Building Autonomy, Motivation, Identity, & Self Determination with Dr. Richard Koestner

This week's guest is Dr. Richard Koestner, a professor of Psychology at McGill University where he has conducted research on human motivation for 25 years.

Dr. Koestner discusses the importance of autonomy in motivation, contrasting autonomous motivation with controlled motivation, and emphasizes the role of values in guiding personal interests. Dan and Dr. Koestner explore the complexities of autonomy, including the distinction between reactive and reflective autonomy, and offers insights into how parents and educators can support children's interests without imposing control.

Special Guest: Dr. Richard Koestner

Self-Determination Resources

Zuroff, D. C., & Koestner, R. (2023). Autonomy support and autonomous motivation: Common factors in counseling and psychotherapy. In R. M. Ryan (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Self-Determination Theory (pp. 801-818). Oxford University Press.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Press. 

Rosenfeld, A. A., & Wise, N. (2000). Hyper-Parenting: Are you hurting your child by trying too hard? St. Martin’s Press.  

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 2:00 What is Autonomous Motivation?
• 6:30 The Role of Control vs. Autonomy
• 10:45 Discovering Self-Determination Theory
• 15:30 Reactive vs. Reflective Autonomy
• 21:00 Autonomy, Expertise, and Decision-Making
• 28:00 Motivation in Education and Parenting
• 33:30 Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Values and Goals
• 38:30 Cultivating Lifelong Motivation

Transcript

0:00

[Music] Why does some clients show up eager to change while others seem to fight every step of the way? Why did the same interventions inspire one person and alienate another? Motivation is foundational to the work of any clinician. It drives your client to engage, sustain, and benefit from the therapeutic work. In particular, autonomous motivation, or motivation that's rooted in personal values and choice, is what transforms I have to into I want to, turning obligation into genuine personal commitment. But how can therapists or anyone for that matter foster autonomous change? That's where my guest comes in. He's one of the leading scholars on autonomous motivation, and he was kind enough to spend an hour of his time with me to help us understand autonomous motivation, and how we can foster it in others. But first, if you're new here, I'm your host Dr. Dan Cox, a professor of counseling psychology at the University of British Columbia. Welcome to Psychotherapy and Applied Psychology, where I dive deep with leading researchers to uncover practical insights, pull back the curtain, and hopefully have a little bit of fun along the way. If you enjoy the show, do me a huge favor and subscribe on your podcast player, or, if you're watching on YouTube, hit the like and subscribe button. It's one of the best ways to help us keep these conversations going. This episode starts with my guest responding to my question about what led him to studying motivation in the first place. So without further ado, here's my very special guest, Dr. Richard Koster. When I teach, I teach about identity development, and sometimes the undergraduates at Miguel, they like to have, they like to invite professors to talk about how they ended up where they ended up. And when I do those talks, I always highlight how I have no idea how I ended up where I am. And I don't think it would have been predictable early on. And it seems kind of like a random set of circumstances. So I'll give you a little background. I grew up in New York City in Queen specifically. My parents were Austrian immigrants. Both of them only had like an eighth grade education. They were caught up in World War II and it's aftermath. But like all immigrants, they wanted their kids to do well in school, especially my mom. I have an older brother, younger sister, so my older brother's a PhD in chemistry. Still working for General Motors. I got a PhD in clinical psychology and my sister is a nurse practitioner with a master's degree. As my mom was really keen on education. When I was like five or six, maybe six or seven, she hit upon the idea that I would get into this one school in New York City that was quite famous for. It's a Catholic school called Regis High School. And it's a scholarship school where they take kids from all around the metropolitan New York area, including Long Island and Connecticut. And my mom pushed for me to interview for this school. And or to apply to their school. And then they wanted to interview me and then they interviewed. You have to bring your parents to. And about nine of us from the Catholic school, I went to interviewed there. No, applied there. I was the only one interviewed. And I got in. And no one from my school had gotten in there like in the previous four or five years. But I didn't really want to go there. All my friends were going to a different school. My older brother went to a not so good school, but one that was co-ed. But I didn't really have any choice once I got in. My mom said, yeah, that's the school you're going to. So instead of going to like a neighborhood school where all the friends went, I went to a school in New York City. Fortunately, I did well there. And I think it was really good for me. But I wrestled with the issue of autonomy around going to that school. And so it's, and I was always alert to the extent to which I was being controlled versus I had any input into decisions I was making of important life choices. So I did well