Kennon Sheldon || How to Be an Optimal Human

Doctor Sheldon is a psychologist at the University of Missouri who studies motivation, goals, and well being from both a self determination theory and a positive psychology perspective. He has authored a co authored multiple books, including Optimal Human Being an Integrated Multi Level Perspective. Doctor Sheldon has been cited more than three thousand times, and in twenty ten, he was named one of the twenty men most cited social psychologists. What honored is day to chat with you. Hey, it's

great to be here. It's been a long time that I've been kind of following your work and we've never bumped into each other, so this is a great thing. I have been a long time in my reviewer work, so it feels really good when someone says that, Yeah, I devoured your book Optimal Human Being. It was just the level of nerdiness that resonates with me, like I almost like crave that level, you know, integration of multiple perspectives. It was really brilliant book. So thank you for writing that. Yeah,

thank you very much. So let's go back. Let's go back to like nineteen eighty one. Okay, I was two years old and you graduated from college and you started to become interested in the topics of creativity, genius, and intelligence, which is what I started off in my career study. Yeah, those topics have always been fascinating to me. The question of how to get the most out of one's own mind and one's own potentials to you know, be as creative and as insightful and as as possible. I really

like to think about that. So I'm trying to think about who were the major researchers in the field at that time. Dean Simonton I think was still I think he was doing good work and then right, I didn't meet Dean until nineteen eighty six when I started PhD program at UC Davis, and he was actually the one that sponsored me. He was the only person that accepted me. I applied to seven programs and I got six rejections. But I found myself at UC Davis. Working with Dean

Simonton was a great place to be. Wow. That is a great place to be. Wow. So you worked with Dean Simonton. So tell me some of the research you did. Was your PhD thesis related to genius? Actually, I should say that we didn't work together that long. I didn't really take to the historiometrical approach. You know. We were in contact, but I was kind of a drift for a while at UC Davis, and I didn't really get my feet under me until Bob Emmons was hired at

UC Davis. He was the personal strife Sky, a goal researcher, and I immediately gravitated to his work when he got there in my fourth year. And then my dissertation research was a goal study related to creativity and creativity issues. Cool and you also were in a You started a rock band? Is that around that time? That was before I went back to grad school. There was about a five year period when I was trying to be a musician,

kind of flyling a little bit. It turns out that it's very difficult to just find people in the musical community who are on the up and up, you know, that are mature and really ready to go. Or maybe I just you know, gave up too soon. But there were numerous band traumas and conflicts and dramas, and at some point I decided, I'm going to grad school forget this. What did that? What did you play? Keyboards? Yeah? Oh wow, that was big in the eighties. Yeah, there was the

new new wave style of music back then. It's electric you know, electric keyboard, yep, synthesizers. Oh wow, that's so cool. Do you miss those days at all? Not at all? I mean, you know, I think back on them fondly. But there's a real sense in which life is just kind of keeps getting better and better, you know, going from I mean you know this, You go from being not really sure who you are, what you're doing, if you can be successful, and then it starts to look

like maybe this is going to work out. And at this point it pretty much has worked out. And that's a very nice place to be. I'm very happy to hear that. Okay, so when did you make contact with humanistic psychology, which has been a clear source of inspiration for both of our work, you know, probably just the introduction to Personality course back at Duke University, which happened to be taught by Tim Wilson, who's now very well known. He was a post doc at that time at Duke.

Now he's at UVA. But I don't think he's much of a humanistic type of guy. But he did a nice job of presenting that perspective and it always resonated with me. Hmm. Yeah. And what's interesting, though, is it resonated with you. And you've also you've done some really tremendous work on happiness, which is not was not really the major focus of the humanist psychologists, right, Like a lot of them kind of even reiled against the search

for happiness. Well, so let's talk a little about how you got interested in the topic of happiness and also, you know, just like I want to ask the question, why is everyone trying so hard to be happy? Is it worth it that that pursuit? Yeah, well, those are really good questions for me. I got interested in happiness because that's what Bob Emmons was studying when he got to UC Davis. He had been a deaner student and of course at Deaner's the Guru of happiness and well being.

To me, it seemed like a much easier thing to study than creativity, which I had been studying. As you know, measuring creativity is quite difficult, and there's lots of ways to do it, and you're not sure that any of them is really valid. It's a mess. It's a bit of a mess. But with a happiness there's pretty good measures. They're reliable, they're valid. The main problem with happiness is people question how important is that? Why should we care

about it? And my answer to that question is we should pursue growth and development and being the best, most creative person we can be, and happiness comes along as a side effect of that. So in the field there's a lot of confusion about what well being is. What's the right definition. From my point of view, we have a big problem because the definition of happiness is becoming so big and so many things now fit under that umbrella.

I once did a lit search about a year ago on the term you dimonic well being, which it's kind of this vague word to describe really any positive psychology construct, and it turns out that people are using that concept so broadly and so widely that it's to me it's threatening to make the concept of happiness almost meaningless. Happiness becomes whatever the researcher says it is, as long as

it kind of sounds good good. Any old random positive psychology construct can be lumped in with the concept of happiness just by calling it a you dimonic well being measure. It's a really good point, you know, I think about. I mean, a lot of people in the philopositiveology have been starting to use the term well being instead of happiness as the umbrella term, you know, well being, being,

well being, you know being. All these same things that you just mentioned are attributed to you demonic well being, yeah, sometimes just referred to as simply well being, whereas happiness might be considered more hedonism. Yeah, I don't like that trend. We could probably go on this. But to me, subjective well being, which I can also call happiness, to me either almost interchangeable SWB is something you don't get by

being narcissistic, by being self centered and selfish. A lot of my career has been dedicated to showing what brings you subjective well being, and it turns out to be all the you dimonic stuff that gets it for you. So I like to make a distinction between what people do and how they feel as a result. And to me, subjective well being is a positive feeling that it's not just about pleasure there, it's not just about momentary, superficial stuff.

