Self-Transcendence or Self-Enhancement: People’s Perceptions of Meaning and Happiness in Relation to the Self

People judge meaningful experiences by how much they benefit society, not just themselves. Across 7 preregistered studies with 1,362 participants, benefits to society weighed more heavily than benefits to the self when evaluating the meaning of jobs, other people's lives, and advice. In contrast, happiness judgments weighed benefits to the self similarly to or more than benefits to society. The same pattern appeared in participants' own experiences, though self-benefit played a larger role in first-person meaning judgments than in third-person ones. The findings suggest meaning perceptions are more self-transcendent than happiness perceptions.

Study at a glance

Abstract

We all desire to have meaningful experiences in life, but what factors give rise to perceptions of meaning? Across 7 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 to 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 1-2) 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.