at uh, uh, uh, reaches high school. And then I applied to six colleges and universities. I got into five of them. And I had one school that I loved. It was Colgate University, a Colgate College. It's in upstate New York. It just looked like the kind of school that I needed. It looked a little bit like this school from, uh, uh, Animal House. Uh, and uh, uh, I had wanted to get away from New York and get it to get away from my parents. Uh, so I went to Colgate and they offered me a trusty scholarship. And they even said I could play on their basketball team. And I wasn't a particularly good. I was an okay player, but I probably didn't belong on a basketball team. And uh, so I said yes. This is where I want to go. Um, but my dad had had a hard attack the year before and my mom, who's a very melodramatic lady said, Oh, no, everything's going to fall apart if you go. So I, I changed my mind and I went to where my mom wanted me to call the first place, which is Columbia University, when my brother went. And so I went to Columbia. I was a commuting student and I was absolutely miserable because I was a kid who knew that I needed to get away and that it would be the best thing for me, even though it wouldn't go so well necessarily, but it was like separation and individuation work had to take place. So I went for two years and like you would take Columbia for two years. Yeah, yeah. And I did well academically. And in the March of my second year, I realized I had to make a switch. Uh, my father had had a nervous breakdown. It was a depression, but it was, it was like a really deep depression with paranoid psychotic ideation. And I had to get him hospitalized. Uh, and then while he was in the hospital, he tried to kill himself, but he didn't fortunately, he didn't succeed. But, uh, at the age of 20 or so, I thought, Holy cow, I don't want to end up like my dad. And I look just like my dad. Uh, and he also, he's like a quiet nice man, uh, but not very sturdy in terms of facing life and dealing with my mom. So I decided I'd have to transfer because you can't really transfer after you've finished two years. And the only place, the only place in New York State that would still take applications in March for the following year was the University of Rochester. And I didn't know much about it. I thought it was a state school. It's not. It's actually a very prestigious and expensive private school, not at all, like a state school. Uh, and I went there and they looked at my, my transcript and they said, yeah, yeah, we'll take you. We'll give you everything you had at Columbia. We'll give you more. And, uh, so I went to the University of Rochester not knowing much about it. And, uh, it was wonderful. It was very different from Columbia. It didn't have the same kind of intimidating prestige factor. The classes were smaller. It was teaching oriented. And, uh, the very first class I took was with, it was called humanistic psychology. It was taught by a professor named Ed DC who, uh, he was a social psychologist, motivational psychologist, but he taught the class as an encounter group. Uh, he taught, he was training gestalt psychotherapy. Uh, and it was a class with like, there were five guys and 10 girls and we'd read a different humanistic psychology book each week. And then during the class, we wouldn't talk about the book. We would just talk about whatever. And the emphasis was on, uh, you know, taking ownership of what you say and how you say it. And, uh, kind of getting in touch with how you express yourself and how you relate to people. Uh, and I found it amazing and fascinating. And I had a strong transference toward Ed DC. He used to wear these nice warm sweaters. All the girls were crazy about him, but, uh, and it was an uncomfortable class in some ways because people didn't know what to do. It was so unstructured. And, there was a lot of emphasis on, uh, being more straightforward and more assertive. And I think a lot of people in the class, they went too far with that and they started like bringing up things with friends and family and in the class that, you know, they weren't skillful enough. So in any case, I had this incredible experience. My other classes were all like relatively small 30 students. You could really talk and discuss. And, uh, I want to take another course with Ed DC and it turns out this was 1978. He was a very established social motivational researcher who was developing the, kind of the, the seeds of an important theory. That theory became self-determination theory. And I think it's the dominant empirical motivational theory in the world right now. And, uh, I decided to stay at the University of Rochester so I could keep working with him, but I actually switched over because he had a brilliant student named Rich Ryan. And, you know, you shouldn't even think of Rich Ryan as the student because he is so brilliant. And the two of them had the most amazing research theoretical partnership that lasted 40 years or so. It's like Connemon and Tversky from Cognitive Psychology, only its motivation psychology. And, uh, it's kind of come to an end at DC's older and he's having some cognitive difficulties. Rich Ryan is still going strong, but, so through because I wanted to get away from home because I didn't get into call gate because the only school that was still available to apply to was the University of Rochester. And because I happened to see humanistic psychology, that sounds cool. And then because that teacher happened to be, uh, like an amazing person who was building it. So I got in at the ground floor. I was one of the