It's really difficult to get that good feeling, and it's very comforting that the main way to get it is through doing virtuous, moral growth oriented types of activities. Oh wow, I definitely want to get to all that good stuff later. And we're not quite there yet in terms of what all those activities are. But yeah, I'm glad you said that. By the way, we just submitted a paper that showed

that life satisfaction measures are positively correlated with narcissism. Narcissists do tend to report themselves on average as having higher subjective well being, while they don't tend to score as high on other metrics of meaning, and they score lower on metrics of meaning a purpose for instance. There does seem to be an important distinction to be made there.

There could be I haven't seen that data. I usually don't find any connection between narcissism and a subjective well being measures, But it sounds like you are finding some association with life satisfaction. So yeah, I might need to think about that. Yeah. Well, I hopefully it gets published and I will would love to send you the paper. We can keep talking about it. Okay, So going back

to happiness. Now, you've studied a lot about happiness. You know, you asked this question, how can we keep ourselves from the upper end of happiness set point range? You know, there is a big controversy, you know, like is happiness in your genes? Right? And then people try to reconcile by saying, well, yes, but it's really just a set point. It's kind of like what is your default? But there's still a good range that we can change. And then you are asking the question, how can we keep ourselves

in the upper end? See it's funny because when I hear that question, I kind of shudder because I don't want to be kept in the upper end of happiness. Like those people who are always like trying so hard to keep themselves in that upper end are really annoying people to me. They're the kind of people that I don't want to be around. They don't seem to be authentic to me. Now am I totally unfair? Yes, well, maybe all right. So I would use myself as an example.

I'm not a real e brilliant, enthusiastic person. I'm not very high on extraversion, so I would say that my set points, such as it is, is somewhat lower than many people. But I consider myself to be doing quite well in my life because I'm keeping myself in the upper end of my potential range, mainly by doing a lot of cool stuff and having a lot of good experiences. So I think it's important not to mix up. So I agree with you. We should not be trying to

make ourselves happy. We should be trying to do enjoyable, interesting, meaningful things. Gotcha, And I think the problem is many you diamonic researchers think that if we say a subjective well being is a criterion that we can use to identify positive ways of being, that makes it the goal. I wouldn't say that at all. It's just a side effect. So circling back around. Just because you're in the top part of your range doesn't mean that you have to

be an annoying person who's happy all the time. It just means that you have raised your baseline level to a higher level than you otherwise would be, but you're still going up and down around that level. So you're still having bad days, you're experiencing grief. I had a really good friend die unexpectedly a couple of weeks ago, and that drugged me down for a long time, and I'm still kind of adjusting to that. So it's just a question of what are you going up and down around?

Are you going up and down around to three? Or have you constructed a life that's full of enough interesting, meaningful experiences that now you're going up and down around to four? Got it? That makes a lot of sense. And so you've studied some of these things, right, So I like the idea of happiness as an epi phenomenon. I like that, But what are some of the things that you've studied helped to contribute to keeping us in

that upper end of the happiest set point range. Well, there could be a lot of answers to that question, but the two main ones, I would say come out of self determination theory theory of motivation, which has been my primary focus. And in that theory, there's an important distinction between what you try to do, what are your values, what do you think is important the content of your goals and motives on the one hand, and then there's why do you try to do them on the other hand.

So there's the what and the why of motivated behavior. And what I find is that parallel with Tim Kasher's work on intrinsic versus extrinsic aspirations, pursuing intrinsic values of growth, connection, contribution rather than extrinsic values of money, image status. That's one important source of happiness to be doing things that lets you be making connections to other people and making connections to your own deeper self. But then on top of that that you need to be doing them for

the right reasons as well. So if you con bear with me for another second, I like to use the example of a stockbroker and a philanthropist. So a stockbroker is pursuing money pretty much, he has extrinsic goals. That is, the content of the goals involving making money. A philanthropist the content of his or her goals involved helping other

people and doing good. So we would expect the philanthropist to be a happier person than the stockbroker, just based on Tim Kaster's findings and some of my own findings. But what if that philanthropist is doing that activity because he feels guilty about his inherited wealth, or he's trying to impress his liberal friends and show how much, you know, how awesome he is. That's not a good reason to be doing that activity. So the motivation would be good check,

but the why of motivation not so good. That would tend to kind of cancel out the effects. So in this model, the happiest person would be the philanthropist who's doing it for the self determined reasons that's autonomous reasons. I enjoy it, I believe in it, I identify it with it. And the least happy person, and the data support this pretty cleanly, would be the stockbroker who is doing it with a feeling of pressure social comparison, wanting

to outcompete other people. So if you take both the what and the why into account, you can say that the happiest person would be the one who's doing good stuff for good reasons, and the least happy would be by bad and good at bad. I don't mean in a moralistic sense, but just from the standpoint of what the data show the least happy person would be the one doing extrinsic or not so good things for not so good reasons. I'll just stop there and let's you react to that. No, I like that. I try to

map on some of these terms. Like I'm not the biggest fan of the intrinsic extrinsic distinction, but you know, I like to go back to the way Maslow framed it,

you know, security versus growth needs. I think you could map it onto saying that there's things that lead to growth, and those are the things that tend to make us feel happier than the things that we do to just fulfill some sort of desperate need or some whole that's within us, right, And I would agree with that, And I would just say that insecurity can lead you to do pursue goals that are not very growth promoting, but they can also lead you to do things for reasons

that are not very growth promoting. So, from my point of view, ASDT breaks the insecure functioning concept down into both what are you doing and why are you doing it? And I think that can be useful and for some kinds of research questions. Absolutely, I really like the distinction between what why, and I also like the how part as well. Right, so you know, what are this How do we self regulate ourselves and make sure these things aren't getting in the way of reaching these higher level

