Welcome back to self-determination theory and introduction. Today, we're going to talk about the topic of sports. Sports is one of those areas that we know to be really intrinsically motivated, and in fact, people love to play sports. They do it just because it's enjoyable quite a bit. Sports is a reflection of our really act of human nature from the time that we're born to the time that we die. We want to move. We want to be active. We want to use our muscles. We want to exercise our capacities. So, we do so both through things like rough-and-tumble play and through exercise, but also through structured games that we call sports. Now, as I say, sports is mostly motivated by fun and by intrinsic motivation. Survey show, in fact, that youth, when they join sports do it really for the fun. They're not motivated by the trophies. They're not motivated by the awards. They're not motivated by some perception or future career. They're really motivated because in the moment, sports is something that they can experience autonomy and competence and engaging in and relatedness in playing with their teammates. So, intrinsic motivation supplies the most fundamental motivation for sports, but as sports develops, as kids grow older and stay engaged in sports, that motivation becomes more complex. We see with time that because sports is really important then people get a lot of approval and recognition for it, that ego involvement and interjection can become very dominant motivations. Some people will play because that's the way that they feel good about themselves, and feel horrible when they don't play well. Some actually feel pressured from the outside to play, but they've been identified with talented people who want something from them. So, we can see the whole continuum of motivations applying in sports. Sometimes, people being externally pressured, sometimes they're being interjected and ego-involved, and sometimes they're doing sport because they see how worthwhile it can be in their lives, and again, hopefully a strong sense of intrinsic motivation being infused in sport play. So when we look at this configuration of motivations, we can then look at an athlete's relative autonomy for playing. We use the same kind of techniques we've been talking about throughout this course for estimating that relative autonomy. We looked at whether the balance of motivations is over on the intrinsic side or over on the externally pressured side. Research shows that the more autonomous an athlete's motivation, the more likely they are to both enjoy their sport and to lack symptoms of burnout. In fact, surveys of children show this. Surveys of college students from various sports show this. The more autonomous they are, the less burnout, the less devaluation of their feelings of accomplishment as they play the sports, and even the more enhances their sport performance. Just many, many studies showing this. So when we concern ourselves with an athlete's motivation, we know that many things influence it. One thing is just the athlete's abilities and talents themselves, the more competent one is, the more there's going to be positive feedback, and that's going to help people engaged. Parent input is also important. In the chapter, you can read on this book, you'll see that there's lots of research showing that controlling parenting styles around sport undermine intrinsic motivation for play, whereas autonomy supportive parents actually encourage more persistence in athletes over time. But perhaps, the most researched and maybe most important influence on athletes motivation, is the coaching atmosphere and team atmosphere they experience in playing the sport. There's many nuances in sport, but coaching looms large as a big factor. One of the early classic studies in this area shows this, I think quite well. It was a study that was led by Luc Pelletier and his colleagues in Canada, and they were studying elite swimmers. They asked those swimmers to describe their coaches style, and some coaches were described as controlling, some as autonomy supportive. Then they looked at the motivation of these elite swimmers, and they found that if you had an autonomy supportive coach, you were much more likely to be intrinsically motivated, and much more likely to be identified knowing the importance of your participation in sport and valuing it, than if the coach was more controlling. Oppositely, more controlling coaches had a lot of external motivation in their players. Players feeling a lot of pressure in their swimming and interjection in their swimming itself. Now, elite swimming is particularly grueling and arduous discipline, and so there's often dropout in sport. What Pelletier and his colleagues did, is followed up on these swimmers over time. One of the things that you can see in their data, is that 22 months after the original surveys, those players who were more intrinsically motivated are identified with their sport were still persisting in the sport. They were still in the elite swimming circuits. In contrast to those who were externally regulated, who were feeling that pressure from their controlling coaches, were much more likely to drop out during that time. In fact, you can see that the more autonomous the motivation, the longer the persistence, and the more controlling the motivation, the less the persistence. These are a function of coach autonomy support and control. Just to illustrate this in another way, I want to talk about a study that we recently did in the UK with both amateur and elite athletes. So, these were athletes in various sports across various levels of competence. I did this work with Kimberly Bartholomew and her colleagues, and that work began by again, surveying the athletes as to their coaches style, whether they were autonomy supportive or controlling. Across these athletes, the data showed that when coaches were more autonomy supportive, all three basic psychological needs, those were autonomy, competence, and relatedness are more satisfied in the athletes and this led to more vitality, less depression, and in some athletes, less symptoms of eating disorders and problematic training concerns. The opposite was true for control-oriented coaches. There was more need thwarting experienced by their players, and there was more depression, less vitality, and more disordered eating in those athletes. We can see the same thing with symptoms of burnout showing the exact same pattern of effects in UK athletes. With one set of athletes, we were able to do even a little more. Of the elite athletes, just before they went out of the practice field, we were able to take a mouth swab to assay a particular protein that's secreted in the mucosa called secretory immunoglobulin A. SIgA is something that is secreted in the mouth when people are experiencing stress. So, what we were interested in here is, whether there'd be higher SIgA levels in athletes if they had controlling coaches, and that's exactly what we found. As they were walking under the practice field, they're secreting more of the stress-related protein in their mouths, indicating that when they walk into that practice, their experience is going to be less positive. There was no such relation for autonomy supportive coaches. We've even done daily diary studies of athletes to look at the variation in athlete's attitudes and experiences on days when their coach is more controlling or more autonomy supportive, or the team is more connected or more fragmented. One of our studies that I did with Marylene Gagne, was a female gymnast, and these are adolescent gymnasts. Again, this is a very arduous sport that requires a lot of practice. We tracked their daily motivation and their mood, and we found that on days when they were experiencing more autonomy support, they had more autonomous reasons for entering practice, and they experienced more relatedness and more competence on those days. As a result of that, post practice, they had higher vitality and better feelings about themselves, and the opposite was true for those athletes not experiencing a positive attitude or controlling atmosphere, leading them to be depleted after practice and to not feel as good about themselves. So, coaching has a huge impact on athletes, and we've been talking at various points in this course about what the elements are of autonomy supportive versus controlling coaching. I'm not going to go into that detail here and now. I really just want to say that there are big implications for practice and coaching, sporting. Practitioners, coaches who really want athletes to be more engaged and to persist longer in their sport are those who really support their autonomy by listening to athletes perspectives, by acknowledging some of the difficulties and challenges that they face, by giving them effective choices whenever they can do so, by providing rationales for why they have to do some of the more disciplined things that are required of athletes during practice, by supporting their initiative and supporting their reflective interest in their own activities, and really in general, being non-controlling in their communications and non-judgmental in their approach to the challenges faced by athletes. These and other techniques of autonomy support really support the athlete's engagement in what they otherwise would be intrinsically motivated to do, which is to exercise their capacities and do their best.
