Cousins or conjoined twins: how different are meaning and happiness in everyday life?

ABSTRACT

Are experiences that bring meaning different from experiences that bring happiness? If so, do people seek out different experiences in pursuing meaning versus happiness? In an adversarial collaboration, we conducted three preregistered experiments (total N = 879) to address these questions. We asked participants to describe an experience from the past month (Study 1) or past day (Study 2) that had provided them with either happiness, meaning, happiness without meaning, or meaning without happiness. Experiences that were happy but not meaningful differed substantially from those that were meaningful but not happy. However, experiences that provided happiness showed only small differences from those that provided meaning. In Study 3, to examine whether people seek out different experiences in pursuing happiness versus meaning, we instructed participants to choose an activity over the weekend that would provide them with happiness, meaning, happiness without meaning, or meaning without happiness. Again, experiences differed substantially when people pursued happiness without meaning or meaning without happiness, but these differences disappeared when people were simply told to pursue happiness or meaning. Our findings suggest that happiness and meaning are linked to distinct sets of thoughts, feelings and behaviors, but the differences between them are small in everyday life.

KEYWORDS:

• Happiness
• meaning
• subjective well-being
• hedonia
• eudaimonia

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Bahja Ammari for her instrumental help conducting this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Open Practices

Data and materials for this work are provided on the Open Science Framework (osf.io/s9quj). Timestamped preregistration forms are also provided on the OSF for all studies: Study1 (osf.io/nq64z), Study 2 (osf.io/2fbxc), and Study 3 (osf.io/bxv86).

Notes

1. Pilot Data. To determine the frequency of happy and meaningful experiences, we conducted a pilot test with 38 UBC students. Each day for up to seven days, we asked one group to report whether they experienced something that day that brought them (a) happiness or (b) meaning. We asked a separate group to report whether they experienced something that brought them (c) happiness without meaning or (d) meaning without happiness. Participants reported experiencing something that brought happiness on 63% of days, meaning on 45% of days, happiness without meaning on 40% of days, and meaning without happiness on 24% of days. Given these results, we expected that participants in each condition would have an experience to report at least once over the course of 7 days.

2. We added Contrast 3 to our preregistered analysis plan for Studies 2 and 3 after analyzing the data from Study 1, and before analyzing the data from Study 2 or Study 3. Communication between the authors and editor verifying this modification is available upon request.

3. We calculated the Cohen’s d for the set of happiness correlates and the set of meaning correlates by converting each individual item in the set to Z-scores. We then computed the mean Z-score across the set of variables for each condition. The resulting standardized means for each condition were used to calculate Cohen’s d. Analyses are provided on the OSF (osf.io/afnt7).

4. To determine this suggested sample size, we first calculated the average meta-analytic effect size of all the individual dependent variables for Contrast 3, d = .18. We then used G*Power3 to determine the sample size required to detect an effect between two independent groups with 80% power, assuming a two-tailed test, α = .05, and d = .18. The required sample size is 486 per group.

5. We conducted the same analysis using the meta-analytic effect size of all the individual dependent variables for Contrast 2, d = .68. The required sample size is 35 per group.

6. “To what extent was the experience negative?” was incorrectly marked with an “*” in the initial submission, but it has been corrected here.