Speaking of Psychology - How to motivate yourself and others, with Wendy Grolnick, PhD, and Frank Worrell, PhD
Episode Date: June 12, 2024Why can’t I get myself to run that 5K? Why isn’t my child getting better grades? We all have things that we struggle to accomplish – or that we struggle to get someone else to accomplish. Frank ...Worrell, PhD, and Wendy Grolnick, PhD, co-authors of “Motivation Myth Busters: Science-based Strategies to Boost Motivation in Yourself and Others,” discuss how our misconceptions about motivation get in the way of reaching our goals, why there’s no such thing as an “unmotivated” person, and the merits and drawbacks of strategies like rewards, competition and praise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot.
It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill,
four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199.
And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove's seven-piece outdoor dining set
for only $49.
This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot.
While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th, U.S. only exclusions apply.
See Home Depot.com slash price match for details.
We all have things that we want to accomplish in life.
Maybe it's writing a book or learning a new language or running a 5K.
Or maybe you want to motivate someone else in your life to do something tough like getting
your kids to improve their grades.
But no matter how much you try to bribe, cajole, or inspire, you're just not seeing the
changes you want or making the changes in yourself.
At that point, you might ask, why am I so unmotivated or why are they so unmotivated?
Today we're going to talk to the authors of a new book on motivation myths about what the science really says about motivation and about how our misconceptions get in the way of accomplishing our goals.
We'll explore such questions as do rewards work to motivate people?
Does competition inspire people to excel or does it make them less motivated?
What about praise?
Does praising people for their smarts or abilities help them to accomplish more?
Are some people just basically unmotivated?
or is everyone motivated in the right context or situation?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association
that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life.
I'm Kim Mills.
We have two guests today.
First is Dr. Frank Worrell, a distinguished professor and director of the school psychology program
at the University of California, Berkeley School of Education.
He also holds an affiliate appointment in the social and personality area
in the Department of Psychology.
Dr. Worrell studies motivation in schools and educational settings.
His areas of expertise include academic talent, development, and gifted education,
at-risk youth, cultural identities, and teaching effectiveness.
He's author of more than 300 journal articles and book chapters, as well as five books,
and he's won numerous awards for his research.
He was also the 2022 president of the American Psychological Association.
Also with us is Dr. Wendy Grolnick, a professor of psychology,
Clark University. Dr. Grohlink is an expert on motivation and parenting. She's conducted pioneering
studies on the role that parents and teachers play in children's motivation and achievement.
She has published more than 90 articles in scholarly journals and her work has been funded
by the National Institute of Mental Health, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.
Dr. Worrell and Grohlnick, together with Dr. Benjamin Hetty, are co-authors of the new book,
Motivation Mythbusters, science-based strategies to boost
motivation in yourself and others to be published by APA books in July. Thank you both for joining me
today. Delighted to be here. Yeah, thanks for having us. Let's start with the first myth you discuss in the
book, which is the idea that some people are motivated while others just aren't. I think a lot of us have
the idea that motivation is some kind of a personality trait. You either have it or you don't. Is that a
myth? Yes, it's a myth. A lot of times we think of motivation as something about a person,
Some people are very motivated people.
Other people are unmotivated people.
And it turns out what the science says is that motivation is really much more a function
of people's interests and the context that they're in.
Everybody can be motivated in a particular context.
And there are some contexts that are more motivating than others.
And I think the problem with holding the conception that some people are motivated and others
aren't is that if we see someone that doesn't look so motivated, we think,
that's a motivated person, we start to treat them as a motivated person, an unmotivated person.
And when we treat them as an unmotivated person, they might start to act like that more and fulfill
that prophecy. So holding the idea that some people are motivated and others aren't, can really get in
the way of the way we treat other people. And if we start to see ourselves that way, can really get
in the way of our reaching our goals. Yes, I would add, if I could, that in speaking to parents,
and teachers, they are often saying, well, they're not motivated. They seem so unmotivated.
And I ask, well, what are they doing? Are they not doing anything? Well, they're playing video
games all day or they're reading. So they're motivated to do something. They're just not
motivated to do what the parent or the teacher wants them to do. If motivation isn't actually a
personality trait, what is it? So motivation is a sort of the energy that we put toward things.
It's where that energy comes from, what direction we're putting it in.
And it's really a function of our own feelings and beliefs and attitudes and the way we approach
different situations.
And motivation is really something that is inside of us.
So motives are in us.
