Tim Kasser

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Tim Kasser (August 1, 1966) is an American psychologist and book author known for his
work on materialism and well-being.

After receiving his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Rochester in 1994, Tim
Kasser accepted a position at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he is currently a
professor of psychology.

He has authored numerous scientific articles and book chapters on materialism, values,
goals, well-being, and environmental sustainability, among other topics. His first book, The
High Price of Materialism, was published in 2002; his second book (co-edited with Allen
D. Kanner), Psychology and Consumer Culture, was released in 2004. In 2009 he co-
authored a book (with Tom Crompton) Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of
Human Identity. He co-authored an article with Tom Crompton of WWF-UK entitled
Human Identity: A Missing Link in Environmental Campaigning on climate change denial.
[1]
Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci
Short Biographies

Richard M. Ryan is a clinical psychologist and a Professor of Psychology,

Psychiatry, and Education at the University of Rochester. He is a co-founder of the
Self-Determination Theory and has published well over 200 scholarly articles in the
areas of human motivation, personality development, and applied psychology. In
addition to basic research on motivational processes, Ryan studies health
psychology, sport and exercise, education, organizations, and psychotherapy. He
is an award-winning educator and researcher and has given addresses in over 50
universities around the globe. He has also been a visiting scientist at the Max
Planck Institute, a James McKeen Cattell fellow, and a recipient of numerous
grants. His current research interests include the following: the acquisition and
impact of materialism and other extrinsic goals; facilitation versus undermining of
intrinsic motivation and self-determination; the determinants of vitality and energy;
and the sources of within-person variability in attachment, well-being, and life
satisfaction. Ryan is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and is
currently editor-in-chief of Motivation and Emotion.

Edward L. Deci is Professor of Psychology and Gowen Professor in the Social

Sciences at the University of Rochester. For more than 35 years, he has been
engaged in a program of research on human motivation. Much of this work has led
to and been organized by the Self-Determination Theory, which he co-founded with
Richard M. Ryan. Deci has published in the top journals in psychology and has
authored and edited several books, including Intrinsic Motivation and Self-
Determination in Human Behavior (co-authored with Ryan, 1985) and The
Handbook of Self-Determination Research (co-edited with Ryan, 2002). A grantee
of the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development, the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Education
Sciences, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he is a fellow of the American
Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. Deci has
lectured widely and has consulted for organizations and government bureaus
related to education, health-care, psychotherapy, work, and recreation throughout
the United States and abroad.

Tim Kasser on Consumerism, Psychology, Transition and Resilience. Part One

Here is the first part (Part Two to follow tomorrow) of an interview I did with Tim Kasser
a couple of weeks ago while he was at Schumacher College.  He is a psychologist, author
of the seminal High Price of Materialism, as well as other useful writings such as a great
chapter in the State of the World Report 2009 about consumerism and climate change.  The
interview raises some fascinating areas for research and thoughts about Transition and
psychology, and I think you’re going to enjoy this one….

What brings you to Totnes?

I was invited to teach a part of the course at Schumacher on Economics and Happiness, and
I’ve given a talk sponsored by TTT and Schumacher College.

Can you give a potted overview of what you’ve found and what you teach?
My work started about twenty years ago when I was interested in people’s values and goals.
And I was interested in that as a psychologist because values and goals are a part of how we
intentionally construct our experience of life and that’s how we construct our lives. Lots of
other things make our lives happen, but our values and goals are one of the things that we
do to make our lives go in one direction and not in another. And I was interested in that
because values and goals influence the experiences we have and I was really interested in
what kind of values and goals lead to what kind of experiences.

In doing that kind of work when I was a young graduate I stumbled across the finding that
individuals who focus their lives more around things like money and image and status,
which are of course the core values that consumer capitalism needs people to believe in in
order for the system to keep working, people who care about those materialistic values
were reporting lower personal well being. They were more depressed, more anxious, they
were less satisfied with their lives. They were reporting more headaches and stomach aches
and drinking more alcohol, smoking more cigarettes, etc.