or growth oriented goals. There's something that a lot of people don't know. Well, some people might not even heard of self determination theory. Let's not assume anything here, would you mind just giving a brief overview of self determination theory and then we can get to some of the deeper nuances of it. Okay, I'll try to do this

pretty quickly. At DC back in the early nineteen seventies was an industrial organizational psychologist who had the radical idea that rewards like pay and money, instead of reinforcing behavior, might actually punish it. And he discovered what's called the

undermining effect. That you can give people, say a dollar for each puzzle they solve, and then leave them alone with the puzzles, and they don't want to solve any more puzzles compared to people who were just told to do it for fun, do it for the fun of it. So that was the undermining effect, and really the entire theory SDT is built on that. Trying to explain that effect, and the explanation turned out to be people have a

need for autonomy. They need to feel like they're doing what they want to be doing for their own reasons. And when some authority comes along or some boss or teacher and tries to kind of bribe us to get us to do what they want us to do by offering us rewards or praise or the threat of criticism, that thwarts the need for autonomy and sort of spoils that activity for us, undermining the intrinsic motivation that we

started out. So STT has gone on to build a lot of different kinds of themes and variations on that basic idea, but they're all roughly consistent that we want to be doing what is interesting and meaningful to us. That the environment gets us away from that. There's a lot of different ways of media, consumer advertising, the ways that authorities try to control us and coerce us. So it's a quest for self determination that's at the core

of the theory. That's great, and so there are basic needs that are part of self determination theory as well, right, the need for relatedness and competence and autonomy. Now, how do those needs interact with the intrinsic extrinsic part. The original thought was that thwarting the need for autonomy would undermine intrinsic motivation, but then it turned out that feeling incompetent will also do it, and that fits right in

with Chicksima High's flow theory. Chicks and High said, we need to have a balance between the challenge of the task and the skill and our skills, so that the skills match the challenge and we can stay in the flow zone and feel competent in doing the task. It's pretty clear that that also is important for maintaining intrinsic motivation. And then if you're building a theory of basic needs, you really can't leave out relatedness or belonginess or connectedness,

whatever you want to call it. So that's where the theory ended up. It's resistant going beyond those three just because of a parsimony perspective. I'm sure as you know, it's tempting to say, what about a need for this and this and this and this and that can get out of hand pretty quickly. So ideally you have some kind of a way of testing and comparing the candidate needs to figure out which ones really are most important, and which ones might be just a rephrasing in some

sense of one of the existing ones. Well, as you know, I do believe it's not a complete model of needs. But even without just taking my own thinking about this out of the picture, your own work has shown there's two additional kind ofate needs that really ought to be part of the theory, the need for security and the need for self esteem. Aren't I right that your work has shown that both of those two are really important

as well? I would agree with you that there's sort of a two level thing going on where security is important. It seems to be mainly a deficit need. It becomes important when it's taken away, whereas SDT is more of a positive experiences that you need, but it also has a deficit perspective, So you know, I might put security in a different category there. I'm not sure what DC

and Ryan would say self esteem is. Yeah, it's really tricky because it's a feeling that it's great to have, but if you're going after it, that's not such a great position to be in. Jenny Crocker has done some important work showing that self esteem striving tends to work against itself tends to backfire in the end. Self esteem striving is a lot like extrinsic values what Tim Kasher studies. You know, it's about getting status, getting ahead, looking good, or it can be about that, So it's more of

a mixed case self esteem striving. Yeah, the thinking about us a lot. You know, I externally don't have all the answers, but I think that it's worth debating. You couldn't want to make the case that if you strive for belonging that's not really healthy either. Like, there are a lot of people who have a constant need to belong and it comes from a place of deprivation and neediness, and people don't respond well. If people are signaling that's

absolutely true. I think you have to make a distinction between chronic and acute deprivation. So if it's Friday night and I, you know, kind of hanging up by myself and I'd like to find some other folks to hang out with, and I pick up the phone and say, hey, what are you doing. That's not coming out of deprivation. That's just reaching out to satisfy a need. But if you're in a place where you feel lonely, and that's

a chronic feeling. I think you're right that people do pick up on that that you're needy and you're trying to use them as a way to satisfy your need,

and they don't respond as well to it. I agree, and I think that's why there's value in distinguishing healthy and healthy avert manifestations of these things, But that doesn't argue against the value of adding So, for instance, I think I could make a case that a healthy self esteem is actually an essential core part of being human, of having autonomy, of having growth, And to me, I would just define that simply as having self respect for yourself,

having confidence. To me, it's not the same as competence. I'm talking about basically the self liking for self competence model, like liking yourself to me, seems to be essential. So in a healthy way. Then there's an unhealthy modifestation of that what you see with narcissism, which you see with those who have an addiction to esteem, but I'm not talking about that. It seems like any one of these self deformation theory things could have a healthy or unhealthy version,

and that doesn't argue against the inclusion of these other things. Yeah, No, that could be and I see what you're saying. I think that DC and Ryan would argue that pursuing self esteem directly is likely to fail in its aim. But it maybe it comes down to an empirical question. Yeah, just more research and distinguishing between these I think it's a really important distinction though, you know, between the healthy and unhealthy flavors of each of these needs and how

we regulate these needs. Yeah, well, I remember what I was going to say a second ago. DC and Ryan would say that self esteem is an outcome of getting the big three needs met, and that's an empirical question

that could be studied. But why would you are liking of yourself even come into question unless you were around people that didn't respect you and didn't take you seriously, So that would be absence of need of relatedness needs that or if you weren't doing what was important and meaningful to you, if you were doing things that you felt controlled and coerced into doing, you might also not really respect yourself. You know, this is a question. Like

I could talk all day about this topic. It's so rich and exciting to me because I see these things kind of building off each other in ways. The fundamental need for belonging is intimately, as Mark Leary has shown, is intimately tied to the self esteem. They're like multiple things that can lead to higher feelings of self esteem. They're multiple indicators, you know, or if self esteem is an outcome, which is how Leary likes to look at it,

there are multiple things that feed into that. It does seem like if there is an overall not self esteem, but I think there is a fundament overall need for esteem and Maslow abram Aso, you know, positive the need for esteam and his his self actuization framework. If you view the need for esteem as something that includes not just how you feel about yourself, but this steam you get from others, that's not in the relatedness or competence purely.