And so when we think about what motivates us, we kind of motivate ourselves.
And that can be a function of what's in this situation.
So that's why we say in the book that you can get someone to do something.
You can persuade them to do something, but you can't really get them to want to do something.
You can't make people be motivated, only you can set the conditions, but you can't make people
be motivated.
They make, they engage and energize from within.
So that makes it kind of complex.
It's not just as simple of getting people to do things.
it's inspiring the motives that they have within them to master things and persevere.
And that makes it a little bit more complex.
Yes.
And so I think one of the reasons why people think its personality is because, as Wendy indicated,
it's internal.
So it's coming from inside.
And so therefore people assume it's a trait.
You have it or you don't.
But it's that process, that energy, right, that in fact people have,
in some context versus others.
I'm much more likely to get off the couch to eat cheesecake than I am to do exercise.
Well, then if you're the parent of a young child, what can you do to create conditions that will help your child be motivated as a child and be motivated throughout life?
Right.
A lot of my work has focused on just that issue.
So we start with the idea that people have these needs.
they have the need to feel autonomous, to feel, you know, they're the owner of their actions,
like they're choosing to do things. They have a need to feel competent, to feel like they're good at
things, and they have a need to feel connected to other people. And so if we create an environment
where people feel like they are the owner of their actions, like they have some choice,
if we create an environment that helps them to feel effective, if we create an environment
that helps them to feel connected to the people around them, those are going to be the conditions
under which people will be the most motivated. So whether we're talking about the conditions that
parents create or that classrooms create or that even bosses create in their workplaces,
helping people to feel autonomous by providing them autonomy support, support for their initiations
and being behind them, giving them structure so that they can feel competent and know what
they're expected to do, and feeling loved and valued and cared for and respected, that's the
kind of overall environment that's going to facilitate motivation. And then kids, if we think about
kids specifically, the nature of the relationship that the parent has with their child is going to
affect how motivated that child is in engaging with things that the parents want them to do.
The same thing occurs in the classroom. A teacher, in fact, who does not have a good relationship with
their students, it's likely to have less motivated students than a classroom where the teachers,
the students love the teacher, they enjoy the teacher. And if we think about young kids in
particular, this idea of competence, so putting things that they can do, or that they're just
on their grass so that if they try, they can succeed, is something that you want to do because that
builds up the sense of competence. And the third point when he talks about was autonomy. Every
parenting book practically has something about, you know, you hear the story about, do you want to wear
your red pajamas or your blue pajamas? That actually is coming exactly out of this notion of autonomy,
giving kids choice. And so it's a limited choice, but it's choice nonetheless, and that gives them a
sense of control, which then will be motivating. So it's prep work also for bigger things to come.
If you can choose which pajamas to wear, you might be able to choose which college to go to.
Exactly. And indeed, think about the highest levels of education that we have in this country,
doctoral students choose what they're going to do their dissertation on, right, so that in fact,
this idea of choice is really, really key and plays out throughout the lifespan.
Let's talk about rewards. This idea is really common that you might promise yourself a treat
as an incentive to finishing a difficult task at work, or a parent might offer their child
cash, you know, for an A on a report card. Do rewards like this work, do they increase motivation?
You know, that's a great question, Kim. It's something we talk a lot about in our book. And the answer is,
it's complex. You know, I certainly could, with a big enough reward, I could get my child to
clean their room or if the boss gives a big enough reward, he can get his employee to come in on a
Saturday. The problem with rewards is that when you give someone a reward for doing something,
they have a sense of motivation that's external. I'm doing it to get the reward. It makes them feel
not choiceful. It makes them feel like they are being controlled by that reward. And they might
want to get that reward. But what it does is it takes away from the doing of the activity
for the either joy of doing it or for the importance of it. Or for the importance of it.
doing it even. So if you say, for example, if you eat your, if you eat your peas, you can get dessert,
it really devalues those peas. And it's, you would only eat those peas if you got dessert. And a lot of
times, particularly with kids, what we're trying to do is not just get kids to do things. We can do that,
but get kids to value things and to find them important. And when you focus on that external
reward, you're keeping it at that level. So instead of helping kids to understand the value of
cleaning their rooms or the value of homework, what ends up happening is that people feel like,
I'm doing this. I would only do this to get the reward. That's, it's not valuable in and of itself.