I got more interested into materialism and people’s personal quality of lives and why it
would be that despite the fact that we’re told that materialism is the pathway to a happy,
successful, meaningful life, why does it seem to be associated with being less happy? So I
explored a lot in that thread and as time went on, I became interested in other outcomes
besides personal well being, because our values don’t only affect our lives, but they affect
the lives of those others around us, and further too, in our globalised world as we have now.

We started to take a look at social outcomes and ecological outcomes too and we started to
find that materialistic people were behaving in ways which were undermining the quality of
social relationships in that tend to be less pro social, more anti social, more competitive less
cooperative, less likely to contribute to the public good because they’re more focused on
themselves and their own good.

Then relatedly that the more people cared about materialism, the more they were likely to
engage in ecologically degrading behaviours, to live unsustainable lifestyles etc.  It became
clear that not only is materialism associated with less happiness, but it’s also associated
with less social cohesion and more ecological degredation, all of which are problems in
today’s world.

As I’ve seen those data start to come in from me and my colleagues and other sources,
especially in the last five to six years I’ve asked well why is this? Why does materialism
lead to these kinds of problematic outcomes and what’s leading people to take on these
materialistic values? Why do we act in more materialistic ways and what can we do about
it? What kind of interventions on a personal, community or national level could be used to
decrease people’s materialistic values and materialistic behaviour and then hopefully
improve those outcomes: make people happier and more pro social and more pro
ecological.

That’s led me in all kinds of different directions, from mindfulness meditation, to

alternative indicators of national progress to time affluence to advertising to children to
really starting to think a lot about capitalism and consumer capitalism and how that
promotes materialism, including relocalisation too.  That’s the historical and conceptual
overview of how I’ve come to this spot and where my understanding is.

What’s consumerism done to us? How have we been changed by fifty or sixty years of
that?

I think what consumerism has done to us is turned us into consumers. Which sounds like a
silly answer but we all have roles in our lives, and we have multiple roles: I’m a father, and
I’m a professor, a teacher, I’m an activist and I’m a consumer too, and our roles like our
values end up influencing what we think is important in life, they influence our behaviour
and how we treat other people.  I think what’s happened over the last fifty/sixty years is that
in order for our economic system to maintain itself, it requires people to enhance the
consumer role – to think of themselves more as consumers and I don’t know how it is here
in the UK, but when you’re reading the newspaper in the US you’re much more likely to
see people referred to as consumers instead of citizens.

To be a consumer has a very different set of implications than to be a citizen. To be a

consumer is to think about “what is it I want to buy?” So first off there’s a selfishness
already involved in the role and there’s a set of behaviours implied by the role. There’s this
sense that as that role comes to dominate more and more of how we think about ourselves
and how our policy makers think of us, it leads potential solutions to problems or potential
decisions to be “well what’s good for consumption, or what’s good to make a citizen?”, as
opposed to what’s good for people. If you think about what a citizen’s role is, it’s to think
about the whole of the community and “what’s my role in the community?”

You’re obviously still thinking about yourself, but you’re not thinking about yourself and
what you’re going to buy, you’re thinking about yourself and who you’re going to be in
relationship to others. There’s sort of a transcendent characteristic or aspect to that role.
That I think leads us to behave in very different ways. I behave very differently when I’m
being a consumer to when I’m being a citizen. The way that our economic and thus our
political system is oriented now, is very much attuned to people as consumers and less to
people as citizens and therefore it develops all kinds of policies that end up maximising the
consumer role and not too much for the citizen role.

I think that’s part of why it makes it easy for people to think about “Do I want this?”
instead of “well, how is it made, and how does my buying this impact people?”, and to
think, “well it’s Friday and I’m going to stay home and watch TV”, rather than “I’m going
to go out enjoying my fellow citizens cleaning up the river bank”, or having a meeting to
help determine town policy about zoning and whether Tesco’s is coming in.

Consumer society tells us what the optimal ways are to live our lives. That’s what any
social system does, there’s nothing special about consumerism with regard to that.
Christianity tells us how to live our lives, fascism told us how to live our lives… the
particular way consumer capitalism tells us to live our lives is this way and through
consumption and the maximisation of economic growth. Through working hard so you can
have a lot of money and then you can spend it on stuff that you want to buy. Whenever you
believe something’s important something else has to become less important and the value
of consumerism and materialism crowd out other important things.

