People Who Need People

For years, my husband Jason and I would pack the kids into the car and set off for a monthly visit to my father-in-law’s house. The 45-minute route was the same every time. From experience, I knew when we exited the highway that we had 20minutes to go. When we passed the cow pasture, we were almost there. But to this day, I cannot tell you how to get there, and without GPS I would not be able to navigate there by myself. Why not? Because my Jason always did the driving. Milyavsky et al. (this issue) argue that when a goal can be accomplished by either personal or social means, more of one results in less of the other when “no alternative goals attainable by only one of the two contrasting means are active” (p. X). In other words, the more you accomplish the goal yourself, the less you rely on others to accomplish it, and vice versa. See Figure 1. For instance, the more Jason navigated to his dad’s house, the less I took responsibility for that task. In a goal hierarchy framework, my driving and Jason’s driving would be called equifinal—substitutable means to the same end. And in the simple scenario Milyavsky et al. (this issue) consider, there are no other goals competing for attention—no alternative goals, for instance, toward which Jason or I might devote effort. The logic of Milyavsky et al.’s (this issue) so-called “hydraulic relations” model (p. 1) is watertight. The inverse relations they describe should emerge in the closed, simple system I prefer calling the ceteris paribus scenario. When all other conditions remain constant, if Jason always drives me to my father-in-law’s, why would I ever offer to do it or learn how? And if instead I preferred taking the wheel, why would I ever ask for his assistance? And yet the ceteris paribus scenario is, I think, the exception rather than the rule. More often, we are animated by a much more complex system of dynamic, interactive goals and means. I call this more complicated and common scenario mutatis mutandis, meaning “things being changed that have to be changed.” As shown in Figure 2, in life there are four complications that contribute to a positive relationship between personal agency and social assistance: (a) personal agency can increase our desire to ask for assistance from others; (b) social support can increase personal agency; (c) sometimes what is required to reach a goal is the synergistic combination of both personal action and the assistance of other people; and (d) when other people help you solve a problem, your personal agency can be applied to an alternative goal that, like the original goal, advances a superordinate goal.