Interdependent Self-Determined Motivation: A Complementary—Yet Often Overlooked—Model of Self and Agency Across WEIRD and RELATE Cultures

Abstract

Students’ academic motivation is rooted in their self and occurs in a particular sociocultural context. The academic motivation literature has been replete with the work that revolves around the concept of self-determination and personal causation. This view of motivation is predominantly built on the independent models of the self and agency that are more pervasive among individuals in culturally individualistic and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic or WEIRD societies. Individuals in nonWEIRD cultures, however, would internalize, ascribe to, and make collective goals, relational values, and group preferences as key constituents of their self. Thus, students in the more collectivistic and nonWEIRD traditions tend to adopt what I call the interdependent self-determined motivation. Like its independent self-determined counterpart, the interdependent self-determined motivation promises an equally powerful way of explaining student motivation. Aligned with the recent call for considering both intrapersonal and interpersonal roots and processes of motivation to arrive at a more holistic understanding of human motivation, the current focus on the interdependent ways of being, doing, and becoming builds a more culturally comprehensive and responsive science of student motivation and provides a culturally diversified educational psychology toolkit that benefits our understanding of student motivation across cultural boundaries. Implications for theorizing, research, and practice of the synergistic integration of the independent and interdependent models of student motivation are drawn and discussed.