Self-determination theory | The Mouse Trap

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Victor E Frankl

Schematic of an idealized analytical instrument. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In today’s post I will be drawing heavily from the spiritual traditions of India (Yoga etc), and interested readers are redirected to these excellent sources for more information about the same.

As per the spiritual tradition of India, Mind (or Antahkaran) is made up of four functions or parts. These are Manas, Chitta, Ahamkar and Buddhi. These are typically translated as sensory-motor mind, memory bank, ego and intellect respectively. As an interesting aside, Buddha derives from the common root of Buddhi (budh- to know) and stands for the enlightened one.

Here is a brief description of the four functions:

Manas is ordinary, indeterminate thinking — just being aware that something is there and automatically registers the facts which the senses perceive.

The subconscious action, memory, etc., is caused by chitta. The function of chitta is chinta (contemplation), the faculty whereby the Mind in its widest sense raises for itself the subject of its thought and dwells thereon.

Buddhi determines, decides and logically comes to a conclusion that something is such-and-such a thing. That is another aspect of the operation of the psyche — buddhi or intellect. buddhi, on attending to such registration, discriminates, determines, and cognizes the object registered, which is set over and against the subjective self by aha?k?ra.

Ahamkara — ego, affirmation, assertion, ‘I know’. “I know that there is some object in front of me, and I also know that I know. I know that I am existing as this so-and-so.” This kind of affirmation attributed to one’s own individuality is the work of ahamkara, known as egoism.

There is also a hierarchical relation between these with Buddhi at the top and Manas at the bottom. Now, lets look at each of these more closely.

Manas, or sensory-motor mind, is not just registering stimulus but also responsible for executing actions and may be equated with the sensory/ motor cortical functions of the brain. It controls the 10 Indriyas (5 senses and 5 action-oriented faculties). Its important to note that Manas is doing both the functions associated with stimulus as well as the response, though its the first one when it comes to stimulus processing (registering the stimulus) and the last one when it comes to executing responses/actions ( it blindly executes the action that has been decided / chosen upstream). Of course one could just have a reflex action where a stimulus leads to response, but in majority of human action, there is a space between the two. That space is provided by the rest of the mind functions.

Chitta, or memory-prospecting mind, may be typically equated with the association cortex part pf the brain. Many refer to chitta as the memory or impressions bank, but forget to mention the future oriented part of it. Here is a quote:

The part of the Mind thinking and visualizing the objects, events and experiences from the past or the future (emphasis mine) is called the Chitta and this act is called Chintan.

Its thus evident that Chitta drives Manas not only based on past memories, but also based on future expectations or predictions. From brain studies , we know that the same part of the brain is used for memory as well as prospection. Chitta using past memories to drive manas (and thus behavior or motivated cognition) I view as being conditioned by classical conditioning processes. Chitaa using future expectations/ predictions to drive behavior and motivated cognition, I view as being conditioned by operant conditioning processes. In many philosophical and spiritual traditions, one of the aims is to get over (social) conditioning. Chitta hinders spiritual awakening by using habits, which is an integral pat of chitta function. The habits are nothing but the conditioning, but again one in stimulus path and the other in response/action path.

Ahamkara, or experiential-agentic self, may be typically equated with consciousness/ conscious and ego-driven self. It knows and say ‘I am’ Conscious entities typically have two functions- experience and agency. It is something it is to be like that conscious entity (experience) and the entity has volition or ability to do things (agency). The concept of self as a conscious entity that has experience (in the stimulus path) and agency (in the response/ action path) is important for this notion of ahamkara. With self comes concepts like real self and ideal self which drive and are driven by experience and agency respectively. The less the discrepancy between the two the better your spiritual growth. An interesting concept here is that of coloring or external decorations- your coloring or how you see your self do lead to downward impact on chitta and manas by contaminating the stimulus/ action.

Buddhi, or knowing-deciding mind, is the final frontier on your path to spirituality. The typical functions associated with Buddhi are knowing, discriminating, judging and deciding. I think knowing/ discriminating (between stimuli/ actions etc) is a stimulus path function, while judging/ deciding (between actions/ responses/ attending to a stimuli) is a response path function. However I also believe they converge to a great extent here or else we will have a problem of turtles all the way down. Once you start to see things as they are, you are also able to choose wisely. At least that is what the scriptures say and what Boddhisattvas aspire or achieve.

To me this increasingly fine-grained control of what we perceive and how we act , from the gross actions and perceptions of manas to the discriminating decisions of buddhi are very intuitively appealing and also appear to be grounded in psychological and neural processes.

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Mindfulness (Buddhism based) has become all the rage nowadays, yet if we look at the spiritual traditions of India, perhaps while Yoga defined as Chitta vritti nirodaha (or “Yoga is the silencing of the modifications of the mind”) does refer to being in the present (here-and-now) and not to be disturbed by the perturbations of chitta (memories of past or expectations of future), one also needs to go beyond just Chitta vritti, to addressing the Ahamkara coloring and finally to try achieving the Buddha nature where there is little disparity in doing and being. (Mindfulness) Meditation needs to move beyond being curious, non-judgemental and in the present to where one doe shave a judgement function, but one that is perfectly attuned.

: Image via Wikipedia

A new and important research paper by Ed Diener et al has been recently published in JPSP and you should read the paper in full by requesting reprint using this page (this is how I got access to the paper) . It is very lucidly written and bears upon an important question: can money buy us happiness and if so to what extent and of what kind?

The research paper itself is a result of a till-to-the-date largest Gallup survey of people in diverse countries and covering a large set of people that is a fairly representative sample.

