Richard Ryan on the Many Applications of Self-Determination Theory
Paper Interview: August 2010
Does Self-Determination Theory compete with other theories of motivation and, if so, how has that competition played out?
This is another possible tipping point for our work. In the 1990s there was a huge debate with behavioralists and social cognitive theorists about the value of rewards in specific motivational contexts. Self-Determination Theory exposed the sometime negative effect of motivating people by rewarding them.
It's called "the undermining effect of rewards on intrinsic motivation." Self-Determination Theory explains how rewards sometimes work positively and sometime negatively and why.
Our perspective has fostered a lot of debate in the field, leading to a big meta-analysis in 1999 in Psychological Bulletin by Ed Deci and me and Richard Koestner from McGill, which really, definitively showed the specificity and robustness of the effect (Deci EL, Koestner R, Ryan RM, "A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation," 125[6]:627-68, November 1999).
Consider kids in a classroom, for example, doing some learning activity. Say they're supposed to be painting or doing some science project, and you decide to pay them for doing it. You think they may be motivated because of the payment, and they do what they need to do to get it. But if you then stop paying them, they might lose interest in doing any more science or art.
Any motivation they might have had before might be converted to a motivation to get the reward. When the reward is not there, the motivation is gone. So by rewarding them for the activity, you've undermined what motivation they already had. A lot of time we use rewards to get people to do something, not realizing that in some ways you're taking the motivation away from them. Their motivation becomes contingent on the continued use of the rewards to control their actions.
When that debate was settled, I think it was very important for the acceptance of the theory.
How far into education and health care and other fields has Self-Determination Theory reached? How much influence is it having?
"We basically postulate that all human beings, regardless of culture and developmental level, have some basic psychological needs, and these needs—for autonomy, for competence, for relatedness—can be easily frustrated as well as easily supported by social environments."
It's increasingly gaining influence in education, but a lot of other forces are at work there, too. In fact, our theory argues that using rewards to try and produce increases in achievement scores will not work and will backfire, and that's what the data are now showing.
If you look at the results of a recent study in New York City, for example, they show that trying to pay kids for grades doesn't work. It doesn't even work in the short term, but we really expect to see the negative outcomes in the long term. The problem, though, is that the political climate in the US now is not very supportive of supporting students' intrinsic motivation.
In health care, psychotherapy, work, and coaching environments, the penetration of Self-Determination Theory has been great, and we think it is generating a lot of positive outcomes and programs of change.
Do these results extend to rewarding administrators and teachers for student performance or only rewarding the students themselves?
There are debates now about whether teacher pay should be made contingent on student test scores. We argue that when you do that, you're reinforcing any behaviors that get you the reward. What you'll do is pollute teaching practices, so now you get teachers teaching to the test.
This is not to say that the rewards may not be powerful motivators, but they may be powerful in ways that aren't helpful. Our theory is really about both the gains and the hazards of any motivational manipulation.
What do you find to be the most challenging aspect of research on Self-Determination Theory?
We do a lot of cross-cultural work and cross-developmental work, looking at the same human dynamics but as they manifest themselves differently in, say, Eastern or Western cultures or in infancy, adolescence, and adulthood. We're really looking at the issue of variability in some very different circumstances, looking at some very fundamental dynamics of human motivation.
This is a theory that focuses on universals, not specificity or differences across cultures or developmental stages. Most people out there are trying to detect differences; were trying to identify same fundamental patterns across social contexts.
What makes that so challenging?
We want to look for those places where the differences are strong so we can find these invariances. The challenge in cross-cultural work is to make sure the measures you're using have the same meaning to everybody, and are both culturally sensitive and yet meaningful for empirical comparisons.
Our research is also very multi-method; we always do both controlled experimental studies and then field studies. Each of these types of research has its own inherent challenge, and both field research and experimental research have huge logistical challenges.
For example, doing a randomized controlled trial of an intervention in high schools. Just the logistics of dividing high schools into control groups and experimental groups and dealing with the politics in the relevant districts when you do that is a challenge. We're doing an experiment now in Europe with soccer coaches and youth soccer, and you can imagine the organizational issues, the language issues, etc. They're formidable, but fun to tackle.
If we lived in an ideal world, and you had unlimited funds to do one experiment—if Bill Gates called and said, what can we do for you?—what experiment would you do?
I would do what I want to do now and set up a large-scale intervention, either in a psychotherapy or educational domain (we're already doing it in health care, with the clinic here run by Jeff Williams).
I'd either start a school or start a psychotherapy clinic where we could systematically apply these techniques, and then we could use that as the locus to continually refine and test these techniques, because we strongly believe in the need for evidence-based practice.
What would you like to convey to the general public about your work?
I would say that the one thing our research definitely shows is that when people have more autonomy, they are likely to function optimally. The problem is that most of us, when we're motivating other people, just don't trust that and use controls instead. But we actually benefit less by doing so.
The idea is that when you afford people autonomy in their
endeavors—children, adolescents, or adults—they are likely to
be more self-motivated, more energized, and perform better than when
they're controlled.
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Richard M. Ryan, Ph.D.
Department of Clinical and Social Psychology
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY, USA
Richard Ryan MOST CURRENT MOST-CITED PAPER IN ESSENTIAL SCIENCE INDICATORS:
Ryan RM, Deci EL, "Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being," Amer. Psychol. 55(1): 68-78, January 2000, with 1,138 cites. Source: Essential Science Indicators from Thomson Reuters .
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
- Richard Ryan is featured in HighlyCited.com
KEYWORDS: SELF-DETERMINATION THEORY, MOTIVATION, TEACHERS, STUDENTS, POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY MOVEMENT, WELL-BEING, PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT, SOCIAL CONTEXTS, AWARDS, INSTRUCTIONS, AUTONOMY, COMPETENCE, RELATEDNESS, MOODS, WEEKDAYS, WEEKENDS, ADULT WORKERS, SMOKING CESSATION, PARENTING, REWARDS, CROSS-CULTURE, CROSS-DEVELOPMENT.
Citing URL: http://sciencewatch.com/inter/aut/2010/10-aug/10augRyan/