EFFECTIVENESS IN HUMANS AND OTHER ANIMALS: A COMMON BASIS FOR WELL-BEING AND WELFARE

Human well-being research and animal welfare science are separate fields, yet they share a common question: What makes life worth living? In this chapter, we propose that effectiveness, a new theory of motivation (Higgins, 2012), may provide a common ground for exploring the answer to this question in humans and other animals. The effectiveness approach contends that people and other animals want to be successful in having desired results (value effectiveness), establishing what is real (truth effectiveness), and managing what happens (control effectiveness) and that, importantly, well-being and welfare result when these three domains work together to create organizational effectiveness. In this chapter, we provide evidence supporting the claim that humans and other animals want to succeed in each of these three domains. We then demonstrate how organizational effectiveness, in particular, ties together the well-being and welfare literatures. We end the chapter with recent empirical evidence of the unique contribution provided by the effectiveness approach and suggest avenues for future research.