Chapter 11 Self-Actualization and Self-Determination Flashcards
Humanistic psychology
- Everyone has the potential for growth and development. -No one- no one- is inherently bad or unworthy.
- Help people realize this about themselves, so they’ll have the chance to grow.
- People are inherently good
- Pursue goals that self-concordant
- Free will?
Phenomenological
*An emphasis on the importance of one’s own personal experiences.
Actualization
- Carl Rogers: Everyone tends toward a state of actualization, a tendency to develop capabilities in ways to maintain or enhance organism
- Potential for positive, healthy growth expresses itself in everyone if there are no strong opposing influences
- Reflected physically
- Part of human nature
Self-actualization
- Promotes congruence, wholeness or integration within the person
- maintenance or enhancement of the self
- Enriches your life experiences and enhances creativity
- Minimizes disorganization or incongruence
Organismic valuing process
- the organism automatically evaluates its experiences to tell whether they are enhancing actualization
- If they aren’t, the organismic valuing process creates a nagging sense that something isn’t right.
Fully functioning person
- someone who is self-actualizing
- Open to experiencing their feelings and not threatened by them, no matter what the feelings are
- Trust their feelings
- Open to experiencing the world
- Immerse themselves in it
- Result: lives filled with meaning, challenge, and excitement but also a willingness to risk pain
- Isn’t particular kind of person, but a way of functioning that can be adopted by anyone who chooses to live that way
Positive regard
*People need to have the acceptance, love, friendship, and the affection of others- particularly, others who matter to them (significant others)
Unconditional positive regard
*affection given without special conditions- with “no strings attached”
Conditional positive regard
- affection is given only if certain conditions are satisfied, vary from case to case
- I will only be loved by others, be accepted by others if I am…
Conditions of worth
- conditions under which people are judged worthy of positive regard
- Get positive regard from other people
- Applied to us by people around us causes us to start applying the conditions to ourselves
Conditional self-regard
- give ourselves affection and acceptance only when we satisfy those conditions
- Makes you behave so as to fit the conditions of worth you’re applying to yourself
- Interferes with self actualization. Can have both internal and external sources.
- Hyper-focus on how other people think of you, judge you
- Trying to live up for conditions -> Keep you achieving from self-actualization
Precondition for acceptance
- defines a condition of worth
- Either by others or by one self
Contingent self-worth
*conditional self regard; people who use their performance in some area of life as a condition for self-acceptance
*The pursuit of self esteem as a costly endeavor, especially when contingencies are external instead of internal
-Jennifer Crocker: people place such conditions of worth on themselves
-Come in many forms
=Academic performance
=Appearance
-Contingencies can be motivating
-Failure can result in loss of motivation
-Stressful and disrupts relationships
=Causes people to be more upset by negative interpersonal feedback
=Make people more likely to become victims of relationship violence
=Keep people focused on a particular condition of worth, rather than having grow freely
Self Determination Theory
- Ed Deci and Richard Ryan
- Having a life of growth, integrity, and well-being means satisfying three needs
- For autonomy (self-determination), competence, and relatedness
- Self-determined: done either because they have intrinsic interest or are of value to you; stay interested longer
- Controlled: done to gain payment or to satisfy some pressure; lose interest
Rewards as having both controlling and informational features
*Controlling: your actions are not autonomous
*Informational: informing you about yourself
-If a reward tells you that you’re competent -> increases motivation
=Possible to promote a sense of self-determination under right conditions
-If the reward implies a condition of worth/it implies that you’re acting just for the reward -> controlling will stand out -> motivation fall off
Introjected regulation
*When a person treats a behavior as a “should” or an “ought”- when the person does it to avoid guilt or gain self-approval; internally controlled
-Controlled- control is exerted from inside
=Ex: Do well in class so won’t feel guilty for wasting parent’s money
-Fits with Roger’s belief that the desire for positive regard can disrupt self-actualization.