That's not in there the esteem that you're getting from others. Like, let's not deny just how good it feels to be respected by others for your competence, not just to have the competence. Yeah, I see what you're saying, and I agree. We could go back and forth on this. It's kind of me it is it is, I mean, to me, the whole light, the problem with self esteem is yourself is an object that you want to feel good about

that object. It might be taking you out of the moment, taking you out of flow, might reflect some problematic interpersonal experiences in the past or in the present. Why do you even need to think about how good you feel about yourself? If you know you're getting good connection, you're doing well, you're doing what you want. And I don't really think about my self esteem very much. Maybe I don't have to. Maybe I've been you know, things are working out well enough for me that that just doesn't

come up. But that's part of the point. If it comes up, doesn't that mean that there's something going on

that is non optimal, which means it's a deficit response. Perhaps, Yeah, it's a great point, and maybe just like a way of resolving that, which is my kind of preferred situation, is to make this distinction between deprivation needs and growth needs, as massively did, Like I really love that distinction, and I would actually argue that relatedness is a deprivation need though like I would argue, belonging belongs, belonging, you know, belongs in the camp of deprivation, whereas what the kind

of more growth oriented forms of relatedness that Maso was talking about. It was not relatedness. It was like universal sort of benefit to the good of society or loving for the He called it being love, loving for the being of others, regardless of whether it's your mother or your partner, or that you belong and a certain group. I would actually argue that the need for belonging is actually deprivation. Do you see what I'm saying. I do

see what you mean. If you think of it as like group acceptance and I'm a thirteen year old and you know cool kids like me or now, the way STT thinks about relatedness, I do think they it's seen as a deeper thing. It's kind of like the distinction between the need for affiliation and the need for intimacy. From a motive disposition, theo affiliation is be accepted, be fit in intimacy is go deeper. In STT, the relatedness is supposedly aligned with the deeper part, but it's true

you could go even deeper. And personally, I'm not sure that there's something different. There's just more elaboration of that same experience of feeling connected and close to somebody that you appreciate. They appreciate you. You're sharing something meaningful, That's what it's about. So you know, I'm thinking of like George Valen's work on He wrote this book called Spiritual Evolution and argue there's likefferent stages of evolution of love.

There's first is like the belonging. Then there's kind of like the intimacy, but then there really is a third, which is it's kind of a love for all of humankind. And I just don't see that really talked about enough. I guess in the needs literature. Yeah, I can see what you mean. What I would want to do is figure out how to measure it and then do the studies to compare it to the existing needs and find out does it predict additional variants and maybe it would

Oh gosh, I have that data set. Should I run it right now? I've been known on the Psychology podcast to run studies on the spot. I've done that with a I've done that before with like, yes, I am that nerdy, It's true, Okay, I actually did collect this data set. I've been trying to come up with a new test of self actualization that I could validate, and some of these kinds of more love for humankind is included on the scale, but I also included measures of

self determination therey. So I'm literally, let's see, let's really put in the dependent variable like work satisfaction. I've never run this analysis is actually well, see, that's one of the questions, what's the criterion? Yeah, what's the criterion? Exactly? That's why I like subjective well being because it's relatively value free. It's just how do you feel? Are you satisfied?

I got it? I have that. Let's do it. Okay, yeah, I have subjective well being is the dependent but at measure going to put in let's call it democratic character structure. Maybe that's one of the closest. So I have a whole bunch. I have sixteen sub scales on the self actuation test. It seems like democratic charac structure might be the closest thing to what I'm talking about, where you're basically kind of like treating everyone as though they have value to me. That's a form of love, do you

know what I mean? Okay, I'm going to put that in, and I'm going to put in the relatedness from the didn't you create the scale? The satisfaction dissatisfaction SDT scale, the one with the Hilbert John Hilbert. It divides need for relatedness comportable autonomy. And I'm literally putting into this progression of scale you created. Okay, so I'll put in this. Should I put the satisfaction or the dissatisfaction one or the overall? Right now, I'll put in satisfaction just for now, Okay, Okay,

here we go. I'm gonna run it. Wow, democratic character structure is no longer significant. Relatedness is Wow. Related is the predictor there? Wow. The STT thing would be that relatedness mediates its effects. Okay, the needs are always mediators, or very typically they're mediators. But I mean, I'm not saying, you know, what's the end that you have there? It's pretty large. It's almost a thousand. Okay. For instance, I

don't think that was the fairest test. Like I included a subject I think is more relevant, which I call humanitarianism, is what I'm labeling. I think that's more of what I'm talking about. And I found that both the relatedness satisfaction and humanitarian independently predict life satisfaction. So it's not the same thing. Can't be reduced to it No, maybe not yep, So okay, I did. I did find that.

You know, that's the suggestive that this is possible. I mean, it's it's a bit tricky doing this kind of test because a you have to agree that SWB is the appropriate criterion, right, and a lot of people don't, as we were talking about earlier. But be just predicting independent variants in subjective well being, you're going to find more than just as self determination theories three needs. So it becomes a question of trade off between parsimony and completeness.

