Agency and its discontents : a two-process perspective on basic psychological needs and motives

Abstract

The study of motivation, and motivational processes, has been and remains an extremely important tradition within the field of personality psychology. Those familiar with the field know, however, that motivation research is characterized by widely divergent theoretical perspectives and empirical approaches, often without much integration among these perspectives and approaches. We believe such integration should be possible, given the assumption that humans live in a single “consilient” universe in which any two true facts or theories, formerly examined separately, ultimately must be able to fit together (Wilson, 1998). But what is the way forward toward such consilience? This chapter describes and presents supporting data for a new two-process model of psychological needs (TPM; Sheldon, 2011), showing that it integrates two enduringly important motivation theories, self-determination theory (SDT) and motive disposition theory (MDT), which rarely have been considered together in the past. Indeed, we hope to show that the TPM provides a platform for studying many different motivational processes and dynamics, addressing issues concerning the instigation of behavior, the reward and maintenance of behavior, and the cessation of behavior as well as issues concerning adaptation and coping, subjective wellbeing, and implicit (nonconscious) versus explicit (conscious) processes. The two processes of the TPM are important motivational mechanisms proposed by MDT and SDT, respectively, and refer to (a) a motivational process, in which an internal force causes the instigation of behavior designed to get a needed experience; and (b) a reward process, in which behavior is reinforced when it succeeds in obtaining a needed experience. These ideas are considered in detail later in the chapter. The following section begins with some introductory considerations and conundrums.