Identified regulation
*The person has come to hold the behavior as personally meaningful and valuable
-Self-determined
-By identified and integrated (autonomous) values
-Having a sense of autonomy -> foster further autonomy
=Felt more competent, acted toward others in ways that supported the others’ autonomy
Need for Relatedness
*Deci and Ryan: people have an intrinsic need for relatedness
-Autonomy: having a sense of free self-determination
-True relatedness doesn’t conflict with autonomy
-Autonomy and relatedness were complementary: each related independently to well-being
-Behaving autonomously was tied to more relatedness- having open and positive communication with significant others.
=the use of relationship-maintaining coping strategies and positive responses in discussing relationships
-When relationship partners are supportive of autonomy, the relationship is experiences as being better and richer.
Self-Concordance
*pursue goals that are consistent with your core values
-Care more about such goals
-Benefit more from attaining them
-Create a longer-term spiral of benefit
=Try harder -> more satisfying experiences -> attain better well-being
=Promotes greater motivation for the next self-concordant goal and the cycle continues
Free Will
- Humanistic psychologists: people have freedom to decide for themselves how to act and what to become
- Roger’s view: people are free to choose whether to act in self-actualizing ways or to accept conditions of worth
- Deci and Ryan’s view: people exert their will when they act in self-determination
- Whether people have free will, but certainly seem to think they do
- Wagner (2002): free will is an illusion
Reactance
- when you expect to have a particular freedom and you see it as being threatened
- Regain or reassert it
- Leads to reassertion of freedom
Self Theorist about Self
- Rogers (self theorist): stressed the importance of the self
- As the person grows, the self becomes more elaborate and complex
- It never reaches an end state but continues to evolve.
- Subjective awareness of being
- Used it interchangeably with self-concept
Self-Concept`
*Set of qualities a person views as being part of himself or herself (much like ego identity)
Ideal Self
*image of the kind of person you want to be
Actual Self
*what you think you’re really like
Self-Actualization & Self
*Self-actualizing: promote congruence- “fitting together”
-Actual and ideal selves- one kind of congruence
=As self-actualization occurs -> closer fit between actual and ideal -> become more like the self you want to be
-Actual self and experience -> second kind of congruence
=Self-actualization should tend to promote a closer congruence here, as well
Self-Verification
- once people have a picture of what they’re like, they want to have that self-concept confirmed by other people’s reactions to them.
- Self-vertification tendency influences the kind of information they focus on
People with negative self-view
*Built-in conflict between self-verification and self-protection
-Self-verification: trying not to have incongruity between self and experience
-Self-protection: trying not to be aware of incongruity between one’s desired self and actual self
-Attempts to diminish these two incongruities can pull a person in opposite directions
-Self-protection and self-enhancement tendencies seem to influence where you look (and where you don’t look) when you consider the relationship between your actual and desired selves.
-Swann: both of these forces operate in everyone
=Which force dominates at a given moment depends on your options
=Most people would prefer to learn about something they view as desirable- fits with self-protection tendency
=People also tend to seek unfavorable information
Incongruence
- disorganization, a fraying of the unitary sense of self
- Don’t always know it consciously, but organismic valuing process senses it
- Rogers: either perceiving a gap between real and ideal or experiencing something that doesn’t fit your self-image- leads to anxiety
- Between actual and ideal selves -> underestimate how much their significant others care for them -> react poorly to their partners , feel pessimistic about the relationship and may act in ways that aren’t genuine -> relationship is less likely to flourish
- Rogers: people defend themselves against even the perception of incongruence, to avoid the anxiety it creates.
Defenses against perceptions of incongruity form two categories:
*Distortion of experience
-Rationalization: creating a plausible but untrue explanation for why something is the way it is
-Seeing an event as being different from how it really is
*Preventing threatening experiences from reaching awareness
-Denial: refusing to admit to yourself that a situation exists or an experience took place
*You can also prevent an experience from reaching awareness indirectly by not letting yourself be in a situation in which the experience would be possible- prevent its access to consciousness
*Defenses act to maintain and enhance the congruity or integrity of the self.
Protect and enhance self-esteem
Two conditions are required for someone to become concerned about maintaining or enhancing self-esteem.