like two or three earliest students and I've been working with that theory for 40 years. I did do other things and, but I was so lucky to get in on the ground floor of a theory that is empirically strong and that's optimistic and hopeful and humanistic and organismic. So, uh, just I'm a very lucky fortunate person and I owe so much to a DC and Rich Ryan. They're just amazing. So there are several things that, but two things that I really noted when you're telling that story, which is one that you had a couple of situations when you, the high school you went to and then the first university you went to, you were sort of forced to, uh, or at least, you know, sort of a controlled motivation, if you will. And yeah, for sure. But you were really successful in both cases. And so we'll sort of get into that how it relates to your research later on. But then the other thing that really stood out was, well, the encounter group situation, which one, there's no way you can get away with that today. That's true. And that too, that, you know, when I think about self-determination theory and DC and all that work, that it seems, uh, so, um, you know, it's also, uh, empirically, um, sophisticated, but also just very, you know, organized and structured and. Yeah, they, they meant it to be like that. Yeah, they really thought about what they were including and what they were not including in the theory. And they've always been very conservative, uh, with not adding things that weren't fully tested and that didn't fit with everything. So you're exactly right about that. It's a nicely built theory. Yeah. And when I think about sort of doing an encounter group in an undergraduate class in the 70s, it just seems, and it is very antagonistic to that whole way of like approaching, uh, you know, scholarship or a sort of anything in life. I would say it was a good stalled group. And if you ever watched the famous psychotherapy videos with Fritz Pearls, he was a pretty good fructive hostile fellow. He was screaming at this one patient who saw him and call Rogers and Abedales, Abedales. And he kept saying, "Are you a little girl? Are you a little girl? Why are you acting like a little girl?" But this, with Ed D.C., he was a very bellow soft spoken person. He would never challenge. It was the other students who sometimes felt them bolded into, uh, speak their true feelings without realizing it was just a way to express, uh, incorrect hostility. It's a poor sucker who is in your class. So, you know, rather than ask you to give an overview of self-determination theory, one of the things I was thinking that could be helpful is sort of a broad, but still have somewhat of an overview. But it's some of the finer points that we're going to be talking about is, you know, in reading your work in more broadly about self-determination theory, there are these these constructs, you know, goals, motivations, psychological needs. I was wondering if you could help us understand sort of what these things are, but then also like how they relate to each other. Yeah, I think that gets confusing. So in the theory, thank you for validating and normalizing experience. So I'll tell you that all of almost all of my work is about autonomous motivation and autonomy support. And the larger theory, I've heard people say that if rich and Edward do it over, instead of calling itself determination theory, they might call it basic psychological needs theory. When when I was working with Ed early on, he really focused on autonomy and then competence. But he kind of ignored relatedness, Rich Ryan, who has a, he was a philosopher and a well-trained psychological theorist and he brought in a lot of attachment work, a lot of psychoanalytic work, but particularly the more attachment oriented aspects of it. So there was a, and a social psychological personality and developmental research focusing on what it means to be motivated in an autonomous way. And then it was work on what it means to be supported by others. Originally, the distinction, they didn't even hit upon the term autonomy support. It was controlling versus informational. So that the early research that put our field on the map were studies that showed that getting rewards to continue to doing, to continue doing an interesting activity or to try to do it well, it actually backfired because it crowds out in intrinsic motivation. It gets people focused on receiving the rewards. And they'll keep doing that activity as long as you keep giving them the goodies, could be rewards, could be praise, could be avoidance of punishment. But in real life, there's not someone around to give you goodies all the time. And so unfortunately, the example I was using, if you have kids who love reading, almost every school system will notice that and then try to reinforce them for reading more. And then they'll try to shape and guide them to read certain kinds of things. I think that's absolutely the worst thing you could do if you want a kid who's going to love reading all their life. So I really was very interested in what it feels like to be autonomously motivated versus what it feels like to be motivated because you're looking for the rewards. Or the other part of controlled motivation is doing things because you feel like you should or because you disappoint your parents or you wouldn't live up to your standards of yourself. So with controlled motivation, it's not always outside you. It's actually inside you, but it's something you've brought inside of you. It's an interject. That's a commander. That's a boss. And it's not really you. It's not integrated