Versus if you're working with kids and helping them to understand the value of what they're doing
and working with them to figure out how it can meet their goals, they're going to, in turn,
internalize that and start to do the thing because it's important. Now, there probably are some things that we ask kids to do, that we ask our employees to do that are just one-timers that are not really valuable in and of themselves. Well, then you're asking me, so, why are we asking people to do things that are not valuable? But anyway, and the reward can get them to do it. But when it's something important and it's something that we want people to continue to do, we want people to value, we want
people to really get behind, rewards can undermine that. So there's a whole tradition of research
that's shown that when people are doing something they love, you bring them into the laboratory,
they're doing a really fun task, and you say, hey, we're going to pay you for every one of these
puzzles you're doing or every one of these widgets you put together. And then they're like,
great. They do more of them. They do more puzzles. They do more widgets. Then you say, oh,
the experiment's over. We're done. I'm going to go out and you can do some more. You can do some
puzzles or you can do something else, the people that were rewarded do less of the puzzles or
make less widgets because their motivation has been transformed into something they do to get
money. And so that sense of, I do it because it's interesting and fun is taken away.
You've now sort of turned fun into work. And so the nuance there is, yes, you can probably use rewards
to get people to do some things.
But be very careful with them because if it's fun things and interesting things, you'll take away the fun and the interest.
And if it's things that are valuable, you'll prevent people from sort of moving along a continuum from doing things because they have to to doing things because they want to.
So it's sort of a very nuanced thing.
It sounds like it can have exactly the opposite effect of what you want.
So it decreases motivation ultimately.
Ultimately.
So it can really backfire.
Right. And so if we think about the example that you ask, for instance, the parent who decides to pay the kids for grades, well, that's fine when they can afford to do so. But when they actually cannot afford to do so, then the kid may stop working. When the kid goes on to college, are they going to do the work in college if they're not getting paid for the grade? Because, again, as Wendy pointed out, it's now become, I'm doing it for the reward rather than doing it for the value or the interest that I have in the task.
There's a lot of discussion out there in the world about whether parents and teachers should tell kids that they're smart.
And I just want to know, what about praise?
How does praise affect motivation?
Well, you know, this is something that, in fact, has gotten into the school system.
I think a lot recently it's related to attribution theory, you know, the reasons why we do things.
And when we tell a kid that you have done well, you are smart, right, that that's why you've been successful, we've actually set the bar that, in fact, you have this smartness that's fixed.
And so, therefore, that's why you did well.
Well, every person is going to come to a point where there's something that they will do that will be difficult or they will have a failure experience.
if in fact they think that their success is due to the fact that it's because they're smart,
when they have a failure experience, it's easy for them to then think,
I have lost my smarts.
My smarts have gone away.
And so what happens, rather than engaging, right, continuing to put more effort,
then they are likely to disengage, to become demotivated.
If instead we praise them for the process, you know, you worked really hard,
on this project and look how it paid off, then what we are setting up is that, in fact,
not that you are smart, but that the thing that you can control your effort is what's setting
you up.
You know, and so this then, in fact, allows them to continue.
And this is particularly important in every education context, which applies in work,
because as you go up the grade levels, things get more difficult, right?
So you are inevitably going to get to a place where there is something that does not come
as easily as the previous task.
You said this place was steps from
the water. We just haven't found
the steps yet. How much
did we save?
Enough to get lost.
Or you could book a stay with Hilton.
Welcome to your ocean front room. Just
steps from the water. The Hilton sale
is on now. Book on Hilton.com
or the Hilton app and save up to
20% to get the stay you expected.
When you want savings, not
surprises. It matters where you
Stay. Hilton for this day. What about competition? You know, it might seem intuitive that if a student
is studying for a spelling, be it school or an employee is aiming to win a competitive promotion,
that they'll be more motivated to work harder. Is that a reality or is that a myth?
It turns out that, you know, competition, one can think of competition as one end of a
continuum incorporation. Now, we know they're separate now. But for a lot of
the early research looked at competition versus
cooperation. And what we found
is that in fact, when in fact
competition and cooperation are directly
put against each other, cooperation wins
all the time, hands
down, right? Because competition
becomes almost some
of the things we've talked about before. It becomes controlling.
I'm doing it just to win.
But there are other things to
think about. There are
different competitive orientations.
So people have different competitive
orientations. So there are some people who are
hyper-competitive. They want to win at all cost. And so these people will always make things
into competition, but they may also stray over into being unethical to win, because winning,
it doesn't matter what you do once you win. I think we can think about politicians,
and we can certainly think of many scandals in the sporting arena over the past few decades
where that has played out. But there are also people who are the types of people who are the
type of competition that in fact is perhaps most useful is what we call self-developmental competition.
