Self-discovery characterizes the late teens and early twenties. Accordingly, many young people turn to colleges and universities – with their expansive resources for occupational, ideological, and interpersonal exploration – to help them clarify who they are and where they are going in life. Although changes in identity and self-direction are normative, perhaps even expected, parts of one’s journey through college, people vary in their ability to find threads of continuity within themselves in the face of change. This leaves many of them feeling unstable and disconnected from the people they were in the past. A sense of being “off-course” in life is known as derailment and is consistently related to elevated levels of concurrent psychological distress. As demand for mental health services on college campuses rises across the nation, derailment represents a potentially salient experience that can help educators and practitioners better address the developmental needs of their students. In this chapter, I review the features of emerging adulthood before unpacking derailment and what it could mean within the landscape of this period. Then, against the backdrop of existing identity and purpose formation literature, I explore the alignment between current United States (US) college structures and the developmental needs of students, theorizing on how traditional institutional policies, practices, and opportunities encourage or discourage derailment during a student’s tenure. Finally, I close by looking ahead to the future, calling for empirical investigation of how higher education can support young people in finding a balance between maintaining personal stability and undergoing radical personal change.

Chapter 3 links context-dependent choice with what has recently been called in economics the “reconciliation problem” between positive and normative economics, and argues that efforts to solve that problem have led to a number of different strategies for reconstructing economics’ individual conception. It first reviews the mainstream’s “inner rational agent” attempt to preserve Homo economicus and then contrasts two broad strategies for reconstructing economics’ individual conception based on opposing views of individual autonomy: an “internalist” view that makes it depend on private subjectivity, and an “externalist” view that makes it depend on economic and social institutions. The chapter reviews four, recent strategies in the literature which take the “externalist” view and move toward a socially embedded individual conception. All four make ability to adjust part of what people are, but all four remain attached to the idea that individuals are only made up of preferences. Thus, I argue they fail to explain how people are autonomous individuals able to choose and act freely.

This chapter tells the fascinating story of how human motivational processes evolved from the humblest of creatures, starting with “primordial” goals and precursors of basic emotions. In addition to explaining how our capabilities for self-direction and self-regulation evolved, this chapter provides a way of understanding the complexly organized motivational systems we see in humans in a way that transcends specific motivation theories. It is thus a chapter about the fundamental properties of human nature as they relate to motivation and optimal functioning rather than a chapter about a particular theoretical approach to human motivation. That is an essential framing, as one of the basic premises of this book is that efforts to motivate self and others can best succeed if they are consistent with basic human nature.

Chapter 5 defines the concept of autonomy and discusses autonomy as an inherent feature of good teachers. The author then describes small-scale qualitative data collected from language teachers to investigate the relationship between autonomy and good language teaching, before concluding with the role of autonomy in effective language teaching and the potential benefit in engaging in action research as a means of promoting autonomy.