Mathematical self-determination theory II: Affine space representation

Abstract

Self-determination theory is a well-established theory of motivation. This theory provides for fundamental concepts related to human motivation, including self-determination. The mathematization of this theory has been envisaged in a series of two papers by the author. The first paper entitled “Mathematical self-determination theory I: Real representation” addressed the representation of the theory in reals. This second paper is in continuation of it. The representation of the first part allows to abstract the results in more general mathematical structures, namely, affine spaces. The simpler real representation is reobtained as a special instance. We take convexity as the pivotal starting point to generalize the whole exposition and represent self-determination theory in abstract affine spaces. This includes the affine space analogs of the notions of internal locus, external locus, and impersonal locus, of regulated and graded motivation, and self-determination. We also introduce polar coordinates in Euclidean affine motivation spaces to study self-determination on radial and angular line segments. We prove the distributivity of the lattice of general self-determination in the affine space formulation. The representation in an affine space is free in the choice of primitives. However, the different representations, in reals or affine, are shown to be unique up to canonical isomorphism. The aim of this paper is to extend on the results obtained in the first paper, thereby to further lay the mathematical foundations of self-determination motivation theory.