So people who see competition not just as a chance to win, but as a chance to grow.
So that in fact, I am pacing myself. And so I did, I ran this thing in 15 seconds. I'm making it up.
Before, I've done it in 14 on this trial. So that in fact, what I'm doing is a competition
is really a way for me to understand,
am I mastering the material, you know, and how am I improving?
And we found that there are people who have that sort of orientation,
that for them, competition is not as demotivating
because if they do not win, they have still sometimes,
they've learned something about their performance.
And the other thing that we found is not just individual,
but these competitive attitudes differ across cultures.
So, for example, in Japan, they are much more likely to think as competitors, as individuals who are helping them pace themselves, whereas in some of the Western countries, competitors are people to be beaten, to be trounced.
And so it really does depend on the orientation that you take towards competition.
And I think, Wendy, may have a few things to add here.
Yeah, I'll just add a little bit.
I mean, we're saying that competition can have some negative effects for some people.
in some context, but a lot of times it's how we present the competition. So for example, in a tennis game,
it's a competitive game. You want to hit it so that your opponent can't get it. By nature,
it's a competitive game. But you can come into that game and focus solely on winning. That's
all that matters. And when you're so narrowly focused on winning, it actually undermines your
motivation. And it actually undermines your game sometimes because you're so focused on winning
that your strokes aren't smooth. You're so narrowed in rather than having fun and also bettering
your skills as Frank was talking about. So what we can do in situations that are competitive,
let's say our children are paying competitive soccer is not focus so much on winning.
focus a little bit more on whether the kids enjoyed the game, how they feel they played.
Instead of when your child comes home saying, who won?
You know, that's for that.
Then they get their ego involved in winning.
It's not, then they feel like I'm not good enough if I don't win versus I'm really here to enjoy the game.
And lots of times kids start playing whatever sport they're playing to really enjoy it and then get ego involved like that because there's too much focus.
on winning. So how we set it up. My daughter actually had a tennis coach who would ask her at the end of
tournament how to go and she'd say, I won and he'd say dynamite. And she'd say, I lost. And he'd say,
did you have fun? And she said, yep. And he said, dynamite. So it's really, it's not just the
competition of a situation. It's how it's portrayed. You know, if it's all about winning,
it is, it has that effect that, especially when you lose, it really can undermine your
motivation. And just like it's too much pressure and it doesn't feel good and it loses its fun.
So on the one hand, you're saying that you can't inspire, you can't make people motivated.
But on the other hand, I'm hearing you say that there are things you can say that maybe will
enhance their own motivation? Is that what we're talking about here? Absolutely. You can set up a
situation where people have what they need to succeed. They know the guidelines, they know the
guidelines, they know the expectations, they have some say in it. They have feel, you set it up
so they feel like they have some choice in it. They're connected to the people around them.
So you can set up those situations and a context like that. And people,
will then want to persevere. They will want to try to master things and they won't get their ego so
involved in it and they won't feel so pressured. And so you can, you definitely can set up a classroom or a team or a home
that has high expectations but also is not pressured and has a sense of valuing people's
own goals and what they're trying to do and not putting pressure on them to win at all costs.
Right. And I would add that, you know, when we think about competition, right, competition has a long
history. In fact, it probably has been around as long as humans have had the cognitive capacity
that we've had. When we think of the Olympic Games, right, they go back to ancient Greece and
why is it still with us? So inevitably, competition is present in society. And when somebody wins,
others lose, right? And so they get feedback. When you get feedback, negative feedback,
you're not won, it's easy to be demotivated. And so even in the context with regard to your question
of somebody who did not win, the way you provide the feedback can be useful in helping them
maintain motivation, right, by giving them change feedback, doing it privately, empathetically,
giving them choices in their strategy to move forward. So when we think about the, you know,
we have these negative examples of people at the sidelines shouting nasty comments at their children
or at their players when in fact something has not gone the way of that particular team or that
particular individual, those kinds of, that kind of feedback is not very helpful for motivation,
right? And so things, people may end up performing, but they are again doing it under
coercion, they're not having fun, they are likely to, their performance is like to decrease
over time. Whereas if in point of fact you are getting empathetic, supportive feedback, things that
can better you help you get better at doing the task, you are actually, and, you know, you don't
lose the enjoyment that you have, why you were doing this in the first place, and you're going to
continue down that road. Now, another myth that you discuss in the book is the idea that if you
visualize success, it will come. Why is that a myth? I mean, what do you need to do then instead of
visualizing success? Yeah, it's, that's one that's really out there in the media. If you go on,
if you Google, you know, visualize yourself at the top of the mountain. And then so it turns out
that there's a lot of research, some of it by Gabrielle Ottengen and other people, to show that
if you visualize the outcome, it's kind of like your mind thinks you've done it, and you don't really
have put energy toward the task as much as if you visualize the sort of process of getting
there, the steps that you need to get there, it sort of energizes you to move forward, and it
also gives you the information you need to reach that goal. So yeah, it's definitely a myth that you
should visualize, you know, running across the finish line. It's really better to visualize the steps
you need to take, like every morning getting up, turning your alarm clock on, going out for a run
and practicing and figuring out how many miles you need to go each time and so forth and
setting these smaller goals and really planning for things by saying, you know, if it's six o'clock in the
morning, I'll be out there running. It gives you a plan. It energizes you for each of the steps.
