Autonomy is equally important across East and West: Testing the cross‐cultural universality of self‐determination theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Self-determination theory (SDT) posits the importance of three basic psychological needs (i.e., relatedness, autonomy, and competence) in promoting achievement. However, some cross-cultural researchers have cast doubt on the generalizability of the theory to non-Western cultures. The primary aim of the study was to test whether provision of support for relatedness, autonomy, and competence would be associated with achievement across both Western and Eastern cultures. METHOD: We drew on a subsample of students from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (n = 92,325 students from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, and USA (Western societies); and Hong Kong SAR, Japan, Macau SAR, Shanghai, South Korea, and Taipei (Eastern societies); 46,006 were females and 46,319 were males, with a mean age of 15.77 (SD = 0.29) years). We used multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MG-CFA) and multi-group structural equation modeling (MG-SEM) to analyze the data. RESULTS: Provision of the three basic needs correlated positively with achievement across cultures, providing broad support for the cross-cultural universality of SDT. MG-SEM indicated that relatedness and autonomy support were equally important for student achievement in both Western and Eastern cultures, whereas competence support was found to be more important to students in the West than in the East. CONCLUSION: Findings support the cross-cultural relevance of SDT while at the same time highlighting important cultural variations such as greater importance of competence support in the West, suggesting the need to be cognizant of both cross-cultural universality and variability in motivational theorizing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".