Heavy talk about culture. We see that across all different kinds of cultures, across nations really, SATs, basic psychological needs have strong importance for well-being. We've looked really a lot about how proximal environments, how classrooms or how parents or how managers have an impact on basic psychological need satisfaction. But beyond these proximal influences, we see that there are some big pervasive influences on people's need satisfaction, sometimes that they're not even aware of. One, for instance, is the political freedoms and economic arrangements of your own society. Recent studies, for instance, so one by Basabe and Valencia show that in countries where there's a lot more freedom and there's a lot more respect for human rights that it turns out that people value autonomy more and they value the rights of others more. In other words, where there are more rights and freedoms, people are more likely to embrace autonomy and respect for others. Now, it's also the case we've seen a lot of evidence that when citizens perceive empowerment or transparency or voice in government, when they have that sense of autonomy as participants in democracy, they more willingly assent and adhere to their government. They're more committed to comply with what their government wants. On the opposite, when they feel control or without voice, they're less likely to internalize the messages from their government and more likely to engage in passive compliance and when they can break out into active defiance. At DC and I saw this in a kind of personal way in our early work in Bulgaria back in the late '80s, there was a very unpopular controlling authoritarian regime that was run by a dictator named Zhivkov. He had tight control over society. There was a lot of internal security and surveilling methods of getting citizens to behave. But the minute there was a crack in that wall, people broke out because they wanted more freedom in their society. Indeed a recent analysis by Welzel, who's sociologist and historian, has shown that wherever people can make use of freedom, they start to demand it. It's usually their demand for freedom that precedes the actual establishments of rights. In other words, at a societal level, we have an impulse toward greater autonomy, and this is a thing that will often drive political action. Now it's not just politics that affects our capacities for basic psychological needs satisfaction so does our economy. For instance, Gonzalez and others recently did a study that showed that people who are higher in socioeconomic status as is well-known have somewhat higher well-being. On the other hand, most of that increase in well-being is mediated by their basic psychological needs satisfactions which in plain English means that the reason why having a little bit more money makes a difference in terms of your life satisfaction and wellness is because it allows you to engage in more autonomous behaviors or things that you choose to do. It helps you connect with others and it typically enables you to feel more competent. These are the things that more socioeconomic resources do for us. In fact, this is one of the reasons why SES makes its biggest difference on happiness really at the lowest levels of economics. It's really when you just get above poverty levels it starts to make less of a difference. So, not only do people with low SES have less need satisfaction, it's not just the level of socioeconomic status, it's also the equality of socioeconomic status and the people around us. Even controlling for how wealthy people might be when they're in environments where there's more inequality between them and their neighbors, there's more unhappiness. In fact, this has shown across the world. The more unequal the wealth within nations, the more unhappy people are within nations even controlling for level of wealth. This comes down to even states and neighborhoods as well. Now, of course, there's reasons for this and one of the things that we've shown this comes out in a work how with Di Domenico and Fournier in particular, which is inequality is associated directly with less basic needs satisfaction. More inequality means you're more concerned with comparisons of others. You feel more controlled. There's less connectedness with others. There's more sense of competitiveness. All these things will interfere with basic well-being as individuals and across populations. Now in societies that do provide people with capabilities and resources so they could potentially pursue a good life, we see greater well-being. There's been a movement within economics it's called the capability movement that really emphasizes this. People like Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have emphasized that within societies, if we give people the capabilities to pursue their dreams, they will tend to actualize those. They'll pursue the things that they value most and this will lead to greater well-being. While with Cody Dehaan and Hirai, I recently did a study looking at how capabilities do predict well-being again as potentially mediated by SDT's basic psychological needs satisfaction. We took Martha Nussbaum's 10 basic capabilities that she thinks all societies would have and we started them in the US and India. We found in both countries that capabilities predicted more wellness as Nussbaum would expect, but we also show that their effects were heavily mediated by basic psychological needs. For instance, if you had access to education, this produced greater wellness because it helped enhance your sense of competence. If you had greater opportunities for human rights, this enhanced wellness but it did so by enhancing your autonomy and connectedness with other people. So, capabilities have their positive impact on wellness largely through helping people satisfy basic psychological needs. Now, when we look across the globe, we see that cultures and environments and economics really differ a lot. Some are oppressive and they interfering with people's autonomy and interfering with people's capacity to relate to one another. Others, on the other hand, are really working hard to provide societies which can gratify these needs. So, when we think about the things that affect our wellness, we shouldn't just think about our local environments but also think about what's the general national context and cultural context we're in and how is that doing in terms of supporting the needs of citizens.