You can plan for all the distractions that might come in your way that will prevent you from doing it.
And that's a much better plan than visualizing the end point.
You know, I think in society we see final products.
We see a Beyonce or Taylor Swift concert.
We see Steph Curry in the basketball court.
And it seems so easy, right?
And so this idea of this, oh, you're shooting this beautiful three-point shot, right?
And so forth.
What we don't see is the hard work that from, you know, where this person was to this easy performance on the stage.
or on the basketball court or the football field.
And that is why the visualizing itself can't work,
because the visualizing jumps over the hard work.
And so what, in fact, you should visualize.
In fact, how are you going to put in the work to get to that final goal?
But what about the reverse?
I mean, when I played softball, for example,
you know, the coach would say,
don't visualize yourself dropping the ball.
You have to visualize yourself catching.
that ball in the out of field? I mean, isn't there some truth that if you imagine that you're
going to miss the ball, you're going to miss the ball? I think that in fact, we know that there are
things called self-fulfilling prophecies. If you visualize yourself dropping the ball, you are likely
to increase your anxiety and so forth, and so therefore. So that's fine. So you don't want to visualize
yourself dropping the ball. You don't want to set up conditions that are going to make, in fact,
your cognitive capacity diminish. At the same time, if you visualize yourself,
catching the ball without practicing catching that ball. You're not going to catch it either.
And so that's why visualize yourself catching the ball, but you visualize yourself practicing
catching those ball on multiple occasions. Now, another myth that you tackle is that if you're
motivated, you'll be successful. Why is that a myth? I mean, is motivation alone just not enough?
We're motivated to do a lot of things that we don't end up doing. You know, we say we're really motivated
to clean that attic up and it's really important, you know, to us and we never quite get to it.
So for things that, particularly for things that are difficult, we need to have also a plan.
We need to have put into place what we call implementation intentions.
We need to put into a place if, you know, statements such as if them statements to say, you know,
if it's Saturday and it's 5 o'clock, I'm going to start doing that attic.
to do it for X amount of time. And so really putting into place some plans and some plans also for being
distracted if the phone rings. I'm not going to stop cleaning the ad. So having motivation is a great thing,
but you also need to follow that up with some plans. The opposite is also a little bit true.
sometimes for things that we don't really feel that motivated for, but what we need to do, we can make
those plans and we will find if we follow them, it's actually not nearly as bad as we thought
it was going to be.
So we just need to get, so we say in our book, we say, just do something, anything.
If you're feeling like, you know, you're writing a paper and you can't really get yourself
up to do much, you don't have a whole lot of energy, just do the references, just do a
little things. You do something because once you start, it can really get you rolling and
people anticipate that things are going to be much worse than they actually are. Even for negative
tasks, things that you don't want to do, there actually tend to be that cleaning that attic was
not really as bad as you thought it was going to be. It was actually kind of enjoyable.
You also bust the myth around the idea that structure damages motivation, that there are some
people who think that they'll be too restricted if there's a structure around what it is that they
need to do. Why is this not true? You know, Kim, that we actually did a survey of people to asking
them if they believe in these ideas. And a lot of people believe in a lot of these myths that we're
talking about. The structure one, people, like, half the people said, I don't know, or it didn't seem
to really know. Because we don't really know what structure is. And so, you know,
So, I mean, the problem is that a lot of times what people do is they pit structure against
having, like, freedom, that either you can have a structure in your environment or you
feel controlled.