in you. So I like the distinction between autonomous and controlled. And the thing people, even if you've you know, I've been checking chat GPT and with chat GPT, if you don't know much about a field, it looks like it's really smart. But if you do know something about the field, they get things wrong. And the confusion they make is to think, well, autonomous motivation is intrinsic motivation, things that are fun and interesting and you like to do. That's only half the story. It turns out things that began as something your parents or teachers wanted you to do can become internalized. And you can feel like you're endorsing it and you're choosing to do it, even though it started outside of you. So it's an issue of whether you endorse and you understand why you want to do that. And so autonomous motivation has to do with things doing things out of interest or because they're meaningful or valuable in some way. And the meaning and value comes from the people who socialize us or from peer groups. So the classic mistake people make is confusing autonomy with independence and self-reliance and absolute total free will. And Rich Ryan is the best about writing about this and theorizing about this. And he points out that there is no world in which you would be totally independent. And there is no world in which you could live without depending on others. And whether you're behaving in an independent way or a dependent way, the key issue is whether you're doing that volitionally or not. So autonomy does not equate with self-reliance, independence, rugged individualism. None of those things. So the one of your questions is what problems do you notice? And that's the double-what problem is that especially now in the US with this movement toward kind of a reactive autonomy. It's like I'm going to, I'm against that because you're for it. And you're not going to tell me what to do. You're not going to tell me to call certain people with the pronoun "they" what gives them the right to have"they" as their pronoun when all the rest of us don't have. So it's sort of like the cliche of like the rebelling teenager or adolescent. Exactly. Because my parents told me to do it, I'm going to do the opposite for no other reason. Like that's what I'm here to say. Is that reactive? Yeah. So I think there's a reactive autonomy. And I actually wrote papers about reactive autonomy. It's actually controlled motivation. It's not autonomy. If you define autonomy as self-endorsement as having a sense of volition about what you're doing, it's there's something compulsive about reactive autonomy. They're always going to be against anything that they feel. They want to rebel against or that they don't identify with. And real autonomy means you're open to information from experts, from friends, from family. And you'll give it a look. You want to make your own decision. You want to sift through it. You want to chew on it. Real autonomy is not immediately saying, oh no, I don't want any input. I already know all of that. My favorite is I'm going to do I do my own research. Yeah, sure. So you're you have a PhD at public health. So you're you're you're you're trained to do your own research. You don't need any input. So I think defining autonomy is a really fundamental thing. And if you talk about it to teachers or parents, even the term autonomy is hard for them. So I have a wonderful former student who's a postdoc and she likes to use terms about alignment and self-alignment. So you do things that align with yourself. And there it's like there's a line with your interest in what's meaningful to you. So when it comes to the the reactive autonomy, tell me if I got this right. So people are experiencing that as them being autonomous, but it's but it's but it's kind of not because it's defined by the opposite the inverse of whatever. Exactly. It's the opposite. So the rebellious teenager actually never actually, literally, they think they are, but they're always doing the opposite of what their parents want. And you know, in terms of many people's views in North America, a lot of it is built on polarization and being against whatever the group there against is suggesting. So it's controlled motivation. And it's actually a pretty striking example of conformity with kind of some strongly held end group values and beliefs and an unwillingness to open their mind and consider the evidence and the points of view of others. And there's a rigid adherence to this conformity. I mean, the most shocking, this is probably controversial for your show, but the the COVID pandemic was really striking because there was a movie about it, like 11 or 12 years before with Gwyneth Paltrow and some other great actors. And it anticipated like how the where am I trying to say the virus would develop and how it would be spread and how it would panic, of course, panic and how some people would take advantage of the panic. But in that movie, what was so funny was that they pretty rapidly developed a cure. And that was kind of the end of the movie because everyone went out and they got it calculated and the drama was over. And that's not what happened for us because no one trusted the science. Everyone wanted to do their own research. And they wanted to be autonomous about this. But to be truly autonomous, you know, you want to acknowledge that there's other points of view that there are approaches to understanding how a virus is transmitted. And there are ways of figuring out whether certain interventions are effective or not. And so I thought that was all reactive autonomy. And now that allows the