Building a Science of Motivated Persons: Self-Determination Theory’s Empirical Approach to Human Experience and the Regulation of Behavior

Self-determination theory (SDT) is a still rapidly expanding framework of basic and applied research, underpinned by a global network of scholars and practitioners. Herein, we focus on one feature of SDT that helps explain its continued growth—the fact that it is a truly human science that takes into consideration our attributes as persons, including our capacities for awareness and self-regulation, as well as vulnerabilities to defensiveness and control. Within SDT, these human capacities are studied using diverse methods and across all subdisciplines of psychology. In this review, we focus particularly on people’s capacity for autonomy as it applies to their individual functioning, interpersonal relationships, and societal interactions. If there is a core legacy to SDT, it is one of representing a generative and philosophically coherent framework based on a convergent network of empirical evidence with relevance across domains and cultures and to our basic experiences and concerns as humans.