Has consumerism left us more or less able to respond rapidly to change? Are we less
resilient? How can we know that?

I think to the particular kinds of changes which we’re likely to face here in the near future if
climate science is right and if everything we read about what’s happening socially is right, I
really think it’s left us less able to respond to those challenges and I think there’s a couple
of different things that goes back to: one of them is that consumerism leads us (this is true
of any social system) when we have a difficulty to think about certain ways to solve that
difficulty and to not think about other ways.

If you take a look at people who accept that there is climate change or climate disruption
and then they try to figure out how to solve that problem, consumerism says: “well,
consume in a green way”, because that’s a very reasonable solution to the problem from a
consumers’ perspective – we just need to consume different things and we need to
decarbonise and we need to keep economic growth, but just have carbon clean economic
growth. So we get locked into that set of solutions when we think about the problem of
climate disruption from a consumerstic view point.

All the climate scientists I talk to and everything I read suggests that that’s important, but it
won’t get us anywhere near the way to solve those kinds of problems. Plus, it’s not going to
help habitat loss or the other environmental problems we have to do those things. That’s
one issue – it tells us solutions which are far too partial.

Another issue is that because we know that materialism and consumerism and materialism
in research is associated with behaving in less cooperative and more competitive ways and
less empathic and more manipulative ways and less pro social and anti social ways. What
all that suggests is that when push comes to shove, and there are significant problems that
we face, we will have lost some of the interpersonal, social skills and community skills that
are really needed in order to come together as a group and solve the problems and instead I
think we’ll be more likely to continue our competitive mindset in ways that end up
damaging us at the very time we need to work together to solve the problems. Because we
don’t think about consensus and we don’t think about building a group and listening to
everybody and treating other people like people instead of other objects to be manipulated
when we take on that materialist mindset.

So that scares me. If things get really bad here we may have lost some of the important
skills that we need to manage that and the aftermath.  We have milk goats and my wife
wanted someone to teach her how and there wasn’t anyone. A hundred years ago there’d
have been all kinds of people to teach her. But we’ve lost a lot of the self sufficiency skills
that we need. Instead we go to work to earn money so we can hire somebody else to do it
because that’s good for the economy.

We’ve lost a lot of the skills that ultimately we’re going to need if we live in a more
localised way and we live not in a self sufficient way, but in a group sufficient way.
What does a resilient community look like to you? What are the qualities that people
have in that context that they don’t have today?

For me as a psychologist how I approach things is that there are four basic needs that
people have to have satisfied in order to function well. The first is that they need to feel
safe and secure. People don’t do well if they’re worried about where their food’s going to
come from or they’re worried about being cold tonight or that somebody’s going to kill
them when they cross the street.

The second need is people need to feel competent – they need to feel good at what they do. 
A third need that we all have is a need for relatedness, connectedness because we’re social
animals and we always have been. We need to feel that we’re part of a group, that we’re
loved and that we have a network.  The final need is for autonomy. To feel that we’re
choosing what we’re doing as opposed to being coerced into what we’re doing.  If you
think about a time when you were unhappy and things weren’t going well for you, you’ll
find that at least one of those needs was not being satisfied.

Whereas what most of the research shows is that when those needs are being well satisfied
people tend to be fairly happy and they tend to like the situation that they’re in. Just as an
aside, in the research what we find is that the more people focus on the materialistic,
consumeristic goals, the less well satisfied those four psychological needs are. Whereas
when people focus on intrinsic values – for contributing to the community and affiliation
and having good relationships and having good self-acceptance – growing into who you are
– those people tend to have those needs better satisfied and thus are happier.

From my perspective, psychologically speaking, the only way a resilient community is

going to be resilient is if it can maintain itself for a long time and if people want to live in it
and they want to live in it more than they want to live in the regular communities that are
currently out there as the dominant alternative. So for me the issue is the characteristics of a
resilient community would be a community which provides the vast majority of the people
to satisfy those four psychological needs and to enact their intrinsic values. To enact
growing as a person. To enact family. To enact contributing to the community in their day
to day life and their life in the community.