possibility that some people would look at the evidence, think about it and decide, okay, I'm not going to have a vaccine because, you know, here are my reasons. But I think it was mostly an anti-conformist foe independent kind of motivation. And I've actually developed my ideas about autonomy. I've changed. I used to call it like reflective autonomy versus reactive. Reactive for people who immediately know what they're for and what they're against. Reflective for people who kind of consider what their interests are, what's valuable to them, whether some people are pushing them to do it and how they should react to that. And then they you know, they go through a process. I now think that autonomy is actually more collaborative so that the most truly autonomous people are the ones who are open to input from others around them. And the people who are likely to make the best decisions are the people who are interested in who are the experts, who are the people who have had similar experiences. And who will want to weigh that information before making their own decision and seeing how, you know, all of that information fits with them and who they trust. But I also think that in most of our work settings, it's hard to be the one who has to make all the decisions, especially because our work lives are so pressured. And if you're the chair of the department or if you're the head of your organization, it's really burdensome and impossible. But if you're in charge with a group of other people, and if you have a good group that supports each other, we can accomplish a lot of stuff. So I've tried to change the way my own lab works. I used to just work like one-on-one with each student and we were working in different spheres. And I don't do that anymore. That's not efficient and it fails to take advantage of kind of a wonderful group process if you have a functional lab where the professor isn't the one who's like socializing all the other students and the new students. It's actually something that happens organically within the people who make up the lab. And there's actually kind of a passing of knowledge on to the next group. And I think that's healthy and good. So yeah, so I was most interested in autonomy. And then I'm interested in autonomy support. And I'm very sensitive to a distinction between control and autonomy support. I can tell when people are trying to control me. I can tell even when people are sneaky about how they control you. They don't use the code words of control, but they try and appeal to you being special or talented or like you could do something that other people haven't done. And it's another subtle form of control that I don't have much use for. So when we think about autonomous motivation, one of the ideas there is that our goals are concordant with our values. How do we, do you have any thoughts about how we figure out what it is that we do value? I actually focus more on what what it is that interests me. So autonomy is interest and value. And I think interest is a higher level. I like, I like to be aware of how I feel when I'm doing different things and where it's leading to. I don't stop too much and worry about, oh, is this really the most valuable thing I could be doing? I usually trust that if it's interesting and engaging, and if I'm trying to get better at it, I trust that it will lead to good things for me. And that does come in with values. In self-determination theory, they distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic values with the extrinsic being the consumer values. So wanting to be rich, wanting to be attractive, wanting to be popular. And the intrinsic values are more about personal growth, connecting with other people, contributing to your community. More of the goody, goody. I think some people would say, oh, they seem like goody, goody. What do they call that when you go to religious training, Sunday school values? But the research suggests that they're considered intrinsic values because they're the things that should satisfy basic psychological needs so that when we're pursuing personal growth, close relationships, contributing to community, that's when we're more likely to feel connected to others, which is relatedness. That's when we're more likely to feel competent because competence, to some extent, is decided by the groups and the people we're involved with. And that's when we're more likely to feel like we're living, you know, the way humans are evolved to live. So yeah, I think values come into it, but well, I use the example of reading. So I think reading should be just something that we like to do and we're interested in it. And I don't worry about, oh, is my daughter reading the right kind of books? Is this the most efficient way? And my daughter was a late reader and if you're an American parent, you panic if your daughter's son is reading by the time they're four and you think, oh, they're not going to get into the special advanced classes. So you call up your your own parent and you say, it's horrible. Sophie's not reading yet. And then your your your parent might say, but she's only in kindergarten. And some of us expect our kids to be reading quickly and then we get upset when they're not. And what I found at school when Sophie finally was reading, and second or third grade, they wanted to put the focus on, you know, giving kids a lot of time to just read during school. So they had a lovely space and times where the kids could read. So I gave Sophie the Harry Potter book so she could read that. It was like right, right in the right time. And the teacher