At the outset, Deiner et al differentiate between different types of well-being. Astute and regular readers of this blog will remember the distinction between positive and negative emotions that was earlier highlighted with respect to health and well-being.

There we distinguished between positive emotions and negative emotions as belonging to different types of affective phenomenon (see also this post that distinguishes between the two) , but it is also important to distinguish affective from cognitive phenomenon. while talking about happiness either we may be talking about the positive affect we experienced recently; or the fact that we did not feel any negative affect recently; or we may be using cognitive evaluations of our overall satisfaction with life. Thus overall life satisfaction is a cognitive component of happiness and well being ; while presence of negative and positive emotions is an affective and hedonic component of our happiness measure. In the past these measures were used interchangeably and without distinguishing from each pother and may have led to inconsistent or inconclusive results.

In this survey, the Diener et al group was interested in finding the effect of absolute individual income (taken on a log scale to take care of the fact that 10,000 rs for a person with 10,000 rs income mean much more than 10,000 rs to someone with income of 1,00,000 rs) , the relative (to others within the nation) individual income, the average income of the nation under study (reflecting the societal infrastructure etc) on happiness and well being as measured by three dimensions (positive emotions, negative emotions and life satisfaction). So they measured these variables and calculated their effects on the three measures of happiness and well being.

They were also interested in finding out whether money leads to happiness directly by fulfillment of basic physical needs or whether it does so via a psychological process wherein getting more material goods (that are valued by society) leads to feelings of goal achievement and thus overall satisfaction with life. Thus they measured tow variables : an index measuring possession of material valued resources like computers, and another measuring satisfaction with standard of living.

The authors were also interested in psychosocial variables like social support (say friends and family that can be relied in case of emergency), sense of autonomy, mastery and control over situations where one can show competence and whether these had any effect on life satisfactions or positive and negative emotions. Work in the past has suggested and theoretical models like Deci and Ryan’ s Self determination theory posit that meeting psychological needs like that for autonomy, competence and relationships should lead to well being and happiness. Thus they measured these psycho social variables too.

How these variables were operationalized and measured I’ll leave as task for the keen reader to read from the original paper. Here I present the major findings:

A cursory look at table 2 indicates that individual log income and national income were the best predictors of life satisfaction. It is important to note that not only individual income , but also the fact that a person was staying in a wealthy or poor nation affected the overall life satisfaction. Thus, material resources avaiable in a thriving economy affect life satisfaction positively.
A cursory look at table 2 and 3 indicates that the effect of income on life satisfaction is mediated by material possessions and satisfaction with standard of living and is not correlated that well with meeting of basic needs. Thus, the life satisfaction one feels is mostly due to the fact that one compares oneself in terms of the societal valued money that one earns/has and by the psychological process of having achieved a desirable outcome, one feels pleased/satisfied with oneself. As the authors put , this is like Berridges ‘wanting’ system and having what you want leads to satisfaction.
Another cursory look at table 2 and 3 clearly indicate that positive emotions and to a certain extent negative emotions (inversely) are predicted by psychosocial variables. That is the more social support and mastery , autonomy etc one has in one life , the greater the chances that the person feels happy on a day-to-day basis and does not feel negative emotions too frequently. This psychosocial capital enables one to like what one has got and is akin to Berridges ‘Liking’ system.
They found that relative income did not predict either life statistician or positive and negative feelings and thus the effect of social comparison might not be relevant in these particular situations when comparing with national averages .

This is the take-home message from the paper:

Contrary to both those who say money is not associated with happiness and those who say that it is extremely important, we found that money is much more related to some forms of wellbeing than it is to others. Income is most strongly associated with the life evaluation form of well-being, which is a reflective judgment on people’s lives compared with what they want them to be. Although statistically significant, the association of income with positive and negative feelings was modest. Furthermore, we found that societal income has a substantial influence on life evaluations beyond the effects of personal income, indicating that it is very desirable for life satisfaction to live in an economically developed nation. However, we also discovered that social psychological prosperity is very important to positive feelings. Some nations that do well in economic terms do only modestly well in social psychological prosperity, and some nations that rank in the middle in economic development are stars when it comes to social psychological prosperity.
If replicated, our findings have profound implications for both psychological theories of well-being and for societal policies. At the theoretical level, our results indicate that different types of well-being can be influenced by very different predictors. It is important to note that social psychological well-being is shown to be an important correlate of feelings across the globe. At the policy level, our findings indicate that more than money is needed for quality of life, and the social psychological forms of prosperity correlate only moderately with economic development. This means that societies must pay careful attention to social and psychological variables, not simply to enlarging their economies. Our findings indicate that it is important for societies not only to measure economic variables but to measure social psychological well-being variables as well.

To me, the fact that increasing income can make you more satisfied with life and the fact that greater autonomy, mastery and relationships can make you feel more good, is a win-win situation where the happiness set-point or baseline is no longer a given, but by increasing psychosocial as well as traditional capital one can hope to increase one’s cognitive and affective happiness and well being. Pursuit of money need not be at loggerheads to pursuit of autonomy or mastery or better relationships; and if they are one will have to make appropriate trade-offs depending on whether one values more life satisfactions ( living in past and future) or positive feelings (living in presents). No choice is simple, but still there is choice and hope!

Diener, E., Ng, W., Harter, J., & Arora, R. (2010). Wealth and happiness across the world: Material prosperity predicts life evaluation, whereas psychosocial prosperity predicts positive feeling. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99 (1), 52-61 DOI: 10.1037/a0018066