Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (Perspectives in Social Psychology)
Richard M. Ryan
Language: English
Pages: 371
ISBN: 0306420228
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Early in this century, most empirically oriented psychologists believed that all motivation was based in the physiology of a set of non-nervous system tissue needs. The theories of that era reflected this belief and used it in an attempt to explain an increasing number of phenomena. It was not until the 1950s that it became irrefutably clear that much of human motivation is based not in these drives, but rather in a set of innate psychological needs. Their physiological basis is less understood; and as concepts, these needs lend themselves more easily to psycho logical than to physiological theorizing. The convergence of evidence from a variety of scholarly efforts suggests that there are three such needs: self-determination, competence, and interpersonal relatedness. This book is primarily about self-determination and competence (with particular emphasis on the former), and about the processes and structures that relate to these needs. The need for interpersonal relat edness, while no less important, remains to be explored, and the findings from those explorations will need to be integrated with the present theory to develop a broad, organismic theory of human motivation. Thus far, we have articulated self-determination theory, which is offered as a working theory-a theory in the making. To stimulate the research that will allow it to evolve further, we have stated self-determination theory in the form of minitheories that relate to more circumscribed domains, and we have developed paradigms for testing predictions from the various minitheories.
rather than the physiological level, he stated, "This taste for excitement must not be forgotten when we are dealing with human motivation. It appears that, up to a certain point, threat and puzzle have positive motivating value, beyond that point negative value" (Hebb, 1955, p. 250). In other words, optimal arousal may be achieved through optimal threat and puzzle, which involve an optimal incongruity between input and some standard such as adaptation level. Berlyne's work, which will be
several ways, the most likely being to change the attitude or change the behavior. Work on counter attitudinal advocacy has shown that, if a person is asked to argue in favor of a position other than that in which he believes, he will experience dissonance and will reduce this by changing his attitude in the direction of the position which he advocated. Aronson (l966) and Zimbardo (l969) have reported substantial support for this notion. A third source of uncertainty which Kagan considered was
said earlier would have to be added to Hunt's optimal incongruity theory to make his theory consistent. The second class of behaviors motivated by the need for competence and self-determination includes behaviors which are intended to conquer challenging situations. In other words, people are motivated to "reduce uncertainty" or "reduce dissonance" or "reduce incongruity" when they encounter it or create it. Hence, reducing uncertainty or dissonance is one class of intrinsic motivation. I am
reproduce the configurations which had been drawn on paper for him. The time to complete each configuration was measured with a stopwatch, and if a subject were unable to reproduce a configuration within 10 minutes, he was stopped and then he assembled it as the experimenter explained how. This let him know that all the configurations were possible. In each experiment, the subjects in the control group were asked to reproduce puzzle configurations. They received no rewards and no feedback about
and magnitude of reward. Those results are shown in Figure 14. When there was choice, there was a dissonance effect, and when there was no choice, an incentive effect. Holmes and Strickland (1970) and Sherman (1970) have reported replications of the Linder et al. results. Consequences Collins (1969) suggested that the consequences of one's actions must be considered in understanding counter-attitudinal behavior. If the consequences to oneself of one's actions are aversive, then dissonance will