
Some research within SDT has more closely examined the forms personal passions can take, with individuals being obsessive or harmonious as a function of internalization processes. Cross-cultural tests of SDT have led to an increased understanding of how economic and cultural forms impact the invariant aspects of human nature. Research on wellness has also led to new theory and research on the assessment of well-being itself, including the distinction between hedonic and eudaimonic forms of living. Specific topics such as autonomy versus controlled motivation has led to greater understanding of internalized control such as ego-involvement and contingent self-esteem and of the differences between them and autonomous self-regulation. Indeed these few examples supply just a taste of how the generative framework of SDT has enhanced research on a variety of processes of interest to the field.
Applications
In addition to formal theory development, research has applied SDT in many domains including education, organizations, sport and physical activity, religion, health and medicine, parenting, virtual environments and media, close relationships, and psychotherapy.
Across these domains research has looked at how controlling versus autonomy-supportive environments impact functioning and wellness, as well as performance and persistence. In addition, supports for relatedness and competence are seen as interactive with volitional supports in fostering engagement and value within specific settings, and within domains of activity. This body of applied research has led to considerable specification of techniques, including goal structures and ways of communicating that have proven effective at promoting maintained, volitional motivation.
The varied articles on this website demonstrate the many types of inquiry associated with the SDT framework, as well as its generative capacity with respect to practical issues in human organizations of all kinds. Relevant research reports and theoretical discussion are listed in the Publications section, organized by topic.
By focusing on the fundamental psychological tendencies toward intrinsic motivation and integration, SDT occupies a unique position in psychology, as it addresses not only the central questions of why people do what they do, but also the costs and benefits of various ways of socially regulating or promoting behavior.
Overviews of the theory can be found in Ryan and Deci (2000) and in Deci and Ryan (1985, 2000), as well as numerous other articles and chapters identified here on our website.
References
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. New York, NY: Plenum.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 227-268.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55, 68-78.
Self-determination theory / psychology | Psychology, philosophy and reflections on life.
Self-determination has often been used in diplomatic and political contexts to describe the process a country goes through to assert its independence. However, self-determination also has a much more personal and more relevant meaning to psychology: the ability or process to make one's own decisions and control one's life.
In fact, self-determination is a vital part related to psychological well-being. nine0005
Self-determination theory suggests that people are motivated to grow and change by innate psychological needs . The theory identifies three innate and universal psychological needs: the need for competence, the need for connection, and the need for autonomy. In addition, intrinsic motivation plays an important role in self-determination theory.
Meaning of self-determination theory
Self-determination theory is a theory that links personality, human motivation and optimal functioning.. He postulates that there are two main types of motivation—intrinsic and extrinsic—and that both influence who we are and how we behave in many ways. Ryan on motivation in the seventies and eighties of the twentieth century. Although it has grown and expanded since then, the underlying principles of the theory are taken from a book published in 1985 on the subject by Deci and Ryan.
The first assumption of self-determination theory is that people are "growth-oriented activities." To master your own feeling, it is important to master difficult tasks and learn new experiences. In this sense, Deci and Ryan's theory suggests that people act motivated by the need to grow and be satisfied.0003 Self-determination theory focuses mainly on intrinsic sources of motivation like the need to acquire knowledge or independence (known as intrinsic motivation).
According to the theory of self-determination, people must feel the following in order to achieve such psychological growth :
- competition : people need to cope with tasks and learn different skills.
- Connection or relationship : people should feel a sense of belonging and attachment to other people. nine0038
- autonomy : people should feel they are in control of their behavior and goals.
Deci and Ryan suggest that when people experience these three things, they become self-determined and they may feel intrinsically motivated to seek out things that interest them .
It is important to remember that the psychological growth described by the theory of self-determination does not happen automatically . Although people may be oriented towards this growth, it requires constant support. According to Deci and Ryan, social support is key. Through our relationships and interactions with others, we can either encourage or discourage personal well-being and growth. nine0005
Motivation and self-determination
According to Deci and Ryan, extrinsic motivation stems from an interest in the external. These sources include rating systems, employee appraisals, rewards and compliments, and the respect or admiration of others. There are inner drives that drive us to behave in certain ways, including our core values, our interests, and our personal sense of morality.
.
Although intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation seem to be opposites, because intrinsic driving behavior is aligned with our ideal self and extrinsic self that leads us to meet the standards of others, there is another important difference for differentiating motivation. That is why Self-Determination Theory distinguishes between autonomous motivation and controlled motivation.
Autonomous motivation includes motivation that comes from internal sources, but also includes motivation from external sources if the person has identified with the meaning of the activity and feels they are aligned or fit with the image they wish to project.
Controlled motivation consists of:
- External regulation a type of motivation in which an individual's behavior is directed by external rewards and punishments
- Introduced regulation : motivation that comes from partially learned actions and values and causes such as the avoidance of shame , seeking approval and defending the ego.
nine0038
According to the theory of self-determination theory, when a person is guided by autonomous motivation, he will feel directed and autonomous. When a person is driven by controlled motivation, they would feel pressured to behave in certain ways and experience little or no autonomy.
Role theory, what is our role in society? Roles let me know what my role is in a group. Don't line up the role well or adapt to one imposed, here are some of the dangers that the role entails Read More » nine0005
| |||||||||
| |||||||||
| |||||||||
Questions of theory and practice . Tambov: Diploma, 2012. No. 7. Part 3. P. 115-118. 
The article analyzes an example of the implementation in the Russian Federation of the Law "On National-Cultural Autonomy" of 1996. The author examines the creation and activities of the Federal Lezgin National-Cultural Autonomy (NCA). As an example of the political activity of the NCA Lezgins, the position on the issue of ratification of the Russian-Azerbaijani treaty on the state border of 2010, affecting the territory of residence of the Lezgins, is given. nine0005 
A free PDF viewer can be downloaded here. 
URL: http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/perepis2010/perepis_itogi1612.htm (date of access: 03/12/2012). nine0038 
