Today we have an exciting topic to talk about which is the topic of culture and how culture influences people's motivation and wellness. Culture represents one of the most pervasive influences on behavior that we can name. When I speak of culture here, I'm meaning that perceptions, the motives, the values, even the aspirations that we have that are transmitted to us from the society around us. Culture is such a strong influence on us, but often we don't even notice how it's influencing us because in a way it's kind of the waters in which we swim, so familiar that we don't even recognize it. Now, when we apply self determination theory to the issue of cultures is really two important issues that we take on. One is that first SDT as you already know from Organismic Integration Theory posits that there's an inherent human tendency to internalize and to integrate social practices. But furthermore, we assume that the way in which a culture transmits or conveys these regulations and values affects how well they are internalized. So, in a culture where the culture is being transmitted through more controlling or authoritarian methods, we expect that the internalization is more impoverished and therefore the adherence to social practices and value systems is more unstable. In contrast, when the socialization techniques are more autonomy-supportive and democratic we expect more full internalization of cultural mores and norms and a more stable culture to result. In addition, we focus on cultural contents that is the specific practices, values, and rituals of a culture, and the way in which they have an impact on basic psychological needs. We know cultures vary quite a bit in their practices, values, and norms and we know also that those are more or less good at satisfying or undermining people's experience of satisfaction of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and so, we would compare cultures in terms of how well they're doing it the job of satisfying people's basic psychological needs. Now, these two kinds of cultural analyses have borne a lot of fruit, we'd been able to show across many different varied cultures, how basic needs satisfaction is associated with well being really invariably across different types of societies. But, there are many people who find this kind of work very controversial particularly a group of scholars that we would call cultural relativists. Cultural relativists are people who I think correctly it emphasized that there's a great deal of variability in cultural behaviors, values, and attitudes and they also recognize that much of that variability comes about through the indigenous activity of people within a culture who construct their local values and sentiments. But one of the problems from our point of view with cultural relativism is it often leads to the suggestion that all cultural values are equal in terms of their goodness, equally good for the people within a culture such that if you grew up within a culture and you embrace its norms and values that all is well. But SDT has a much more critical point of view. We argue that some cultural contents just aren't as good at supporting basic human psychological needs satisfaction and this produces variability in wellness across cultures. So, unlike cultural relativists, we think critiquing cultures is important, we already ready to look at how some families are better than others at raising children, how some schools are better than others at helping children learn, how some clinics are better than others at fostering patient motivation, so, we have every reason to think it's useful to look at cultures in terms of how well they're supporting wellness. A careful application of SDT requires however that we differentiate some often conflated terms. For instance, we separate values from motives, from needs, values are culturally or individually preferred sensibilities or outcomes. Motives and contrast are the explicit reasons or sometimes implicit reasons the conscious or unconscious reasons why we engage in a particular behavior. Finally a need is something we identify as an essential nutrient for thriving and wellness across cultures. So in SDT we do claim that both values and motives are differ across culture and therefore we call them emic variables. An emic variable is something that is indeed locally constructive and whose laws and principles may only apply in a particular setting. In contrast our concept of psychological needs we identify as an etic universal, meaning a characteristic that can be empirically identified and cross-culturally validated across all cultures. Particularly, controversial has been our posting that there's a need for autonomy that applies across culture. When we think autonomy is important we're arguing that people want to feel empowerment and they want to be able to embrace their activities no matter where they live, and yet many cultural relativists have argued that autonomy is not a universal value it's something that's only important in the west and particularly among males in the west because it represents an individualistic motivation. Now, we're more inclined to agree with McGregor who argues that even though autonomy maybe differently manifest across cultures it remains essential to well-being and all. So, how do we know this? How do we argue for this? Well, we do lots of studies on autonomy and its role in different cultures, and one study I just want to quickly review for you is an early one that I did with Valery Chirkov and other scholars that looked at how cultural orientations can be differently internalized across cultures. In this study we survey people from the US, from South Korea, from Russia, and from Turkey, and when we are looking at these countries we are looking at the differences in their cultural orientations, for instance we see that Turkey, Russia, South Korea are relatively collectivistic countries, where group comes before self, the US are more individualist country where we might put self before group. Countries differ as well in terms of their horizontal versus vertical structures, so, Russia is a very vertical culture with strong hierarchical set of social arrangements, South Korea you ask more egalitarian in their approaches, so, we see that cultures differ a lot in their orientations. We asked people why you would carry out behaviors that reflect these orientations, and we see that the relative autonomy of people's engaging in cultural practices is associated with well-being positively and significantly across all four of these distinct cultures. In other words, regardless of your cultural practices to the degree that you're engaged in them autonomously the better your well-being and that is not moderated by cultural membership. Indeed recent studies for instance one that I mentioned in the earlier session that was done by Chen has looked at this question by looking again at multiple countries and asking about needs satisfaction and need frustration. They find across all countries that were examined and here again we're looking at Peru, China, Belgium, and the US as exemplary countries here, that the more people have needs satisfaction and the less they have need frustration, the higher their well-being at levels that are equal across all these countries. When you ask people in these countries how important is this particular need to you or how much are you desiring to attain satisfaction of this particular need, that does not moderate these effects. So, even in a country where people say, autonomy is not that important to me, not having it has an impact on their well-being. So, this gets us back to our assumption that basic psychological needs whether or not they're emically valued in a country are etically important in the sense that they will bear on the wellness of people within those countries. Now, there are many other studies we can look at that support the idea that autonomy support in particular and basic needs satisfaction more generally is associated with well-being regardless of cultural contexts and your chapter is replete with many instances of this. I just want to say again that our attitude in self determination theory is not to diminish our respect for the great deal of variation in variegation we see across human cultures but rather to argue that there are some basic human elements that apply within each. Rather than the relativistic point of view we think that all cultures do better when they find ways to support the basic psychological needs of their members.
