Making autotelic people

A number of ideas came out from last week’s HCI seminar on flow (including ). One of them involved a discussion of the importance of autotelic people. Autotelism is when the purpose of something is in the thing itself. The reward is intrinsic. In his seminal book, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that there are autotelic personalities capable of finding pleasure in any context. For these people, it is easier to achieve a flow state.

Autotelic Art
The artist describes this pencil drawing (posted on Flickr) as “a representation of holding on to the feeling of being alive, which is done by showing life as a water drop which is contained within a pattern.” It is likely the artwork arose before the meaning was assigned, however. The art exists for its own sake. Similarly, autotelic people are capable of finding joy—that flow state—it almost any context. They flow by manufacturing their own set of challenges to match a chosen set of skills.


The impact of family
Csikszentmihalyi discusses cultural and individual barriers to flow, of course—a lack of societal rules, too many constraints running counter to one’s own goals, attentional disorder, self-centeredness—and certainly there are other sources of obstacle to autotelic learning. However, it is his commentary on family that resonated most.

So how does one craft an autotelic person? Csikszentmihalyi—a big fan of alliteration—identified five things a family does to help matters: Clarity, Centering, Commitment, Choice and Challenge. Clarity is when the goals and feedback from the family are unambiguous. Centering occurs when the child gets a sense that what she does is important and interesting to the parents, and that there is a level of commitment to a trusting environment, allowing the child to lower defenses and become involved with those interests. The child must also feel there is a real choice in their actions, including decisions to break family rules and suffer consequences. The challenge parents provide presents the child with a range of complex options from which to choose. People who grow up in such a family environment, according to Csikszentmihalyi, stand a much better chance of developing autotelic personalities through the confidence and natural curiosity that arises.

Furthermore, he suggests “there are ways that parents behave with babies much earlier in life that will also predispose them to find enjoyment either with ease or difficulty.” This is the underlying idea behind attachment parenting. Creating strong emotional bonds with infants develops trust that their emotional needs will be met. The result of strong attachment is that the child stands a much better chance of developing “secure, empathic, peaceful, and enduring relationships.” To that end, Attachment Parenting International (API) suggests eight guidelines to help families produces attached relationships:

1. Be prepared for childbirth.
2. Respond to your infant’s emotional needs.
3. Breastfeed your baby.
4. Wear your baby.
5. Share a bed with your baby. (co-sleeping)
6. Avoid frequent, prolonged separations from your baby.
7. Use positive, non-violent methods of discipline to help children develop empathy and self-control. (positive discipline)
8. Maintain balance in your family life.

Humans are inherently wired for such connection, both to crave and provide it.

Universal v. Cultural
Two studies—”Universals of Child Rearing” (Naomi Quinn, Duke) and “Emotional Learning in Infants: A Cross-Cultural Examination” (Michael Lamport Commons and Patrice Marie Miller, Harvard)—offer different, but related explanations for how parenting practice arises and its impact on young children.

The Quinn article describes four universal features of child rearing—make lessons constant; link lessons to emotional arousal; connect lessons to evaluation of the child; and prime the child to be predisposed to learn—that span cultural differences to explain how children are turned into adults. “The result, human adulthood, could not be accomplished otherwise,” Quinn concluded.

The work by Commons and Miller, which is a key citation in the later work by the Stone Center, delves into the benefit and detriment early childhood learning experiences hold on future life. As with Quinn, Commons and Miller recognize the differences in cultural context when it comes to child rearing. “[W]hat is viewed in one culture as normal emotional learning and obviously the correct methods for achieving that learning,” they wrote, “may be seen by another culture as strange, deficient or even pathological.” The authors suggest ways to study the effects of these early parenting decisions, but more importantly conclude that early stressful experiences—such as being left to “cry it out,” a controversial method of sleep training promoted by Richard Ferber— may result in later difficulty in handling future stress. Stress in infants may result in higher levels of cortisol, long-term, and emotional behaviors may be learned subcortically and persist. In other words, trauma in babies equates to an easier path to trauma in adults.

Tying these ideas together, it is suggested that parenting is a universal trait in humans, explaining why so many different approaches yield essentially the same results: valued adults. However, the decisions about how to achieve those universal goals vary across cultures and philosophies. These different approaches are vital in explaining why people achieve flow states differently and with a varied degree of difficulty. Autotelic personalities arise from stable, loving, trusting family environments, such as those modeled in attachment parenting.