What makes a life meaningful? Folk intuitions about the content and shape of meaningful lives

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 peo ple 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 study ing 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 mean ingfulness 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 philosophi cal literature to investigate the folk concept of meaningful life.