Self-transcendence or self-enhancement: People's perceptions of meaning and happiness in relation to the self.
Journal of experimental psychology. General February 1, 2023 DOI: 10.1037/xge0001297
Summary
People prioritize societal benefits over personal gains when assessing the meaning of experiences. In a comprehensive analysis involving 1,362 participants across seven studies, individuals rated jobs and life advice based on their societal impact more than on self-enhancement. While self-enhancement was similarly weighted in happiness judgments, it played a larger role in personal evaluations of meaning. These findings highlight that perceptions of meaning are more self-transcendent compared to those of happiness, revealing important distinctions in how we derive significance from our lives.
Abstract
We all desire to have meaningful experiences in life, but what factors give rise to perceptions of meaning? Across seven preregistered studies (total N = 1362), we examined the role of self-transcendence (i.e., benefits to society) and self-enhancement (i.e., benefits to the self) in people's judgments of meaning, in comparison with their judgments of happiness. We found that people weighed benefits to society more heavily than benefits to the self when evaluating the meaning of different jobs (Study 1), other people's life (Study 2a), and advice given to others (Study 2b). In contrast, benefits to the self were weighed similarly to (Studies 1 and 2) or even more heavily than benefits to society (Study 3) in people's judgments about happiness, suggesting people's meaning judgment is more self-transcendent than happiness judgment. Similar differences between meaning and happiness were found in participants' first-party perceptions of their own jobs (Study 4), advice intended to improve their own lives (Study 5), and actual feelings of completing a behavioral task (Study 7), except that self-enhancement played a relatively bigger role in first-party meaning judgments than in third-party meaning judgments (Studies 4-6). The results consistently suggest that people's meaning perceptions are more self-transcendent than their happiness perceptions (Studies 1-7). Our findings help illuminate the social-cognitive processes underlying people's perceptions of meaning, as well as shed light on the similarities and differences between people's conceptualizations of meaning and happiness. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).