3BI: self-determination, humanities, and social media
Welcome to my 3BI newsletter, where I share three insights from the world of behavioral science on psychology, decision-making, and behavioral change.
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Self-Determination is key to performance and well-being
American figure skater Alysa Liu became the star of the Milan-Cortina Olympics after winning the gold medal in the women’s free skate with this electric performance.
What made her routine stand out so much was how fun and joyful it was. I’ve written in the last few weeks about how the extreme pressure of the Olympics impacts athletes’ performance, but Liu seemed to lack any of that stress and simply enjoyed the process. Figure skating is notoriously demanding of athletes at a young age, but Liu famously retired at 16 to escape the grind and build a life outside of the sport. She returned to competition in 2024 invigorated and won the gold medal two years later.
It’s counterintuitive, but taking that break had a positive impact on her psychology and made her a better figure skater. For one, it created more resilience for competition. From Steve Magness:
In psychology, we call this creating self-complexity. Where you create a robust sense of self that isn’t solely tied to one pursuit. You realize you can be a mother, dad, scientist, athlete, artist, sister, and person who loves dogs all at once. A complex sense of self makes us resilient.
It also made the sport feel like an internal choice that she wanted to do vs an external obligation that was expected by others:
Self-Determination Theory is one of the most established frameworks in psychology. According to self-determination theory, the level of autonomy, or “the desire to be causal agents of one’s own life,” is intricately tied to our well-being. It serves as one of the three basic psychological needs that allows us to flourish and bolsters our motivation. When we feel like we can have an impact on whatever it is we do, we are better off. The ability to have control is central not only to overcoming adversity, but also to being a happy, healthy human being.
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A study of over 200 men and women found that when athletes trained in an autonomy-supportive environment, it was related to satisfying their basic psychological needs for well-being. Controlling environments were associated with thwarting an individual’s basic needs and lower overall satisfaction. Furthermore, they found that those in a supportive environment tended to have higher levels of mental toughness and better performances.
Hard work is critical to success, but it has to be paired with desire, passion, and autonomy to result in peak performance. Sometimes we have to step away from our pursuits to fuel the fire necessary to do the work.
Liu happens to be a psychology major at UCLA, so perhaps that curiosity about the mental side of performance has given her an edge.
Read more at Steve Magness’ Substack.
Humanities skills are becoming more valuable
The emergence of AI has caused a lot of rethinking of what careers will look like in the near future. With AI becoming especially proficient in technical tasks, humanities skills that had become undervalued in this century are once again growing in importance.
From Business Insider:
Derided by some as useless, the utility of the English major has long been questioned. Who needs to write essays (or articles) anymore in the age of AI? But AI may be more poised to disrupt humanities majors’ peers in computer science — an ironic turn of events, considering the perceived career stability of the two fields.
“We are certainly seeing organizations look more towards the soft skills, the accountability of a job, the identity of the person, their style, their empathy — their humanity,” in a world that requires both humans and technology, said Bryan Ackermann, head of AI strategy and transformation at recruiting and organizational consulting firm Korn Ferry.
When technology is moving quickly and some technical skills feel uncertain, focusing on people and the philosophy around how we think and interact with technology may be a more important baseline skill and differentiator:
Daniela Amodei, the cofounder of Anthropic, studied literature in college. In an ABC News interview, she said “the things that make us human will become much more important,” and that when her AI company hires, it looks for candidates who are great communicators. “I actually think studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever,” Amodei said.
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“Think about it this way: If you have five different companies who are using the same generative tools to develop their marketing copy, they’re all going to get generally the same type of thing,” LaGaccia said. “If everybody’s using the same tools and everybody’s inputting the same information, then how are you going to differentiate yourself in the market? That’s where creative people come in.”
Read more at Business Insider.
Social media is a structural problem, not an individual one
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU whose current work is focused on the negative impacts of social media on children. In an interview with the New York Times, he was asked about where the blame for this issue should lie and gave a great answer:
Newton: You’re understandably, and I think appropriately, very critical of the tech executives here. But I’d also note that parents gave kids these phones, and schools allowed them, and regulators did nothing for a decade. So if we’re assigning blame for this situation, how much falls on everyone else involved?
Haidt: I would say close to zero, for this reason: The whole key to solving this problem, and the reason we didn’t solve it for so long, is that it’s a series of collective-action traps. I’m a social psychologist. What we do for a living is we look at the ways that we influence each other. And there are certain situations where people say, “Yeah, I don’t want to give my 10-year-old a phone, but, you know, everyone else has one and she’s being left out, so … ”
The phones and social media, all these things — they put us in a trap, so we feel we have to give in. And since that’s the situation, I can’t blame the people. My rule as a social psychologist is: If one person does something really bad, that might be a bad person; if everybody in a situation is doing something bad, that’s guaranteed to be a bad situation.
So no, I don’t blame — I mean, of course parents should stand up and parent. But so many of us are trying, and it’s really, really hard. Everybody’s fighting all the time with their kids over this tech. We didn’t ask for these fights. So I don’t blame the parents, I don’t blame the teachers. I blame the companies.
Behavioral science shows again and again how structural and environmental factors are a much bigger influence in our behaviors than motivation or willpower. When we see a situation where the vast majority of people consistently fail to do the right thing, we should logically assume that the fault lies in the architects of the underlying choice architecture, not the individuals struggling to navigate it.
Read more at the New York Times.