ABSTRACT

It is often assumed that most people want their life to be “meaningful”. But what exactly does this mean? Though numerous research have documented which factors lead people to experience their life as meaningful and people’s theories about the best ways to secure a meaningful life, investigations in people’s concept of meaningful life are scarce. In this paper, we investigate the folk concept of a meaningful life by studying people’s third-person attribution of meaningfulness. We draw on hypotheses from the philosophical literature, and notably on the work of Susan Wolf (Study 1) and an objection Antti Kauppinen raised against it (Study 2). In Study 1, we find that individuals who are successful, competent, and engaged in valuable and important goals are considered to have more meaningful lives. In Study 2, we find that the perceived meaningfulness of a life does not depend only on its components, but also on how its elements are ordered and how it forms a coherent whole (the “narrative shape” of this life). Additionally, our results stress the importance of morality in participants’ assessments of meaningfulness. Overall, our results highlight the fruitfulness of drawing on the philosophical literature to investigate the folk concept of meaningful life.

摘要

人们通常认为大多数人都希望自己的生活“有意义”。但这到底是什么意思呢？尽管许多研究记录了哪些因素导致人们体验到他们的生活是有意义的，以及人们关于确保有意义生活的最佳方式的理论，但对人们有意义生活概念的调查却很少。在本文中，我们通过研究人们对意义的第三人称归因来调查有意义生活的民间概念。我们借鉴了哲学文献中的假设，尤其是苏珊·沃尔夫的著作（研究 1）和 Antti Kauppinen 提出的反对意见（研究 2）。在研究 1 中，我们发现成功、有能力并致力于有价值和重要目标的人被认为拥有更有意义的生活。在研究 2 中，我们发现，生活的意义不仅仅取决于它的组成部分，还取决于它的元素如何排列以及它如何形成一个连贯的整体（这种生活的“叙事形状”）。此外，我们的结果强调了道德在参与者评估意义中的重要性。总的来说，我们的结果突出了利用哲学文献来调查有意义生活的民间概念的成果。