NOTE-439: The "What" and "Why" of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior

Contribution

The theoretical keystone of SDT. It argues that the concept of need, dropped by cognitive motivation theory in favour of goals, is required, and gives SDT’s version: few, innate, psychological, universal, and defined by what they do for well-being. It then shows how two separate lines of evidence, on regulatory process and on goal content, are unified by need satisfaction, and extends the account to need thwarting, the self, evolution and culture.

Key insight

Goals are not interchangeable once valued equally and expected equally. “Without the concept of innate needs, all desires are equal in functional importance if they are equal in strength” (p. 231). With it, some desires are “linked to or catalyzed by our psychological design” and others are “derivative or compensatory”, the by-products of past thwarting, which may in turn cause further thwarting (p. 231). The same move explains why an unusually strong wish to control a situation is read not as a strong need for autonomy but as a sign that the need was thwarted (p. 231).

Assumptions

• Organismic-dialectical metatheory (pp. 228–229). Humans are “active, growth-oriented organisms … naturally inclined toward integration of their psychic elements into a unified sense of self and integration of themselves into larger social structures”. This is a postulate.
• The set point is activity, not quiescence (p. 229). Unlike drives, needs do not have to be the aim of behaviour: “children … do not play to feel competent” (p. 229).
• Functional identification of needs (p. 228). A need is shown by positive consequences of its satisfaction and negative consequences of its thwarting. This makes “need” and “well-being” partly interdefined.
• Individual differences are in orientations, not need strength (pp. 230–231). Causality orientations and regulatory styles are outcomes of the history of need support (p. 231).

Key results

The article is a review and argument; results are cited.

• Needs against Hull and Murray (pp. 227–231). Hull’s needs are innate and physiological; Murray’s psychological and acquired. SDT’s are innate and psychological. Murray’s abasement, acquisitiveness and dominance “are certainly not needs” in SDT’s sense (p. 227). Psychological needs differ from physiological ones: thwarted, they readily produce “defenses and need substitutes” rather than intensified pursuit (p. 230).
• Autonomy defined (p. 230). “Autonomy refers to volition—the organismic desire to self-organize experience and behavior and to have activity be concordant with one’s integrated sense of self.” It is “often incorrectly equated with the ideas of internal locus of control, independence, or individualism”.
• Intrinsic motivation (pp. 232–234). Two strands of definition (no separable consequences; based in needs) can come apart: “behaviors that are directed at satisfaction of these needs are not necessarily intrinsically motivated” (p. 232). “Perceived competence is necessary for any type of motivation, perceived autonomy is required for the motivation to be intrinsic” (p. 234). The 1999 meta-analysis (LIT-557) is said to have “repudiated” Eisenberger and Cameron’s (1996), “whose methods and conclusions turned out to be fatally flawed” (p. 233).
• Internalization (pp. 234–238). External regulation, introjection (“swallowing regulations whole without digesting them”, Perls, p. 235), identification, integration. Introjection “involves internal prods and pressures and is characterized by inner conflict between the demand of the introject and the person’s lack of desire to carry it out” (p. 236). Integrated extrinsic motivation “does not typically become intrinsic”; it remains instrumental (p. 236). In Deci et al. (1994), with two or three facilitating factors the internalization looked integrated (behaviour correlated positively with valuing, enjoyment and freedom); with zero or one it looked introjected (negative correlations) (pp. 237–238).
• The “why” of goals (pp. 238–242). Studies across school, religion, health care, politics and the environment link autonomous regulation to persistence, performance and health. Causality orientations: autonomy orientation goes with self-actualization and with congruence among traits, attitudes and behaviour (Koestner et al. 1992); control orientation with public self-consciousness; impersonal orientation with depression (p. 241).
• The “what” of goals (pp. 243–246). Intrinsic versus extrinsic aspirations, as in LIT-559. Carver and Baird (1998): autonomous reasons for pursuing wealth help, but the relative importance of wealth still predicts lower self-actualization with reasons controlled (pp. 244–245).
• Culture (pp. 245–247). Iyengar and Lepper’s (1999) Asian-American children are read as showing that “the means through which autonomy is expressed can differ across cultures” (p. 246). Genital mutilation and the rule that boys should not cry are offered as values that “can at best become introjected or compartmentalized” (p. 246).
• The self (pp. 247–248). The self “begins with intrinsic activity and the organismic integration process”. “The inherent tendency for activity, the integrative process, and the fundamental needs are all aspects of one’s nascent self.” Introjected regulation is “motivated by processes internal to the person but relatively external to the self”. Higgins’s “ought self” is an introject (p. 247).
• Need thwarting (pp. 247–251). Three accommodations: need substitutes (extrinsic aspirations; T. Kasser et al. 1995: cold, controlling mothering predicted teenagers’ materialism, even from observer ratings at age 4); non-optimal regulatory styles; and “rigid behavior patterns”, which “have the maladaptive features of tending to keep people from dealing with their inner experiences and of tending to persist into new situations in which they are not needed” (p. 250). Anorexia is the worked example (Bruch; Strauss & Ryan 1987). “The etiology of various forms of psychopathology resides primarily in developmental deprivations concerning basic psychological needs” (p. 247).
• Evolution (pp. 251–255). The needs are broad, cross-domain design features, against Buss’s and Tooby and Cosmides’s modularity. Autonomy is “an extension of [the] deeply evolved tendency” to integrated functioning in living things (p. 252), and “the means by which humans can avoid having their behavior easily entrained down maladaptive, even disastrous, paths” (p. 253; Olds’s self-stimulating rats). Needs, not emotions, are proposed as the higher-order regulators, “because emotions themselves must be self-regulated for effective functioning” (p. 254).
• Other theories (pp. 255–261). Self-efficacy theory “does not distinguish between autonomous and controlled behaviors”, so it treats “pawns to reward contingencies” as agentic (p. 256); Bandura’s definition of autonomy as “entirely independent” agency is rejected (p. 256). Approach–avoidance cannot replace autonomy–control: reward seeking is approach yet controlled, and quitting smoking on a physician’s advice can be autonomous avoidance (pp. 257–258). Attachment security varies within a person across partners as a function of need support (La Guardia et al. 2000, p. 261).