I think that suburbia and inner city life obviously don’t do a very good job of satisfying
those needs a lot of the time. There’s a lot of inner city life that doesn’t satisfy our need for
safety. A lot of suburban life doesn’t satisfy our need for relatedness, a lot of the way that
cities are set up force us to do things that we don’t really want to do like drive sometimes
when we don’t really want to drive because of the way that they’re planned – you’re only
allowed to build a house here and stores there and no side walk in between and no bus so
you only have one option.  A lot of those places don’t let you really be a part of the
community and figure out how you can contribute to that community which is important
for competence needs.

To me and what I understand of the Transition Town movement and the resilient
community movement is that what was required is to build a community that satisfies those
needs and I’m sure that’s not explicitly what you all talk about, but ultimately that’s my
interpretation of why it works. When I look at these communities it seems to me that they
make people feel pretty safe because there’s a social network there and people know they
can rely on each other and usually those kinds of communities have opportunities to help
those who fall on misfortune and there’s a lot of opportunities to build competence usually
because there’s meetings all the time where you can come and contribute to this action or
that action or lots of chances to learn stuff.

Usually there’s lots of chances for relatedness because you know your local shop keeper
and you’re working with people you know, or you bump into people in the street and get
together and chat with them. It seems that there’s a lot of freedom and autonomy in those
kinds of places. To voice your opinion and to get the chance to be heard and from what I
hear about the TT meetings there’s a lot of chance for autonomy there.  Don’t get me
wrong, we need practical things too, like solar panels etc, but if you don’t meet people’s
psychological needs it’s never going to be a resilient community.

Tim Kasser on Consumerism, Psychology, Transition and Resilience. Part Two

What can local government do to promote those four

things because clearly in our consumer society people tend to feel less safe and are
becoming less and less competent?  Relatedness is breaking down and people feel they
have less control over the democratic process.

I’m not a political scientist, I’m a psychologist, but my sense is that what has to be
developed are structures in the political economy and in the social system and the way that
decisions are made that ask people what are the things in our community right now which
are barriers to the satisfaction of these psychological needs and I’d imagine that different
communities are going to have different barriers, but somebody there in your community
knows the answer and if they can say what it is and put their finger on it, probably other
people are going to say yes, and add to it.

So I would say, I’d begin by building from the ground up and talking to people about what
these needs are and asking them what’s standing in the way of them living in ways that
satisfy these needs? Ultimately the problem is that what we haven’t figured out to do on the
community level, or the personal level, or the societal level is how to make a life which
facilitates the satisfaction of those needs. Instead, we think that we can facilitate the
satisfaction of those needs by buying something. That’s what consumer society tells us to
do.

You know – people don’t love you, it’s the wrong shampoo, or want to feel free – buy this
car. But I think if we can get past all that junk, and really have a conversation with people
about what is it about this community that does and doesn’t satisfy these needs? Once you
can identify the barriers and those things that are promoting satisfaction of the needs, then
ask why do we have these barriers, which ones are surmountable and controllable at this
community level and which ones have to do with something happening at the next level up,
such as the council or government?

And focus on what we can do in this community to satisfy the relatedness needs, given that
there’s this barrier? Is it because that’s the way it’s always been done or is it because of
some law in the book or policy? What can we do to facilitate these other things? If you can
get the people and the policy makers and the other leaders of the community all to think in
that way and to have a conversation around that, then the solutions to the problems, at least
at the community level will emerge. And of course that’s the easiest place to solve a
problem, maybe other than at the individual level. If the problem is at a higher level then
the community needs to organise with itself and other communities and say, well you’re the
one blocking us, how are you going to change it?  This is a more general idea that then you
apply to wherever you’re at.

Are those four psychological needs set out in one of the books?

Yes, in the middle chunk of The High Price of Materialism.

How would one measure individual’s ability to bounce back – individual resilience?
Are there ways to measure so that you can come back to the community yearly to see
if they are more or less resilient?