And really, there are two kind of two separate dimensions.
There's how much structure there is in the environment, how clear the rules and
expectations are about what you're supposed to do, the boundaries.
You know, we live in a world.
There's structure all around us.
you know, there's rules and expectations. We can't drive through a red light and so forth.
Those are just the, it's the way the world is. And then there's how that structure is imposed.
Is it imposed in a way that feels controlling and pushy where you don't have any say in it?
Or is it structure that's imposed in a way that you can have a role in thinking about it?
You can put in your input. And so structure facilitates people being competent. So that's really good for motivation.
don't know what you're supposed to do on your assignment, you're going to feel helpless. So we need,
we need that structure. We need those clarity of what is expected of us. But we also need to feel like
we have some say in that, like we're not being coerced of, coerced. We're not being coerced.
And so the best situation is whether, where there are these structures, but we also understand
why they're there. We have reasons for them so that we can internalize their value. And we have
some opportunity to have input, some opportunity to respond to them if we think that they're not
helping us. And so, for example, corporations that have clear guidelines, but their employees also
have some say in those guidelines and have an opportunity to give their opinions, that's what's
really, you know, really, really effective in a workplace or in a classroom, in a home.
And we can think of this coming close to home for both Wendy and myself and Ben as well,
I guess, as professors, right?
Oftentimes we have students who come to us.
They want to be researchers.
If we just say to them, okay, decide on our topic you want to study and stuff, they are
actually left hanging because they don't know how to proceed.
But if we say, okay, this is the project, some of the most.
We have a variety of questions here that you can choose from.
Then they can look, you've given them some structure within which to work, they choose
then which project they're going to work on.
And even as they progress through, they're doing the dissertation, they have a committee, an advisor.
Again, they are getting to make choices, but they get some structure around them to help guide them,
you know, down the path.
And without that structure, they'd be, even if they're successful, it would take out much longer time to get
there. So last question. Final chapter of your book is about structural inequality and how the
inequities in our society affect motivation for individuals. Can you talk about that?
That, of course, is, I think, a myth that was really, really important for me. And I think for all of us,
because, again, this idea of motivation being a trait or individual, we tend to focus on the individual who's on
motivated and we don't look at the context in which those individuals are. And so take the example,
I think one of the examples we used in the book was the wage gap, the gender wage gap. You know,
so two people start working at a firm and, you know, one is male, one is female, equal qualifications,
and then the female finds out that she's being paid, you know, 80% of the salary that the male is
being paid, although she's doing the same work, same level, right? So then,
she can think, whoa, you know, my work actually, she can start devaluing the quality of the work
that she does. She can start devaluing her competence, right? That, oh, my, my God, I thought I was
smart, but I am, you know, I thought I was doing good work, but I'm not really, because if I were,
this wouldn't be happening. And so that her motivation would decrease and it may appear,
okay, she's unmotivated. But what's happening is that the context has set her up,
where I, the context is telling her that, oh, you are not as good as somebody else.
And we know, of course, that this applies not just to gender.
It applies to ethnic racial groups.
It applies to sexual orientation.
There are many sort of demographic groups within societies that are sometimes
marginalized in certain ways.
You know, and so the student in the classroom.
And often in these contexts as well, sometimes these people are loners or singletons.
So they don't have anybody else to even talk to get a sense of,
Is this normal?
So that in fact, it really is incumbent upon teachers in the classrooms that they said.
How are you responding to the students when they put their hands up?
Do you have a way where, in fact, you are getting to every student
and some students are not being left out unintentionally?
I mean, it's not always intentional.
If you are a supervisor in a company, right, are you giving feedback and clear directions
to all of the employees, again, in the same way?
do you have the employees help set up the structures that in fact allow for the feedback?
We come back to those things about autonomy, competence, and belonging, because that's the
other thing that structural inequities do. They decrease belonging, right? Do I really fit here?
And so the structural inequities can infect all three of those major aspects of self-determination theory.
Dr. Worrell, Dr. Gorlick, I want to thank you very much for
joining me today. This has been very interesting. Thank you. Thanks for having us. It was a pleasure.
Yes, I enjoyed myself. Thank you very much. And to our listeners, if you're interested in learning more,
you can order the book at www.apa.org slash books. You can find previous episodes of
Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.spakingof Psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify,
YouTube, or wherever you get podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe, and
leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at
speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you
for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.
