Currently reading Hoan et al. (2025) on “With or Without You? People Feel Less Autonomous During Social Interactions, Except With Close Others”

This is quite an intriguing article! Feeling more related (more belonging?) might make us feel less autonomous (except with people we are super close with)? If, motivated by self-determination theory, we try to give students opportunities to experience both autonomy and relatedness, and for feelings of relatedness/belonging, we force/encourage students to work with people they don’t really know all that well yet. But is that working against their feeling of autonomy? Let’s read!

Hoan et al. (2025) describe the dilemma in a nutshell: “it is not always possible to do exactly what you want while also getting along with others“. But of course that depends on who the “others” are. In older studies, people reported feeling like they could be themselves (i.e. more autonomous) with people that they know well, like their friends and family, than with acquaintances or co-workers. And of course it also depends on what people value how much relative to the other — independence/autonomy or attachment/relatedness.

Hoan et al. (2025) find that social interactions make people feel more connected but less autonomous, especially if the social interactions are with non-close others. For romantic partners, even though one might assume higher pressure/desire to fulfill their needs, and therefore feeling less autonomous, this is not the case. In interactions with romantic partners, people feel more autonomous than when they are on their own! This could be because autonomy could mean different things in different contexts. The authors explain: “Negative freedom refers to the “freedom from” interference and constraints that prevent a person from acting as they choose, whereas positive freedom refers to the “freedom to” act according to one’s will and pursue one’s goals. We speculate that interactions with non-close others might restrict one’s negative freedom, making them feel that their options to act or behave are limited, whereas interactions with romantic partners, friends, and family could enhance peoples’ positive freedoms by providing the support and confidence needed to act on their freedoms.” So “the autonomy that people feel with romantic partners may not just be fewer restrictions on behavioral choice, but also an imbued sense of freedom and ability to fully act on one’s desires.”

So that is nice and all, but in the article, the focus is on general well-being, and I am of course thinking about teaching and learning contexts. And there, when we — in order to increase feelings of relatedness and belonging — use methods where students are interacting with each other a lot, students are most likely not in groups with their romantic partners or other close others, so despite hopefully experiencing relatedness benefits, they likely also experience autonomy costs (and of course we have always seen that, for example when there are disagreements in groups about the focus of a group project, or difficulties in agreeing on schedules and meetings). Maybe we need to take the autonomy costs more seriously and consider that they are eating up the relatedness benefits? Of course, group work is not only about relatedness and there are in many cases lots of other intended outcomes from it. But still…

Hoan, E., MacDonald, G., & Sun, J. (2025). With or Without You? People Feel Less Autonomous During Social Interactions, Except With Close Others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 01461672251378784.