Again, a very simple answer is not quite the same as the bouncing back necessarily, but one
of the things I’d be very interested in – and there are community social indicators out there,
eg. The International Society for the Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS). If you go there,
there are all sorts of community quality of life indicators. If I wanted to measure the
progress of a community and how it’s moving along, what I would focus on is whether
people felt that their psychological needs were well satisfied within the community, and
there are measures for that that could be adapted at least. So, how safe do I feel in my
community? How much do I have the chance to feel competent in my community? How
many barriers do I encounter in my attempts to satisfy these needs within the context of my
community.

If my intuition about what a resilient community is, is correct then what you would
hopefully find is that as time goes on, people would be experiencing more and more
satisfaction of their needs and that their community is providing them with more and more
opportunities to enact those needs, and to enact those intrinsic values, and that they’re
experiencing less and less barriers to enacting the intrinsic values and satisfying the needs.
So on a psychological level, that’s what I’d be looking at within individuals, is that
occurring as time goes on. If that is occurring you would be having a resilient community
in the terms that I described earlier.

I think some of the other things you’d obviously want to be looking at are attendance at
meetings and actual social networks within the community. How much cohesion and
interaction is there? How many neglected people are there? You’d expect fewer neglected
people and you’d also expect fewer of the shining star people – you’d want more
egalitarianism.  Also, energy use and all the rest. But even funny things like obesity rates. If
people are walking more they’d probably be losing weight and be healthier.

In terms of how we move beyond being a consumer society, can we? Will we? Is it a
process that we can make happen or is consumerism just another pulse and then we’ll
have something else? Is the end of consumerism inevitable, or do we need to take to
the streets to bring it about? How do we get out of this?!

The end of everything is inevitable, right?! The question is how long will this go on and
will it be so destructive that what we have after consumerism is very unpleasant?  Well, to
be pessimistic first, the more I learn about consumer capitalism, the more impressed I am
with it as a very well designed social system. What I mean by that is fro my perspective a
well designed social system is one that’s maintains itself over time and which can expand
and incorporate other social systems and take them over, in a way.

I think clearly you have to accept by that definition that consumer capitalism is a
remarkable social system and it’s internal logic, the more I understand it the more I see is
that once you begin with the assumptions that it begins with and then the practises that it
has been able to develop over the decades in order to facilitate people’s entry and
maintenance into that system and to solve problems in ways that help the system rather than
hurt the system, even if it hurts other things – it’s really a very remarkable system. Because
it does appeal to something very real to people and it takes that appeal and magnifies it
times a hundred at this point. It has worked to create enormous wealth and then tells people
that that’s all that matters, so that when people take a look and try to decide whether the
system is good or not, they say, well it’s done great because it’s made a lot of wealth and
that’s what’s important! So the internal logic and the overall functioning of the system is
really remarkable.

For that reason, it will be difficult to dislodge at one level – I’ll come back to that though.
Of course the other difficulty is that to succeed in the system you have to follow the rules of
the system and then you end up the one in charge of the system and then the system is the
dominant thing and you set the rules and you can decide who’s going to play and who’s not
going to play and therefore it’s easy to pick out the people who don’t like the system
because you set the rules as to whether or not you get to speak.

I find that all the time talking to reporters. Five companies own ninety five per cent of the
media outlets and they’re all for profit, so if you try to critique capitalism in a for profit
system, you’re never going to get in the media. And that’s part of its brilliance, to me. It
makes it hard to change.  One possibility is that the system is going to continue on and
ultimately because it’s trying for infinite growth in a finite system it’s going to do such
ecological ands social damage that it begins to fall apart, or some internal logic means that
a huge depression happens and then you’ve got all kinds of social unrest and you’ve broken
down the commons so instead of coming together during this social unrest people fight
each other over the few scant resources that are left and it all falls apart. That’s one feasible
outcome of what could happen. The rich are on high ground, and have enough food, and the
poor on the low ground don’t. And then you’ve got social unrest. I think that that could
happen.