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	There are exactly three basic psychological needs, innate and universal	moderate as an organizing hypothesis; the list is avowedly inductive and open	pp. 228–231
C2	Needs are identified by the consequences of satisfying or thwarting them, not by individual differences in strength	definitional	p. 228
C3	Autonomous regulation of goals predicts better performance and well-being than controlled regulation	moderate (largely correlational, many domains)	pp. 238–242
C4	Extrinsic aspirations predict lower well-being, beyond the reasons for pursuing them	moderate (one direct test, Carver & Baird)	pp. 244–245
C5	Integration, as opposed to introjection, requires autonomy support	moderate (Deci et al. 1994 plus field correlations)	pp. 237–238
C6	Thwarted needs produce substitutes, controlled styles and rigid patterns, which perpetuate thwarting	weak–moderate (correlational developmental studies, clinical accounts)	pp. 247–251
C7	Some cultural values cannot be integrated, only introjected	asserted, with examples	p. 246
C8	Autonomy is an evolved, domain-general self-organizing tendency	speculative (argument, no evidence specific to it)	pp. 252–253
C9	Needs, not emotions, are the higher-order regulators of behaviour	asserted	p. 254

Concepts

• need: “innate psychological nutriments that are essential for ongoing psychological growth, integrity, and well-being” (p. 228).
• autonomy: volition; “the organismic desire to self-organize experience and behavior and to have activity be concordant with one’s integrated sense of self” (p. 230).
• homonomy: integration of the individual into a larger social whole, paired with autonomy as the two natural tendencies (pp. 252, 262).
• causality orientations: autonomy, control and impersonal orientations, general individual differences in how behaviour is regulated (p. 240).
• need substitute / compensatory motive: a motive that gives “collateral satisfaction” without satisfying the thwarted need (p. 248).
• intrinsic / extrinsic aspirations: life goals more (growth, relationships, community) or less (wealth, fame, image) directly tied to need satisfaction (p. 243).
• self: in SDT, the integrated set of processes that begins with intrinsic activity and organismic integration, and is elaborated by integrating regulations (p. 247).

