Abstract: Purpose in life (PIL) is often associated with grand achievements and existential beliefs, but recent theory suggests that it might ultimately track gainful pursuit of basic evolved goals. Five studies (N = 1,993) investigated the relationships between fundamental social motives and PIL. In Study 1, attribution of a life goal pursuit to disease avoidance, affiliation, or kin care motives correlated with higher PIL. Studies 2 and 3 found correlations of self-protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, mate retention, and kin care motives with PIL after controlling for potential confounds. Study 4 showed that writing about success in the status, mating, and kin care domains increased PIL. Study 5 replicated the effect for mating and kin care, but not for status. Results imply that fundamental motives link to PIL through a sense of progress, rather than raw desire. Overall, this set of studies suggests that pursuit of evolved fundamental goals contributes to a purposeful life.
Keywords: motivation, purpose, meaning, well-being, evolution
General Discussion (excerpts)
The results of these studies present the first causal evidence
that thinking about satisfying at least some evolved social
goals increases PIL. Study 1 showed that the extent to which
individuals attributed their important goal pursuits to disease
avoidance, affiliation, and kin care motives predicted higher
PIL. Participants did not draw their own connections in
Studies 2 and 3, instead completing validated measures of
each construct. Study 2 showed that self-protection, affiliation,
status, mate retention, and kin care motives predicted
higher PIL among undergraduates, controlling for personality
and affect. Study 3 showed that affiliation, status, and kin
care motives predicted higher PIL, controlling for personality,
affect, regulatory focus, and approach/avoidance motivation.
Study 4 demonstrated that writing about accomplishment
of status, mating, or kin care goals increases PIL about
equally and that preexisting status and kin care motives made
the manipulations of those domains more effective in boosting
PIL. Study 5 replicated a causal effect of writing about
mating and kin care, but not status. Post-tests showed that the
manipulations did not affect amount of fundamental motivation
per se, suggesting that motive satisfaction feelings may
have increased PIL.
Previous work has shown that people with a tendency
toward goal locomotion endorse more PIL than those who
merely assess new goals (Vazeou-Nieuwenhuis, Orehek, &
Scheier, 2017), leading researchers to theorize that working
toward goals increases PIL. The current work supports this
causal claim via two experiments.
The current findings both support and extend previous
work connecting fundamental social motives with purpose.
People not only believe that affiliation and kin care pursuits
lead to PIL but also people pursuing these motivations tend
to report higher PIL. Status motivations also predicted higher
PIL in Studies 2 and 3. Studies 4 and 5 showed that writing
about full accomplishment in mating, kin care, and sometimes
status domains increases PIL. Taken together, the moderation-
by-motivation finding of Study 4, the lack of motive
manipulation in Study 5, and the success-eliciting nature of
the writing prompts suggest that the feeling of progress or
satisfaction in a fundamental domain may be how fundamental
motives influence PIL.
Our work is also theoretically consistent with that of King
and colleagues, but a fuller integration with their perspective
will require more research. They make the important observation
that
the psychological approach to the experience of meaning in life
has focused on humanity’s search for an experience that seems
simultaneously ineffable yet vital, essential but somehow
potentially unattainable. Psychologists have often examined
what happens when meaning is absent: When experiences feel
senseless, when purpose is difficult to ascertain, when meaning
must be created. (King, Heintzelman, & Ward, 2016, p. 211)
In line with this expressed need for a new perspective,
we studied how everyday motives in everyday people foster
a sense of PIL. Future research should look at how
pursuing fundamental goals might influence the other facets
of MIL.
Some of the motives we studied overlap with those in
King and colleagues’ work, but not all of them. They note
that MIL is correlated with social integration (King et al.,
2016), which may be partially captured by the fundamental
motives mate acquisition, mate retention, or kin care as all
involve fostering social relationships. Ward and King (2016)
found a relationship of MIL with socioeconomic status,
which likely overlaps with the fundamental motive status.
Other predictors of MIL, such as religious faith (e.g., King
et al., 2016), likely correlate with kin care and affiliation
(e.g., Saroglou, Delpierre, & Dernelle, 2004), but are far
more distinct from fundamental motives.
With regard to causal directions, there are multiple possible
perspectives. Kenrick and colleagues (Kenrick & Krems,
2018; Krems et al., 2017) have suggested that success in evolutionary
domains can lead to well-being, and our work here
shows fundamental motives influence PIL. However, it is
also possible that meaning and purpose influence evolutionary
success in ways that are not incompatible with what we
have shown, but which represent a causal direction we did
not focus on. King et al. (2016) proposed a
meaning-as-information Framework . . . [which] draws on the
feelings-as-information hypothesis, which suggests that
affective states provide information to direct behavior and
cognitive processing in adaptive ways . . . feelings of meaning
track the coherence of one’s environment to provide important
information to direct processing in a situationally appropriate
manner. This framework suggests that strong feelings of
meaning can be adaptive because they emerge when one inhabits
a stable environment that fosters positive functioning across
many domains of life. (p. 214)
Future research should consider the multiple theoretically
derived causal directions that may be possible.
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