- An event must be attributable to the person
- Events that’s outside your control is not relevant to you
- The event must be good or bad, thereby having a potential connotation for the person’s self-esteem.
- Not relevant- when it’s bad
- Relevant- when it’s good
Self-handicapping
- acting to create the very conditions that tend to produce a failure
- Failing to attain a goal threatens self-esteem
- Your can’t really fail, though, if success is prevented by circumstances beyond your control.
- No one could do well in those conditions, so it wasn’t really a failure.
- People self-handcap more when they expect bad outcomes.
- Prevents awareness of failuring
- Unaware that you’re using it
- Cope poorly with stress
- If people think you’re self-handcapping, they react negatively to you.
- Self-handcapping helps create the very failure it was intended to protect against.
Stereotype threat
*Claude Steele
*Some groups are stereotyped in ways that lead to expectations of poor performance of some sort
-Members of these groups can be threatened by being viewed through the stereotype, rather than as individuals.
-The sense of being prejudged occupies the person’s mind and promotes negative thinking.
-The person begins to disidentify with the domain in which the threat is occurring- to stop caring about it.
=Protects self-esteem by denying that the experience is relevant to the self.
=Failure doesn’t matter if the test isn’t important.
Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Motives
*Human needs = forming a hierarchy,
*Needs vary in their immediacy and power
*Physiological needs: base of the pyramid, primitiva, basic, and demanding, fundamental, necessary for survival
*Safety and physical security needs: necessary for survival but less demanding, less basic because they require satisfaction less frequently
*Love and belongingness: companionship, affection, acceptance from others (need for positive regard), satisfied through interaction with other people.
*Esteem needs: needs bearing on evaluation and self-evaluation, need for a sense of mastery and power and a sense of appreciation from others
Acceptance may not be evaulated but appreciation is.
*Self-actualization: tendency to become whatever you’re capable of becoming, to extend yourself to the limits of your capacities
*Low-level needs are more primitive and more demanding than needs higher on the hierarchy
*The power of the motive force weakens as you move up the pyramid
*As you move up, the needs are also more distinctly human and less animalistic
*We have needs that make us different from other creatures- less powerful when they’re unsatisfied than the needs we share with other creatures
*If a need begins to develop at a lower level while you’re trying to satisfy a higher, the lower-level need can cause you to be pulled away from the higher-level one.
*How people move up through this of needs
-Freeing of your mind from the demands of low-level needs that lets you be attuned to the very quiet voice of self-actualization
Deficiency-based motives
- motives low on the pyramid
- Arise from deprivation
- Escaping unpleasant condition
Growth-based motives
- high on the pyramid
- Avoiding an unpleasant state
- Seeking of growth
Maslow v.s. Rogers
- Rogers emphasized two motives: self-actualizing tendency and the need for positive regard (affection and acceptance)
- Focus on social needs which for Maslow begin at the third level (Love/Belonging)
- Bottom two levels of Maslow’s pyramid (Physiological and Safety) refers to needs that Roger ignored.
- Maslow believed, as Rogers, that the need for accpetance could be more demanding than the need for self-actualization.
- The structure of the pyramid clearly implied that people can be distracted form self-actualization by the need of positive regard.
- Maslow’s pramid- esteem needs - can be viewed as an elaboration on the need for positive regard
- Seem similar, in many ways, to Roger’s conditions of worth.
- To Rogers, bowing to conditions of worth is bad.
- To Maslow, esteem needs are part of human, although less important than the need for self-actualization
- The two agreed, that esteem needs can get in the way of self-actualization.
Maslow’s Self-Actualization
- Everyone has the potential to self-actualize, and everyone has an intrinsic desire to become more and more the person he or she is capable of being.
- Self-actualization is so diffuse a quality, it can appear in virtually any kind of behavior.
- It’s any person who’s in the process of becoming more congruent, more integrated, more complete as a person.
