So as we have been discussing this week, life goals make a great difference in how happy we can be, and how much we're healthy and fully functioning. But it's always been a bit depressing, in the sense of we've really been emphasizing how a focus on extrinsic life goals like materialism, like fame, like attractiveness, really detract from well-being, and I don't think we've talked enough about how focused on intrinsic goals actually is enhancing to well-being. So, remember, there are other goals in life besides the extrinsic goals we've been discussing. Intrinsic goals are a place that people can find a great deal of meaning and satisfaction. For instance, one of the intrinsic goals we've been discussing is personal growth, and people find personal growth when they pursue meaningful vocations and avocations, when they look for interests, when they follow up on their curiosity, when they are constantly learning, as people often do through traveling, or through reading, or through media kinds of events. As people pursue their values and interests, they get a great deal of satisfaction. Not only of autonomy because, of course, they're doing what interests them, but also of competence because they're growing in terms of their learning, and understanding of the world around them. So, personal growth, of course, is one of the great venues for enhancing wellness. But, perhaps, the most important way we enhance our wellness is through our human relationships. It's being really connected with other people, that probably most effectively enhances wellness. In this sense, we understand why relatedness is probably universally the most highly rated value when people look at life values, and what they'd like to pursue. It's also the most important ingredient, and overall, life satisfaction. Interestingly, we often forget about the importance of relationships and well-being and motivation in our workplaces in our schools, because we're so emphasizing goals and outcomes that we're after, but those relationships actually enhance our functioning in those kinds of settings. They're particularly enhanced when environments are supportive of the other basic psychological needs for autonomy and competence, as we'll discover when we get later into relationship motivation theory, yet another mini-theory within SDT. But, one-third value for getting intrinsic goals accomplished and psychological needs satisfied is through giving to your community, or what we might call generativity, it turns out that giving is very rewarding to human beings. When we give to other people, we satisfy many basic psychological needs. If I can find somebody that I can help in the world and I want to do so volitionally, obviously, that's autonomy, I also can feel competent and effective when I do help them, and I also feel more closely connected with them, and that would be relatedness. So, when we give to others, when we're benevolent in the world, this tends to be a highly need-satisfying, and it tells us a lot about human nature. We studied this in many different ways, and there was a whole series of studies that I did with Netta Weinstein, that came out in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2010, that I think really illustrates how important giving can be to well-being. One of the first studies in that series of studies, we did daily diaries on people, and asking them about whether they've been able to help anybody on that given day, and then why they helped people. What the data showed is that, on days in which people had helped other people, there was a slight increase in their subjective well-being in their vitality, in their needs satisfaction and self-esteem. But when they helped other people volitionally, when it was something they wanted to do, it substantially helped all of those outcome variables. When you helped for an autonomous motive, you had much more vitality and much greater need satisfaction. So, that led us to do some experiments in which we looked at helping in a much more detailed manner. One of those experiments, for instance, we had people in a laboratory setting, where they had an opportunity to help somebody else, and under one condition, we told him that they had the choice whether they help that other person or not, and a second condition, we basically pressured them to help by telling them that they should help the other person, so that there'll be less autonomy in that helping circumstance. Then, we looked at the outcomes. People who had helped by their own choice, showed higher subjective well-being as a result of the helping more vitality and greater self-esteem. Whereas people who helped because they were told that they should help, showed none of those benefits. What was really interesting in this study, is that the recipient of helping these experiments didn't know about the experimental condition for the helper, but it turned out that when they were helped by somebody who was doing it willingly or autonomously, the recipient of help also had higher self-esteem. Also, got more subjective well-being, more positive experience from the incident, and they came away with higher self-esteem. Nobody likes to be helped by someone who's doing so unwillingly. It can be demeaning and even hurtful to well-being. So, you can see here that volitional helping enhance the wellness of both parties, both the helper and the helpee, and numerous experiments now have I think supported that overall idea. Recently, we wanted to show that the benefits of helping to the self have nothing to do with contacting the recipient of help, or anything that you might expect in terms of future reciprocity. To show that we set up an experiment, which was a very simple experiment, in which people came into our laboratory setting, and this was an experiment I did with Frank Martela, a Finnish scholar here at the University of Rochester. We set up an experiment in which subjects came into a lab, and they played a simple computer game. When you scored in this computer game, you've got scores and positive feedback as a result of it, so it was a fun game that typically would be intrinsically motivating to people. In a second condition, people play the exact same game, but when they scored well in that game, rice was donated automatically to needy people around the world. So, in this condition, not only did you play the game, but you're also in scoring well, you're benefiting other people who you would never meet and never know. It turned out that when people play this game under the condition where they saw that their activities could be benevolent to others, they had more autonomy for the game, more competence feelings in the game, and they experienced more relatedness. Now, it's not that other people weren't experiencing things most things in the game, the game was fun, but it was even more fun when you thought it was doing social good. It turned out that, to the extent that you were in that condition, you also had more positive effect after the game, less negative effect, more energy and vitality, and more sense of meaning, because you had done something that was actually good for others. Vitality results showed up even in subsequent tests/ people who had been benevolent in this experimental game actually had more energy for subsequent tasks that we gave them that showed up in performance on those tests, like a stroop task, which some of you may know from experimental studies. So, one of the conclusions from my researches that the pursuit of intrinsic goals, and particularly giving to others and being benevolent, enhances wellness through its enhancement of basic needs satisfactions. As it turns out empirically, where people are functioning in a way that is more eudaimonic or intrinsically focused, they become more happy even though that's not their proximal aim or direct aim. So, as we volitionally pursue what's intrinsically worthwhile, as we're more relational rather than selfish, these things supply an evidence supported way, in which we can actually attain greater happiness without even trying to do so. These dynamic findings in both basic psychological needs of theory and goal of contents theory, the too many theories we have been discussing over the last week, strongly support why extrinsic goals hurt well-being, intrinsic goals help well-being, and they do so through the mechanisms of basic psychological needs.