If you were going to pick go with just three, which would they be or maybe just five? You know you could answer those questions right right now for sure. So just like relatedness is part of it, I don't think that's the umbrella. I guess what I'm trying to say, just I think autonomy doesn't go far enough as it is like autonomy to me, the umbrella of autonomy really

is authenticity, whereas the umbrella of relatedness is love. And under both of those umbrellas we have one facet, which is so I guess that's how I'm conceptualizing it, and it's just is I don't know if I'm making any sense to you how I'm thinking about it, it does make sense to go to sort of the purest, most intense version at the construct. Yeah, I think authenticity has problems. It's not really clear what it means. But some people say the same thing about autonomy can be kind of

hard to define. So yeah, so cool. This has turned out to be a lot of fun for me intellectually. I don't know if we've lost all our listeners at this point. I hope, gosh, we have it. I hope they're enjoying this us trying to kind of make sense of things. But let me move on because I would love to highlight more of your wonderful research and specifically, like, it's funny when I think of you, I don't think like the self determination guy. That's not what I think of.

You have your own unique spin on this, which is self concordance theory, which you develop. So I think we really should dive into self concourse because to me, that is more you like, that's more self to me. Self coord theory is what's more self concordant with Ken Sheldon than self determination theory in general? Am I right? Okay? Yeah, yeah,

I like that that's okay. So, because I studied personal strivings back in graduate school, which is what people write down on a blank sheet of paper that they say

they're striving to do, I'm very interested in goals. And when I first got to Rochester as a post doc, Rich Ryan didn't like goal constructs, not even sure why he brought me there actually, because he saw a goal as an external control that the person has brought in side themselves to beat themselves up with, right, And I saw a goal as a standard that you use to regulate your behavior to try to make positive changes. So I had that perspective on goals as a positive thing.

So when I first got to Rochester and I asked people to rate, why are you pursuing these goals that you just wrote down on this blank sheet of paper. You would think that they would say, oh, you know, they're meaningful, they're interesting, they're enjoyable. But a lot of people were saying, no, I don't enjoy it and re believe in it. I just kind of have to do it. So I had to puzzle over that finding a lot. Because the goals were self determined in a nominal sense.

The person thought them up and wrote them down, but they didn't seem to be self determined from a phenomenological feeling sense, and in order to figure that out, came

up with this idea that's really not that new. But the idea is that we're stuck up here in our conscious worlds in what we would now call system two, trying to think of what to do, and we don't have very concrete direct access to system one, the world of implicit motives and potentials and growth impulses, so we can very easily confuse ourselves consciously into pursuing things that

don't fit us at a deeper level. And so the self concordance idea is an attempt to help people identify which of their goals are really are them, And it turns out that they're the ones that they have a lot of intrinsic motivation for, a lot of identified motivation for I use these self determination measures to get at the self concordance question. You know, it's just trying to find out if the goals reach all the way into

you or not. Do they connect with a core, developing, growing self or are they something that's only gotten partly shoved into you by the environment. Perhaps that you think is what you're doing, but really you need to hopefully get some deeper insight and maybe change what you're doing. I love that. So what are some of these characteristics

of fit? Like if we could think of, like design an artificial intellgo system that had like the optimal fit to a task, we it would include your satisfaction and basic needs, your talents, your capacity, Like what is the total list of things here we're talking about? It could

be a very long list. And then there's more research by twenty fourteen review article called Becoming Oneself The Vital Role of self concordant Goal Pursuit basically said, it's kind of a mystery what's in there that the goals need

to fit with? You know, it could be self actualization needs, you know, could be some other deep needs as it could be just the fact that if you ever somehow found yourself in front of a piano, and maybe you never have before, you would find that you could play by year, and you had all this talent that you

didn't even know about. So it would be potentials and talents and values and interests that resonate deeply with the person, so on as many levels as possible is that the ideal, like, how does your work relate to harmonious for subsessive passion, for instance, the Doloruns work. Is there a good congruence there between how you're thinking about how viron's thinking about

a harmonious passion? Yeah, I think there is. That. It's definitely a positive correlation between self concordant motivation to do X and having harmonious passion to do it, whereas obsessive passion is more about what set you would call it interjection. You know, you're kind of making yourself do it, you're kind of obsessed with it, you're compulsive about it. So they are similar. The difference is that Valorian sees those personality styles to some extent, not really about goals, although

could adapt them to goals. The thing I love about his idea is that it was the first time that anybody ever asked, can intrinsic motivation be maladaptive? Right? And if you look around, it's pretty clear that it can people who are addicted to social media, to violent video gaming, lots of other things. But self termination theory didn't really

have a way to talk about that. It just said intrinsic motivation good, but here's a case where obsessive passion, you really love to do it, but you can't stop doing it. And so the absence of a stop rule is something that STT didn't really address before Bob valorand came along. Cool. Cool. So going back to let's say we found something that is very self concordant and harmonious, so we took both those boxes. What else should we take into consideration, not just the self accordance but also

the content of the goals? Is that right? Is that something else that we should take into account? Yeah? I mean that would go back to the stockbroker versus the philanthropist example. And I'm not meaning to pick on stockbrokers, but it's kind of easy to understand. Yeah, so you'd be best off if you were able to be self concordant as a philanthropist, and maybe not quite as well off according to the data. Again, I'm not making a moral judgment if you felt self concordant in pursuing monetary

or extrinsic type goals. Okay, so let's talk about you know, like, give me that list there again of the goals that you have found, the type of goals, What are the categories conceptually that are most correlated with happiness. Well, this really goes back to Tim Kasser's work. I was there when he was developing this way of thinking about things. He was coming out of the values tradition, Schwartz values,

real Kee, and so forth. And they were the first to ask the question are some values healthier than others? And the first thing they looked at was materialistic values versus others, and they found that people who strongly placed a lot of emphasis on materialism were not as high as well being. And then the category became generalized to include not just money values, but also appearance values, status values, popularity, image.