- Some people self-actualize more than others
Frequent Self-Actualizers
- Self-actualizers are efficient in thier perception of reality
- Their experience is an extra-sharp focus
- Self-actualizers can spot the confused perceptions of others and cut through the tangles.
- More accepting
- Accept both themselves and others
- Realize they’re not perfect
- Accept the frailties of the people around them as a part of who those people are
- Mental spontaneity
- Creativity without artificiality
- Having a fresh appreiation of life, an excitement in the process of living
- Problem centered
- Problem: enduring questions of philosophy or ethics
- Take a wide view, consider universal issues
- Independent from their culture and immediate environment
- Know relationships require effort- they have deep ties because relationships matter to them, but the ites are often limited to a very few others
Transcendent self-actualizers
- so invested in self-actualization that it becomes the most precious aspect of their lives
- More consciously motivated by universal values or goals outside themselves
- More holistic about the world, seeing the integration of all its elements
- Self-actualization almost becomes “universe=actualization”
- See themselves as the tools by which capabilities are expressed, rather than as the owners of the capabilities.
Peak experience
- a moment of intense self-actualization
- Has a sense of being connected with the elements of his or her surroundings- perceptions
- There’s also a loss of the sense of time as the experience flows by
- Include awe, wonder, and even ecstasy
- Tends to take you outside yourself
- You aren’t thinking about yourself but rather are experiencing whatever you’re experiencing as fully as possible
- Can occur in a passive way- usually occur when people are acting
- What’s important isn’t what is being done but rather how it’s taking place.
- If you’re completely immersed in it and it’s stretching you as a human being, it can be a peak experience
- Happen more during work than during leisure
- Similar to flow
Flow
- so immersed in an activity that it seems to “become” him or her.
Existential psychology
- Existence is all anyone has
- Each person is alone in an unfathomable universe
- Stresses that each person must take responsibility of his or her choices.
- Fits the phenomenological orientation in emphasizing the importance of the individual’s unique experience of reality.
Dasein
- a concept that’s central to the existentialist view
- A German word= “being-in-the-world”
- The totality of a person’s experience of the self as an autonomous, separate, and evolving entity
- Emphasizes that people have no existence apart from the world and that the world has no meaning apart from the people in it
Existentialists on existential dilemna
*life inevitably ends in death, which can come at any time.
*Death is the event no one escapes, no matter how self-actualizing his or her experiences are.
*Awareness of the inevitability of death provokes angst- dread, anguish far deeper than anxiety over incongruity.
*Being and not being- polarity between them
*How should you resond to this realization?
-Retreating into nothingness or having the courage to be
-Whether or not to commit suicide (choose nothingness), thus avoiding the absurdity of a life that will end in death anyway
=Less extreme ways of choosing nothingness: choose not to actu authentically, not to commit themselves to the goals and responsibilities that are part of who they are; drift or go along with some crowd
=When people fail to take responsibility for their live -> Choosing nothingness
-Choose to be
=Assign meaning to his or her existence
=By acting authentically, by being who you are
-Often easiet to let other people decide what’s right and just go along
-Existential psychologists believe that we are all responsible for making the most of every moment of our existence and fulfilling that existence to the best of our ability- inescapable responsibility
Existential guilt
- over failing to fulfill your possibilities
- Strongest when a person who’s free to choose fails to do so
- But people who are aware are never completely free of existential guilt, because it’s impossible to fulfill every possibility
- Inescapable- part of the cost of being
Emptiness
- People have lost faith in values
- Many people no longer have a sense of worth and dignity, partly because they have found themselves powerless to influence forces such as government and big business.
- When people lose their commitment to a set of values, they experience a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness -> turn to others for answers -> answers aren’t there because the problem is really within the person
- You must be responsible for your own actions and that truth can come only from within and from your actions.
Terror Management Theory (TMT)
*Begins with the idea that an awareness of one’s eventual death creates existential angst, or terror.