I think that it’s quite possible that if things start to break down, if we have really good
alternatives to key into people at that moment, and say, well rather than continuing that,
let’s try this instead. I think there’s a good possibility (I don’t know if it’s better than fifty-
fifty, but a good possibility) that at that critical juncture people will be able to reorganise in
a healthier way.  I’ve written about this in a recent State of the World report piece (in 2009)
on how people respond to trauma. Most of the time after trauma people go back to baseline.
Sometime after trauma they never recover, and sometimes they grow.

The way I look at it is if the trauma comes and we don’t have those alternative models in
place then there’s no way that we’ll go towards those alternative models. So we need to
have them in place so we can offer them to try.  All that said, I do think that it’s quite
possible that we could change things before the traumas occur. There are so many solutions
that are quite possible. That’s what we’ve been talking about at Schumacher and what a lot
of my writing has been about lately. Relocalisation is one of those solutions, but my feeling
is that relocalisation is never going to be enough by itself. Neither is ethical consumption or
voluntary simplicity and neither are alternative indicators of progress. No one of those
things by themselves is going to be sufficient to bring about the kinds of change that
ultimately I think could lead to broader social community and individual change before
collapse.

But, I think, tether them together and the more I read and think about it and talk with
people, those things can work together and they have their own internal logic that’s
different to capitalism’s logic and is a new kind of social system. From everything, all the
research I’ve seen and all the thinking I’ve done, and all the people I’ve talked to, suggests
to me that it will do a better job of meeting people’s needs and they’d be happier and
people will live in a more socially cohesive way and live more sustainably. Or at least it
will encourage all those things.

So, I think what we really need to be doing now from my perspective is developing and
fleshing out and thinking through the multitude of options, not because we think we’re
ultimately going to chose one of those things from the menu, but because we recognise that
we’re actually going to have to chose the whole buffet, and implement them now, as soon
as possible. Once we get one implemented people will be more open to the next one and the
next one and then you can affect that kind of change reasonably quickly. And that’s what
gives me hope.

What’s your take on the Transition Movement as a part of that? What’s your sense or
experience of it and its potential?

My sense of its potential is that it is to me a necessary ingredient in that whole buffet.

Ultimately what we’re going to have to do in order to promote social cohesion and people’s
well-being and sustainability is to relocalise and to do what we can at a local level and what
we can’t do at a local level, take to the next level up, and what we can’t do at that level we
do at the next level up. But right now it’s all at the global level, seeping down. The more
that I understand the Transition Town movement and relocalisation are that they hold
promise for promoting the kinds of things that are needed in order to get to these outcomes
that we’re interested in. And they provide a very nice model for both what it looks like and
how to get there. One of the things I like about the Transition Town Movement as I
understand it is that it really is a grass roots, building up from within, helping people to
figure out how to build the kind of community that they want to create, that is going to
meet certain requirements that we’re going to have to deal with.

So I definitely think Transition Towns is part of the answer. Maybe it’s the case that if
every town is a TT then all the other things would fall into place too?! Because maybe the
only way for every town to be a TT is if all of those other things happened also.  The thing I
know is that all people can do is what they themselves can do. If what you’re good at is TT
then go and do it. It’s part of the solution and you have to trust that someone else is doing
another part of the solution.
 Aspiration Index
    The primary focus of much of my research has distinguished between two types of goals.
Extrinsic, materialistic goals (e.g., financial success, image, popularity) are those focused
on attaining rewards and praise, and are usually means to some other end. Intrinsic goals
(e.g., personal growth, affiliation, community feeling) are, in contrast, more focused on
pursuits that are supportive of intrinsic need satisfaction.

    The Aspiration Index is my preferred way of assessing the constructs I typically study, as
it is quite flexible, allows assessment of various goals on various dimensions, and, most
importantly, allows for the assessment of the relative centrality of particular goals within an
individual's personal goal system. Briefly, the AI presents individuals with a variety of
possible goals they may have for the future and asks them to rate them on different kinds of
dimensions. Versions of the AI have proliferated, as it is a fairly flexible instrument that
has undergone substantial revision over the years.

