A preview of this full-text is provided by American Psychological Association.
Content available from Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne
This content is subject to copyright. Terms and conditions apply.
Honourary President’s Address – 2007
Facilitating Optimal Motivation and Psychological Well-
Being Across Life’s Domains
EDWARD L. DECI RICHARD M. RYAN
University of Rochester
Abstract
Self-determination theory (SDT) differentiates motivation, with autono-
mous and controlled motivations constituting the key, broad distinction.
Research has shown that autonomous motivation predicts persistence
and adherence and is advantageous for effective performance, espe-
cially on complex or heuristic tasks that involve deep information pro-
cessing or creativity. Autonomous motivation is also reliably related to
psychological health. Considerable research has found interpersonal
contexts that facilitate satisfaction of the basic psychological needs for
competence, autonomy, and relatedness to enhance autonomous moti-
vation, which comprises intrinsic motivation and well-internalized ex-
trinsic motivation. SDT has been applied in varied cultures and in
many life domains, and research is reviewed that has related autono-
mous and controlled motivation to education, parenting, work, health
care, sport, and close relationships.
Keywords: autonomy, self-determination theory, autonomy
support, intrinsic motivation
The topic of motivation concerns what moves people to act,
think, and develop. The central focus of motivation research is
therefore on the conditions and processes that facilitate persis-
tence, performance, healthy development, and vitality in our hu-
man endeavors. Although, clearly, motivational processes can be
studied in terms of underlying mechanisms in people’s brains and
physiology, the vast amount of variance in human motivation is
not a function of such mechanisms but is instead a function of the
more proximal sociocultural conditions in which actors find them-
selves. These social conditions and processes influence not only
what people do but also how they feel while acting and as a
consequence of acting. Most theories of human motivation have
therefore focused on the effects of social environments, including
the rewards, incentives, and relationships inherent in them, to
better understand what activates and sustains effective functioning,
not only because that is where variation is most readily observed
but also because it is the most practical focus for interventions.
In doing so, most theories have treated motivation as a unitary
concept that varies primarily in amount (e.g., Bandura, 1996;
Baumeister & Vohs, 2007). They have assumed that more motivation,
however catalyzed, will yield greater achievement and more success-
ful functioning. Self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 2000;
Ryan & Deci, 2000), in contrast, has maintained that there are differ-
ent types of motivation—specifically, autonomous and controlled
motivation—and that the type of motivation is generally more impor-
tant than the amount in predicting life’s important outcomes. Auton-
omous motivation involves behaving with a full sense of volition and
choice, whereas controlled motivation involves behaving with the
experience of pressure and demand toward specific outcomes that
comes from forces perceived to be external to the self.
SDT began with the premise that the most useful theories of
motivation would be broad in scope, encompassing a wide range of
phenomena; use concepts that have phenomenological or personal
meaning for people; be derived using empirical methods; and have
principles that can be applied across life’s domains. As such, the
theory has developed with these guiding criteria, and that may be the
reason why in the past 2 decades it has generated an enormous amount
of research elaborating many aspects of the theory and addressing
issues in many applied domains, such as parenting, health care,
education, work, sport, psychotherapy, and so forth.
SDT assumes that people are by nature active and self-
motivated, curious and interested, vital and eager to succeed be-
cause success itself is personally satisfying and rewarding. The
theory recognises, however, that people can also be alienated and
mechanized, or passive and disaffected. SDT accounts for these
differences in terms of the types of motivation, which result from
the interaction between people’s inherent active nature and the
social environments that either support or thwart that nature. More
specifically, resulting from empirical methods and inductive rea-
Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, Department of Psychology,
University of Rochester.
This article was based on the 2007 Honourary Presidential address to the
Canadian Psychological Association by Edward L. Deci. The theory de-
velopment and research review presented in this article have been done as
a joint effort of the two authors.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Edward
L. Deci, Department of Psychology, Box 270266, University of Rochester,
Rochester, NY 14627. E-mail: deci@psych.rochester.edu
CORRECTED JUNE 27, 2008; SEE LAST PAGE
Canadian Psychology Copyright 2008 by the Canadian Psychological Association
2008, Vol. 49, No. 1, 14–23 0708-5591/08/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0708-5591.49.1.14
14