said, oh, no, you can't bring a book like that. That's a popular book. I only want you to read the books that we've selected here. And she even went further when Sophie became became one of the best readers. The teacher said, oh, Sophie, I think you could handle more challenging material. I have a story here about a boy on an island in the Pacific. And there was a tidal wave that wiped out the whole island, but the boy had to survive by climbing up into the mountains. That's the kind of book I want you to read. And I was outraged by that. Sophie quite like my Harry Potter book. She liked other books. Too, but that's where values are getting in the way of pursuing your natural interest. And if, you know, I think we should trust and we should trust kids to read what interests them. And it, and what the early studies that Edithie showed was that if you pursue things that are interesting to you, you're going to make it more challenging to yourself. And there's a natural progression toward more challenging and complex that goes, you're not going to be reading the Harry Potter books the whole time. That will progress to some other more sophisticated kind of reading. And I just think every time we jump in and think we know, okay, this kid's talented, we're going to guide them on the right. I'll give you another one of my spills. So you were probably good at school. I was good at school. And when I was a professor, I'd sometimes find a student where I thought, oh boy, this student is just she's so good at this or he's so good at this. And there's a risk because there are some people who pick things up very well and who always come across as if they're natural. So the student that I would think of, oh, this is going to be the best motivation student I've ever had. They were probably five to ten other people in her life that had identified her as best tennis player, the best math student, the best this, the best that. And there's a danger of you know wanting to guide them and wanting them to go in a certain direction. I see this a lot with very talented women science students. There's such an emphasis on, oh, we need more women in the sciences. But the funny thing is some of those women who are brilliant at physics and math when they take psychology, they fall in love with it. And they get the message, are you sure waste your time on psychology? You should be doing physics and math. Or if you're great at language learning or something, oh, no, no, you have that talent. We want you to go in this direction. And I think that's almost always a mistake. We should let kids pursue their interests. And we have to trust that even a kid who goes for dramatic odds is probably going to end up making more of a contribution and having a better life if they're allowed to follow their interests rather than being funneled into being an engineer or something. This brings up sort of the challenge then of write the challenge that every parent, every teacher has when they see an interest in a kid and how to foster that and support them and sort of provide opportunities for the next step or potential next step without having them feel like they're being controlled. They're almost always being controlled. And it's really hard for the parents. I actually teach extensively about the development of expertise and parents play a vital role in terms of exposing them early on and encouraging them finding a motivating coach early. One that will help them keep this love of the activity. But then transitioning at age eight or nine to not such a motivating coach, but one who has the level of training that will bring out the best. And there's so many things that can go wrong on that pathway to excellence. And there's so many dangers of destroying the kids' interest and developing problems of overdoing it in a sport or in an activity. It's really really hard. And I think self-determination theory is good to know about so that you can... In the United States, we all want children who are brilliant. And there's a tendency to be watching for the appearance of what the special quality is and then wanting to nurture and develop that. But the research on expertise indicates that there is a special quality. And it's the capacity to work hard to remain interested and to keep refining what you're doing. And it's that motivational quality that's going to allow our kids to go... to succeed in any direction they hit a pot. And instead, the mistake we make is to think, "Oh, yeah, it's math ability. That's where I'm going to... or this kids are great athletes." Or, "Oh my, they have musical ability." And it's pretty sad when I think of all the kids I know who are great at music in high school. And very like 98 percent of them never play that instrument again the rest of their lives. And with sports, a lot of kids, once you get into competitive sports, you'll reach a level at which you... other kids will be better than you and there's fewer kids still involved. So you usually leave the field as, you know, thinking you're a failure and you didn't have where it takes. And I think more of the training and parenting should be about, you know, things you're going to enjoy the rest of your life. And don't worry about funneling them towards some... some area where you think, "Yeah, that's where the jobs are going to be and that's where a girl could make the most contribution or don't burden people with that." That's a wrap on the first part of our conversation. As noted at the top of the show, be much appreciated if you spread the word to anyone else who you think might enjoy it. Until next time![Music]