Those all hang together as a factor, and from the Maslow point of view, they're all kind of based in insecurity, whereas the intrinsic values include connection, intimacy, contribution, service, personal growth, so they're not all social. They also involve getting the most out of yourself. But they all hang on a second factor. So you get a pretty solid two factor structure. When you look at most data that has a bunch of different types of values in it beautiful And you know,

I love that two factor structure. You know it's security and growth or however, you want to label those factors. I love that, and you can tell I'm so appreciative of this conversation. I've been like following you work for so long that this is like I'm like a kid in a candy shop right now. I hope you understand like that I'm able to ask you these questions so well, there's not that many people that I run into who want to ask me these questions, so I appreciate it.

I doubt that. But so, look, how can we link the Schwartz I'm glad that you mentioned the Swartz vial. It's going to be trying to think of how that maps on to You wrote this cool paper on the structure of gold contents across fifteen different cultures. I thought that was a really brilliant paper, Like, how does that structure map on to the Schwartz values? Do they map on nicely? Can you actually tell me which of the Schwartz values would go in one camp or the other?

I guess I'm asking, to be honest, I'm not totally prepared to talk about that. I was a more of a minor author on that paper. Oh, no problem. I mean, one thing about the Schwartz model is it didn't try to cross that line that positive psychology crosses to say which one is quote better versus not so good? Right, And that's what Tim was Casher was willing to try

to do. Yeah, So, I mean Schwartz would just take a matching perspective and he would say, doesn't matter what value is what I think is important, just whether you're kind of moving towards it or expressing it. And Tim would come along and say, well, it matters what the value actually is, not just whether you're successful at enacting it. I'm not sure what Schwartz would say about that now,

And that's what you're saying. I mean, it's funny you say, Tim Casser, but I think that's like that's your argument. You know, that's a self concordance theory sort of argument. And that's so cool. You just got to learn today that you studied with Tim Kaster. I didn't know that. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. I don't want to take any credit for the Oh, of course intrinsic extrinsic

value distinction, because that was him. But of course I was there when he was coming up with it, and we did work even back then, So I feel some ownership of that distinction as well totally. And I think that this self co coord theory, though, does make a stand in a sense. On certain you don't use the word values, but that's what you're taught. I mean, these

things are values. Like if we just concretely here talk about the four major categories in Schwartz's values model, we have self transcendence, self enhancement, conservation, and openness to change. It seems to me like the two out of those four that are most conducive to growth are self transcendence and openness to change. Yes, now, why can't we make that argument and say, look, you know it does matter what the value is, Like I have all this data,

for instance, showing that the dark triad of personality. I'm actually trying to publish this right now. We're sending this out soon in my colleagues. The dark triad, which compsus like psychopathicy, narcissism, and machandelions, that is so strongly associated with self enhancement values and wholly uncorrelated with the growth whole measures like lots of measures of growth even like just to the just you just take the riff personal

growth subscale zero correlation with the dark triad. So maybe a proader question is how much can we garner our values through science. The thing that changed when positive psychology came along was it became more acceptable to talk about the roots of thriving and growth and to start to make value judgments about what people were up to. But what I try to tell people is it's not a

value judgment, it's just what the data saying. So I'm not saying if you're a narcissist or a making a Elianus that you shouldn't do that, but I would say, well, the data shows that that's not going to do so much for you. I am on the same page as you, same page, But I don't understand why we can't look at it from like the same perspective of a doctor. You know, you go to a doctor and you want

to lower heart disease. What the doctor is telling you our recommendations that are based on scientific findings of what behaviors in life. We know that eating lots and lots of pizza is statistically less probable to fix your heart disease than needing celery stuf excelled. You know, I don't know, I'm just making that up, but I'm saying it seems that, you know, if the science shows that's the case, then that's what the doctor says. So why can't we be

doctors too? In the same spirit, you know, why can't we be psychological doctors? Because what psychologist is? Do you know what I'm saying? Though I totally agree with you, but I think you take an additional step when you go beyond each salary to endorse a certain type of value and not a different value. I mean, this stuff gets really politicized. I published one paper where I compared

the values of Republicans and Democrats. And this was a data collected after the two thousand and four election, back when there was this idea that the Republicans were the family values party. And the finding was that Republicans and Democrats consistently differed on two values. The Republicans were lower

in community service values and higher in materialism values. I had a hard time getting that published because it starts, you know, and I was afraid that I was going to end up on Rush Limbaugh, you know, being one of his punching bags or something. So that's that's different from telling people they should eat celery. I do hear you're saying. But I understand that these things do get politicized, so that makes it tricky. I agree, one hundred percent.

But if we remove politics from it, like in the discussion, you know, and we just talk about humanity, like what are the human values? You know, I wonder if we can I wonder if we could rise above politics, like Maso talks all the time about be values versus you know, being values, the values that come along with being itself existence. That's the level which I wish we had these discussions. Yeah, no,

I agree. And the paper I just mentioned this is the only one I've ever published that mentioned politics explicitly. Usually I would stay away from that, but that that election election just irritated me so much I couldn't help myself. Yeah, so we can ask which activities, which goals, which motivations are associated with particular positive outcomes, and just put that

out there and let people make of it what they will. Yeah, or you know, it is because it does get tricky, and I am at the very least, I think it's great to just have open honest dialogue about it, you know, at the very least. And what are the scientific finding show how are certain people choosing to know their lives? Are there certain ways of being that are more conducive to happiness and others? These are important questions for science as well as that people are individuals are interested in