*People respond to the terror by trying to live lives of meaning and value
*People often don’t define the meaning of life on their own
They use a process of social and cultural consensus
-Group identity- how people affirm the value of their lives
-Mortality -> more protective of their own cultural values
-By weaving themselves into a meaningful cultural fabric- a fabric that will last long after they’re gone- they affirm their own value as human beings
-Making people aware of their mortality -> more favorale toward those who uphold their worldview and more negative toward those who don’t.
-Mortality salience -> makes people adhere more to cultural norms themselves; make people act more altruistically
-Threats to your worldview -> thoughts about death
-Remind of mortality -> higher identity seeking; intending to work at projects that were more self-consistent
*Terror management is the reason people view themselves as separate from other animals.
-Think of yourself as animal= reminded of your death because all animals die
*Sex= reminder of your animal nature
-Reminds them of their mortality
-Ascribe aestheic vale to the sex act- romance, cultural standards of beauty
-Animal is transformed to the spiritual
*Propping up self-esteem can establish a sense of one’s value and stave off existential angst
*Confronting mortality motivates people to form close relationships
*The push toward affiliation may be even more important than the affirmation of cultural values
Interviews In Assessment
*Self theorist such as Rogers: assessment is a process of finding out what the person is like.
*Offers maximum flexibility
*Lets the person being assessed say whatever comes up
*Lets the interviewer follow stray thoughts and ask questions that might not otherwise occur
Lets the interviewer get a subjective sense of what that person is like from interacting with him or her.
*Requires empathy
-Enter the other person’s private world
-Requires sensitivity to small changes
-Interviewer must repeatedly check the accuracy of your sensing to be sure you haven’t taken a wrong turn
-Important to doing therapy and to being a fully functioning person
*An extensive interview produces a lot of information.
*Problems: hard to compare one with another
Content analysis
*grouping the person’s statements in some way and seeing how many statements fall into each group.
Measuring The Self-Concept By Q-Sort
*Rogerts for assessing self-concept
-Many variations but the same basic process
-Always involves giving the person a large set of items printed on cards
-The items often are self-evaluative statements, can be phrases, words, or other things
-Asked to sort the cards into piles (one end are most like you and the other end are least like you)
-The piles between two extremes represent graduations and thus contain more cards
-Rules about how many cards can go in a given pile
=People start by sorting very generally
=Look hard at the statements and decide which one or two are most and least descriptive- is forced into self-evaluation by comparing qualities
The Personal Orientation Inventory (POI)
*Measure the degree to which people have characteristics of frequent self-actualization
*Consists of paired statements
*People choose the one from each pair that they agree with more.
*Has two scales
-Time Competence: the degree to which the person lives in the present, as opposed to being distracted by the past and future.
=Time-competent people: effectively link the past and future with the present; sense continuity
-Inner directed in the search fo values and meaning
=Self-actualizers: have a stronger tendency toward inner direction in determining their values than people who are less self-actualizing
Problems in Behavior, and Behavior Change
- Rogers: lack of congruity within the self creates psychological problems
- Incongruity between experience and self-concept or within the self-concept -> anxiety
- Anxiety= signal of disorganization from the organismic valuing process; especially likely to arise if the person focuses too much on condition of worth and acts in ways that interfere with self-actualization
- When the holistic self is threatened by uncertainty, the person becomes not only more distressed but also more rigid -> hold onto the self that existed before
- Incongruity in one aspect -> stress certainty about other things -> compensate for what’s been threatened
- More zealous or extreme in their beliefs and personal values
Therapy
- Rogers: therapy is essentially one of reintegrating a partially disorganized self.
- Reversing the processes of defense to confront the discrepancies between the elements of the person’s experience
- The conditions of worth that distorted the person’s behavior in the past must be lifted.
- The person still needs positive regard, but it must be unconditional -> feel able to confront the discrepancies
- Removing the conditions of worth -> allow the person to focus more fully on the organismic valuing process, the inner voice that knows what’s good and bad for you -> allows reintegration of the self
- People are less defensive when they’re accepted for who they are than when they’re accepted in an evaluative, conditional way.