    The original version of the AI (Kasser & Ryan, 1993) examined four domains of
aspirations (self-acceptance, affiliation, community feeling, and financial success) and
assessed ratings of how important and likely to occur subjects perceived these goals as
being. Kasser & Ryan (1996) added three more aspirational domains (image, popularity,
and physical health) and Kasser (1996) added another of spirituality. The most recent
published version of the AI (Grouzet, Kasser, et al., 2005) also assesses conformity,
safety/security and hedonism, for a total of 11 domains. This 47-item version of the AI was
validated in a sample of over 1800 college students from 15 nations. Factor analyses
supported an 11-factor solution, MACS analyses demonstrated the cross-cultural
comparability of the instrument, and multi-dimensional scaling analyses and circular
stochastic modeling showed that the AI is organized across cultures in a circumplex fashion
as shown below:
 Click here for the full sized version.

    Goals next to each other in this circumplex are psychologically consistent with each
other; that is, people who care about personal growth also often care about affiliation, and
people who care about image are often oriented towards popularity. Goals on the opposite
side of the circumplex are in conflict with each other; for example, spirituality and
hedonism oppose each other, as do financial success and community feeling.

    There are a variety of types of validity data supporting the use of the AI. For example,
over the years, my collaborators and I have replicated results that come from the AI when
we have used other measures such as guiding principles (Kasser & Ryan, 1993, 1996) and
personal strivings (Sheldon & Kasser, 1995, 1998, 2001). Other researchers have also used
reaction time methods (Schmuck, 2001; Solberg, Diener, & Robinson, 2004) as well as
self-reports of Materialistic values (Richins & Dawson, 1992) to yield some similar results.
I'd also note that Kasser & Ahuvia (2002) found substantial positive correlations between
other measures of materialism and the extrinsic values of financial success, image, and
popularity.

Using the Aspiration Index

    You are welcome to use the AI in your research without charge. Here is some advice
about using the AI.

1.    If you are only interested in assessing intrinsic and extrinsic goals, you probably
could just use the Kasser & Ryan (1996) version published in PSPB.
 2.    You do not have to use all of the 11 domains, and can mix and match if you
desire; I have certainly done that in my work. I do recommend, however, that you
use the whole AI if possible, for it gives the fullest description of a person's goal
system. If this is not possible, I would recommend using goals that come from the
different areas of the circumplex shown above.
3.    We almost always ask individuals to rate the importance of these goals. Some
studies have looked at ratings of the likelihood of attaining these goals. One other
has looked at ratings of current attainment of the goals. Another, unpublished study,
examined motivation for the goals. Theoretically, many other rating dimensions
could also be applied to these goal domains. Again, I consider the AI as a flexible
measure that can be adapted for many purposes.
4.    I must emphasize that, from our perspective, it is crucial when using the AI to
compute relative centrality measures (see Kasser & Ryan, 1993, 1996) in order to
test the hypotheses we are interested in; you may of course have other uses for it.
That is, it is necessary to control for the overall importance (likelihood, etc.) ratings
before looking at the associations of the AI with other measures. We have done this
in a variety of ways; the simplest is to subtract the subject's grand mean (i.e., ratings
averaged across all domains) from the subject's particular aspiration score (e.g.,
financial success, extrinsic, etc.).

   The Kasser & Ryan (1996) version of the Aspiration index, with scoring instructions, is
available.

   The English version of the newest version of the AI (Grouzet, Kasser, et al. 2005) with
scoring instructions, is available.

   We also have French, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese versions available upon request. If
you are considering collecting data with the AI and might be interested in collaborating on
a larger cross-cultural study, please e-mail Fred Grouzet.
About The Theory
Overview
Meta-Theory: The Organismic Viewpoint
Formal Theory: SDT’s 5 Mini-Theories
Other Topics of Interest
Applications
References

______________________________________

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 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 Five Mini-Theories

Formally SDT comprises five 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Other Topics of Interest

As SDT has expanded both in terms of breadth and depth, 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. And 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 numerousother articles and chapters identified on
this website.

References

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior.
New York: 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.