So your work has contributed to that, you know. I'm just going to talk about another interesting paper of yours, which is it's in my top ten favorite papers of yours. I know, I sound like a fangirl right now. Are a fanboy however you want to call whatever you want to call me, But that's maybe not a phrase that's used that often in science. But this paper you wrote where you tested Carl Rogers's notion of the organismic valuing process, Can you talk a little bit about Carl Rogers because

I always loved Carl Rodgers' motion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The idea is that people have an ability to tell what are the most growth relevant choices to make, but often not in touch with that ability, and so one of the things that Rogers would try to do with his clients would be to give them unconditional positive regard and get them into a safe, open state of mind where they could regain contact with this sort of deep implicit knowledge of the organismic valuing process. And it's a very

kind of New Age term difficult thing to prove. And the way we tried to prove that there really is such a thing was just too very simple method of ask people to rate what's important to them, and then ask them to do it again, maybe just a few minutes later, or a couple days later, or a week later. And what you would expect is that the repeated measures of values would get the same results. It would just

be test retest. But what we found was that there was a biased shift towards the more intrinsic growth relevant values over time that if people changed, tended to be towards what Casher calls the intrinsic values. We saw that as at least some kind of evidence for the existence of this valuing process, whether you call it a bias towards growth or you know, an ability to grow. It seems to be a real thing. But let me just

do a quick follow up. It's contingent, it might not be active, and there are circumstances where it can go the other way. So I've studied the effects of law school on law students, and one of our findings is that their values tend to go the other way. They tend to become more extrinsic over time, which is not the usual trajectory, but it reflects the influence of what my collaborator thinks is very toxic educational culture. So it's there, but you might not necessarily figure out how to get

in touch with it. The OVP. I love it, And you're also highlighting the importance of the culture, the society, the environment in bringing out telling us to listen to it or not giving us the kind of autonomy, so to speak, to listen to it. Yes, so I really

like that. Okay, So thanks for explaining that, and I thank you for testing a very old idea that like no one else has seemed to care about in the field, Like I feel like me and you're the only ones that have ever used the word organismic value process in the field of positive psychology, Like how did you become interested in that? Well, you know, I just read old books by Carl Rogers. I actually kind of like him, maybe as much or or even more as Maslow. Yeah,

I mean too like them both. Yeah, I mean we don't need to compare, but they're both awesome. And as you know, one of the problems in positive psychology has been the attempt to distance itself from humanistic psychology, which came before, and I think that that's been to the loss of the field. Positive psychologists not just reinventing all this stuff. What it's trying to do is be more scientific about some of these concepts that I'm in favor of.

But the marketing aspect of positive psychology sometimes is a bit off putting. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more any But you wrote an article in the Journal of Humistic Psychology where you argue that humanistic psychlogy and positive psychology could make a very happy marriage, right yeah. I think that's like a direct code of yours. Yeah, yeah, okay, I agree. So I'm trying to think what's where I shiftween self concording goals and personal projects like Brian Little's work.

Did you interact with Brian Little at all? I really like him a lot, and yeah, you know, I know, and we used to talk quite a bit an email and various things. I haven't seen him in quite a while now, but he'd probably disagree with this. But to me, it doesn't really matter what you call an idiographic goal. So idiographic means the person writes it down on a blank sheet of paper, and that to me was a major advance and personality psychology back in the nineteen eighties.

Instead of giving people a questionnaire and forcing them to respond to what you think is important, let them tell you what they think is important. So there were several goal constructs that came out at about the same time. The person is striving the current concern, the life task,

and the personal project. So to me, it's all kind of it's a little interchangeable whether you call it a striving, a project or a concern, although there are some differences based on the timeframe potentially, Whereas Brian thought of the project as a kind of a more special thing that was related to the context in certain ways, which I won't I never quite got, so I won't try to explain them. But to me, you know, it's it's really you're letting the person tell you what they're trying to do,

and that's the important thing. Okay, how does that relate to you know, the importance of having self consistency versus psychological authenticity, because personal projects is very much in the spirit that we can diverge from our personality. You know that we can like have these free traits, as he calls it. Yeah, yes, So do you see how I'm trying to reconcile that because it's not actually self concordance.

You know, it doesn't happen right self content And this is actually a debate that he and I had quite a bit. He would tell these stories about free traits, that he was able to set a project that went against his traits. Although Brian is he seems to be incredibly extroverted. Maybe he is, I'm not sure. He feels like when he goes and gives a talk or in a group of people that it's very stressful for him,

as if he's really an intense introvert. So he says that he has the projects of being very glib, very out there, but it takes a big physiological toll on him. But yet he is free to diverge from his own traits via his goals. And I agree with that that

we can set goals to become different people. The question is are those goals self concordant enough that you're ultimately going in a direction which is going to be good for you, or are you laboring under some delusion that you should be a certain way that's getting you to act very different from who you know normally would be, and maybe you're just stressing yourself out for no good reason. Yes, this is so great to be able to reconcile this. So you like, I feel like we're on the verge

of actually reconciling this. We want to reconcile this for such a long time. Okay, So in your book you talk about why it's important to modify aspects of your personality that are getting in the way of your higher level goals. Now you do talk about that. So maybe the simple reconciliation here is that we can create personal projects in the service of our growth as a whole person in the sense that they take us they diverge from traits that we don't like about ourselves. Yeah, so

would that a good reconciliation? Yeah, I think so, because a trait, by definition, is sort of a habit or behavioral predisposition, but it doesn't imply goals or values, you know. So a person high in the trade of neuroticism is a great example. Should they be true to their trait and just let themselves worry and stress or should they maybe set goals, try to be more mindful, learn how

to relax, learn how not to overreact to things. So, yeah, I think setting goals to change traits that are getting in your way is a great thing to do. The hard thing to know is I mean, in the case of neuroticism, Yeah, it's probably not too much value in that, although even there there's theories. The hard thing to do is to know whether that's really the right thing for you versus right now, you've just been led to a false conclusion and maybe the only way to do it

is to try it and find out right. Maybe that's the point is just too you should also be flexible in knowing when to change goals, So wouldn't that be it. That's something else that you'd argue in your book, right, Like, it's not just important to set the goals or to have the content the goals, but also to know when to fold them. Yeah, And I don't study that so much.