Connections

• Ryan & Deci (2000), LIT-559, the companion summary. This paper is the argument; that one the overview.
• Vansteenkiste, Ryan & Soenens (2020), LIT-561, which formalizes this paper’s functional criterion into five basic and four associated criteria for a need.
• Bandura (1977), LIT-545, unread. The disagreement is about whether efficacy expectations are the whole of agency. This paper’s charge is that self-efficacy theory has “only one class of motivated behaviors” (p. 256). Whether the 1977 paper answers it cannot be checked until LIT-545 is read.
• Frijda, Ridderinkhof & Rietveld (2014), LIT-540. A real disagreement. Frijda holds that much emotion regulation is one state of action readiness checking another, with no regulator of a different kind (NOTE-433). This paper puts needs, and “the self”, above emotions: “emotions themselves must be self-regulated” (p. 254). Frijda’s concerns, which include “goals, needs, values” (NOTE-433), are what give events pertinence, so the two may differ less in mechanism than in which level they call the regulator.
• ACT’s model (Hayes et al. 2006, LIT-555; Kashdan & Rottenberg 2010, LIT-553). SDT’s “rigid behavior patterns” that keep people “from dealing with their inner experiences” and persist where not needed (p. 250) describe what ACT calls experiential avoidance and inflexibility. The explanations differ: ACT traces it to verbal processes (fusion), SDT to thwarted needs. Neither paper cites the other.

Bearing on the record

• THEORY-029. The self here is specified organismically, as the integrative tendency and intrinsic activity, before any endorsing attitude (p. 247). That is SDT’s candidate for a stopping point that is not an attitude of a higher order. Whether it is “specified without presupposing the agent’s participation” in Velleman’s sense, and so disownable, is the test. The paper’s answer is that the nascent self cannot be alienated from because it is the agent’s own activity, which is close to the stipulation THEORY-029 records for Frankfurt’s wholehearted love.
• THEORY-040. Need-thwarting histories produce introjects and substitute motives that a person may value and pursue wholeheartedly (wealth as a substitute for relatedness, p. 248). SDT therefore separates present endorsement from autonomy by appeal to history and to need satisfaction. That is a substantive, not content-neutral, criterion in the IEP’s sense (NOTE-266): some contents “are not integrateable” (p. 246).
• THEORY-056 (emotion regulation is one motive state checking another). This paper is a source against it on one point: it posits needs as a higher-order regulating level over emotions (p. 254). It gives no evidence for that level beyond the argument.
• THEORY-050 (inflexibility as a transdiagnostic process). The rigid-patterns passage (p. 250) is a rival etiology for the same pattern.
• No ML instruction. Nothing here belongs in the anthology.

Limitations

• Interdefinition. Needs are identified by their effects on well-being, and well-being is “an organismic function in which the person detects the presence or absence of vitality, psychological flexibility, and a deep inner sense of wellness” (p. 242). The paper does not show how to test a need claim without assuming the well-being measure.
• Mostly correlational. Apart from the reward and internalization experiments, the support is cross-sectional or diary correlation.
• The evolutionary section offers adaptive stories, not evidence that the needs were selected.
• The commentaries were not read. Carver and Scheier’s objection that needs are “simply another set of goals” (p. 258) is known only through this paper’s report of it.

Open questions

• Can “integrated” regulation be distinguished empirically from “identified”? The paper uses the distinction but cites no study measuring integration alone.
• What would show that a value is “not integrateable”? The examples (genital mutilation, boys not crying) are asserted, not tested.
• Are compensatory motives and rigid patterns distinguishable from ACT’s experiential avoidance by any measure, or are they two names for one pattern?

Corrections

• none to a seeded skim (there was no seed)
• The brief’s citation is right: Psychological Inquiry 11(4):227–268, 2000. Crossref prints the title with title-case and curly quotes, “The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Goal Pursuits”.

Note of 2026-11-03: C4 against its primary source

Kasser and Ryan 1996 (NOTE-1525) support only C4’s first half, that extrinsic aspirations go with lower well-being. They measure no reasons and call the “beyond the reasons” test future work (p. 286). Their intrinsic and extrinsic results are close to one contrast, since both are entered after an overall score averaged across all seven domains.