- Unconditional positive regard= key to therapy
- Must be given from the person’s own frame of reference- acceptance for who you think you are
- Empathy is necessary to get an adequate sense of what the client is like- provide meaningful acceptance -> show unconditional positive regard -> facilitate reintegration of his or her personality
- Sometimes, people undertake therapy to satisfy a condition of worth.
- People who are trying to change for self-determined reasons will do better than people who are trying to make similar changes to satisfy conditions of worth.
Client-centered therapy/person-centered therapy (Rogers)
- the client takes responsibility for his or her own improvement
- If people with problems can be put in a situation in which conditions of worth are removed, they should naturally reintegrate themselves.
- Therapist displays empathy and unconditional positive regard -> lets the clinet escape temporarily from conditions of worth and begin exploring aspects of experience that are incongruent with the self.
- Therapist remains nondirective and nonevaluative, showing no emotion and giving no advice
- Therapist: remove the pressure of conditions of worth
- By avoiding evaluative comments -> avoids imposing additional conditions of worth
- Tries to help clients gain clear perspective one thier own feelings and experiences
- Reflecting back to the client, in slightly different ways, things the client is saying, so the client can re-examine them from a different angle.
Two variations on the reflection procedure in Client-centered therapy/person-centered therapy
- Clarification of feelings
* Restatement of content
Clarification of feelings
- express feelings about things, either directly in words or indirectly in other ways
- Therapist repeats the expressions in different words -> make the client more aware of what his or her true feelings are, simply being reminded of the feelings can help this to happen -> allows the nature and the intensity of the feelings to become more obvious to the client -> puts the client into closer touch with the experience
Restatement of content
- more intellectual and less emotional
* Ideas in the client’s statements- the cognitive content of what he or she says
Beyond Therapy to Personal Growth
- Humanistic psychologists: therapy isn’t a special process of fixing something that’s wrong and then forgetting about it
- It’s on a continuum with other life experiences
- A person who’s living life to the fullest should always engage in more or less the same processes as occur in therapy
- Provide a way for people who have average lives- or even very good lives- to further enrich their experiences and to self-actualize even more completely
- Rogers- fully funtioning person: ideal way of life
- Personal growth throughout life should be a goal for every requires that the people with whom you interact be genuine and open, with no holding back and no putting up false fronts.
- Requires empathic understanding together with unconditional positive regard
- Similar to Maslow’s view on self-actualization: growht isn’t a goal that’s reached once and then cast aside. It’s a way of living to be pursued throughout your lifetime.
Self-Actualization and Self-Determination: Virtues
- Represents an optimistic and positive view of human nature
- People are intrinsically good-naturally motivated to be the best they can be
- That motive will be expressed in everyone, as long as other circumstances don’t interfere too much
- Practical virtue of the humanistic view
- Emphasizes the importance of fully appreciating your own life and maintaining close contact with your own feelings
- Provides a strategy for living that many people have used to enrich their lives
Problems
*Lack of precision
-Hard to generate research from the theories
-It might be necessary to study as many types of behavior as there are people being studied
*Quality that was just described as a virtue: its optimistic, positive view of human nature
-Arbitrary, naive, sentimental, and romantic
-Has no basis other than the theorists’ belief that people are inherently good
*Idea that everyone’s self-actualization should be encouraged
-If this principle were carried to its extreme, it would require that everyone live life to the fullest, regardless of the consequences for anyone else.
-Result of such unrestrained self-expression would be chaos.
=Create serious conflict whenever one person’s self-actualization interfered with someone else’s self-actualization
*The optimistic overtones that permeate so much of humanistic psychology are largely missing from the writings of the existentialists
-Humanists such as Rogers and Maslow: fulfilling quality that can come from making your own way in the world
-Existentialists: doing this is hard and can be painful
=Living honestly- confronting harsh realities and absurdities and rising above them
=Can be difficult to reconcile the warm, glowing optimism of the one view with the darkness and angst of the other
*Concept of free will
-Theorists who emphasize self-actualization and self-determination- assume that people can decide for themselves what to do at any point in their lives
-Others regard this conception of free will as a convenient fiction, an illusion that is misleading at best