That's for Carson Roche and Mike Schier have studied that, And I think it's a really important question knowing when to fold it, because how to tell the difference between copping out versus legitimately changing your focus. Like if you give up too soon, you say, Okay, I'm giving up on this. You know it's not working, it's not for me.

The really hard thing to know is whether you are making an adaptive change that makes sense versus you should keep going even though it may not feel very great at the moment, but instead you're going to let yourself off the hook. It's really hard to tell that difference. I think, Yeah, that's one of these things. We don't really have a good measuring instrument to precisely let someone know whether it's one or the other. Yeah, but you know, I would just go back to listen to your organismic

valuing process. That would probably be my What I'd say is, you know, to constantly be listening to it, like, don't get out of touch with it. Yeah. I think that can be easier said than done. Yeah, yeah, I mean we need a good point. It can be helpful to have techniques, you know, the mindfullest meditation, I think is a great one to learn to recognize these little impulses or reactions on the fringes of consciousness, as William James would say, and let them in to your conscious awareness

and try to figure out what they're telling you. Going with your gut is something you can make a conscious effort to try to do. But again, you know what if you think your gut is telling you that you have to do something that's going to hurt people or might be immral, but I mean, it's just really hard to really know. I think I mean is that the whole process or the point of becoming fully human is being open to all your experience and trusting the satiality

of your experience. Like to me, that just seems like that's just part of personality integration. Is being able to trust yourself at such a deep level that you can feel when you're making doing something bad for yourself, you really trust it that you're making the poor decision. We have an article under review almost Impressed. I hope that

uses that idea. Instead of having people list goals first and then rate how self concordant they are, now we're having them rate the potential self concordance of a bunch of candidate goals and then picking a subset of that list of candidates, and that the finding is that people are more likely to pick healthy intrinsic goals if they got the chance to rate the self concordance of those goals beforehand. So I'll say that a different way. You're looking at a list of goals, What should I do?

You don't know? How do you tell? You're saying, listen to your OVP, your valuing process. I would say, yeah, that sounds good, but how can you get it to give you a readout that you can hear well. One way to do it is to think in advance about how enjoyable it's going to be, how much you're going to believe in doing that goal, how much pressure or

guilt you're going to feel in pursuing that goal. Just having the chance to think about your potential motivation we've discovered as an experimental manipulation versus not getting that chance, it leads people to pick or intrinsic well being promoting goals. I'm not sure if that's clear, but yeah it is. I love it. Could you send me that paper when it's yeah, that sounds I love that. Maybe I can include one of those activities in my book as an

activity for the reader. I really like that. There's something similar to it in Sonya's book, The How of Happiness. She calls it assessing the fit of an activity with personality, with your personality. So you might take a look at that as well. Absolutely, I will. I guess I'm just wondering when we talk about the content of the goals are important. It's not a simple distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. There are some forms of extrinsic motivation that

are growth oriented. Isn't that correct? That like kind of a major point of the relative autonomy sectrum. Yes, but I would mend it this way. The relative autonomy spectrum has to do with the why of behavior, no matter what it is, Whereas I think you're talking more about the what the content of the values. So you may not agree with this distinction, but it's an important one in SDT. So the why has to do with why

are you doing it? And the finding is that whatever you're doing, you know, you're brushing your teeth, you're going to the gym, you're writing a paper, you can be that behavior can be located somewhere on a continuum between. At one extreme, I love it, it's fascinating. I wouldn't choose to be doing anything else. To the other extreme, I have to I don't want to be doing it, but I'm forced to do it. But between those two extremes there's gradations, So the continuum is about those gradations.

And in the middle, pretty close to the dividing point between autonomous and control is self esteem motivation, which we talked about earlier. Doing it because I want to feel good about myself. That's it's kind of like, you know, I need to feel good about myself. You know, I'm into my my ego. But that one just barely falls

on the autonomous side. So it's actually not a bad form of motivation, despite what Jenny Crocker would say, or it's not as bad, but it's not as not as healthy as as the ones closer to the autonomous extremes. They tell me, like the best and the best is the word is of motivation and stt would say, that's the growth motivation, and I know that's what you're concerned with, and you think, maybe it doesn't capture that, and maybe

it doesn't. But when it was proposed back in the seventies, it was a radical idea that a creature would do something just because there one and two and was interested. I'd like to do it. I didn't fit with reinforcement theory. It didn't fit the drive theory, and really that is how the theory thinks about it. Follow your intrinsic motivation, that's your growth and pulse telling you what to do. No, I want to be very clear, I owe huge debt

to self defamation. They're not debt, but you know, a huge what everyone I'm trying to say, I really appreciate and respect how foundational it is I want to do. Want to make that clear. So I'll leave you today with one last question. The good life well being or well doing well doing? To be sure, absolutely, I mean the goal is not to be happy, but it's really awesome that if we try to be the best, most open, inclusive, creative person we can be, we get happiness as a

side effect. But as soon as we make that the goal itself, it undermines itself. That seems to be the finding. I love it. Hey, thanks so much for tagging with me today and for the great work you've done for the field. Thank you. It's really been fun conversation. I hope we haven't boggled everybody too much with all these nerdage distinctions. For those who've made it to the end of this episode. Please let me know, drop me a line or write in the comments and let us know

what you thought of the episode. So thanks again, Thank you Scott. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Also, please add a

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