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 Mengdi Huang, Fan Yang 38 citations
Across seven preregistered studies with 1,362 participants, people judged meaningfulness more by benefits to society than by benefits to themselves, whereas judgments of happiness weighed self-benefits equally or more heavily. This pattern held when evaluating jobs, other people's lives, advice, and one's own experiences, though self-benefits played a larger role in first-person meaning judgments than in third-person ones. The findings indicate that meaning perceptions are more self-transcendent than happiness perceptions.