The good life broadly and narrowly considered

THE GOOD LIFE:
BROADLY AND NARROWLY CONSIDERED
LAURA A. KING
JENNIFER EMILLA EELS
CHAD M. BURTON

Big Question:
What defines the GOOD life?

Introduction
• Much of the field of psychology is focused on answering how
humans can lead better lives.
• Better Life = Good Life
• Good Life = An Exemplary Life
• Fulfillment
• Moral Character
• Physical Health
• Success
• Excellence

Introduction
• Conceptions of the “Optimally Functioning Person”
• Allport: “healthy, mature person” as someone who possessed a variety of
functional characteristics, including the capacity for close relationships, a
positive view of himself or herself, common sense, objectivity about the
self and others, the capacity for self-extension, and, perhaps most
importantly, a unifying philosophy of life.”

Introduction
• Maslow: “as individuals who maintained a capacity for awe and peak
experiences; who were creative, democratic, and unpretentious; and who
possessed a non-hostile sense of humor and a deep compassion for others.”

Introduction
• Contemporary Research: Definition of Good Life remains implicit in the
outcomes chosen to promote.

Introduction
• We will consider the following questions:
• What is this implicit definition of the Good Life
• What is the role of positive mental states on in psychology’s approach to the
good life.
• What are folk concepts of the good life - how “just plain folk” approach the
important question of what makes a life good.
• What is the role of unhappiness in the good life?

Outline
• Implicit Definitions of the Good Life: The Problem of Happiness
• Optimal Functioning: Eudaimonia Revisited
• Folk Concepts of the Good Life
• The Role of Suffering: When Bad Things Happen to Good Lives

Implicit Definitions of the Good Life:
The Problem of Happiness

• Based on existing literature, it may be difficult to argue with the
idea that the psychological notion of the good life is the absence
of mental illness.

• Is good life essentially a happy life?
• Psychological well-being, positive affect, feelings of satisfaction, and so on
are common outcomes in a broad range of research areas.
• Other goods of life aside from happiness are associated with being happier.
• Alternative constructs thought to be indicative of the good life such as
meaning in life, autonomy, purposeful striving, optimism, and so on, tend to
be lent construct validity by their associations with measures of happiness

• Happiness appears to be something of the natural state for human
beings.
• In general, people tend to report themselves as pretty happy.
• Race and gender are relative unimportant
• Life circumstances are also relatively unimportant

• Happiness itself can predict a variety of outcomes, not just an
outcome by itself
• Not only happy people feel good much of the time, these pleasant feelings
may be associated with a variety of other goods in life.
• There may be sound empirical support for the central place of positive
mental states in (at least Western) psychology’s implicit answer to the
question, “What makes a life good?”

• Happiness might not be “everything”
• Ryff (1989): “..the previous literature has been guided by somewhat narrow
conceptions of positive functioning. Central emphasis has been given to
short-term affective well-being (i.e., happiness), at the expense of more
enduring life challenges such as having a sense of purpose and direction,
achieving satisfying relationships with others, and gaining a sense of self-
realization.”
• Myers and Diener: A person’s age, sex, race, and income does not tell us
whether one is happy.

• Are all happy lives good?
• Negative outcomes are juxtaposed on the idea that people are generally
happy.
• Can happiness alone discriminate between good lives and lives that are
lacking in essential ways.

• The role of happiness has been the central question of interest for
humanity
• Aristotle contrasted the pleasurable life with the good life and proposed the
concept of eudaimonia as an alternative to sheer hedonism.
• Hedonia vs Eudaimonia: Subjective vs Objective
• Waterman: Simple Pleasure vs Expression of the Self
• Eudaimonia defined as “a striving for perfection that represents the
realization of one’s true potential.”
• No effort vs Effort

• The role of happiness in the good life is difficult to challenge
• Though a lot of variables under happiness are beyond hedonism, most don’t
take effort or realization of potential, but a general sense of feeling good
• No one argues that happiness is the only true good in life
• Often happiness is viewed as a good proxy measure for more complex
variables such as intrinsic motivation, flow, and so on.

Optimal Functioning:
Eudaimonia Revisited

• A number of constructs meant to capture “optimal experience”
incorporate aspects of experience beyond enjoyment.
• e.g. Intrinsic Motivation
• Has been identified as associated with activities that serve essential
psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness

• Self-Determination Theory (SDT): when individuals engage in
activity that satisfies their needs for autonomy, competence, and
relatedness, they experience genuine happiness, self-esteem, and
so on.
• Activities directed towards obtaining extrinsic rewards promotes less
fulfilling states.
• A good life is a life dedicated to the satisfaction of intrinsic needs
• Good days are apparently occupied with such activities.

• Flow (Csikszentmihalyi): involves being optimally challenged by
experience.
• “In the zone”
• the demands of a situation match the individual’s abilities, and the
individual is engaged fully in the act of doing
• the person loses self-consciousness and a sense of the passing of time and
enters a different level of experience.
• while flow is itself an attractive experience, it involves effort and as such
may not be viewed as preferable to simply goofing off.

• Positive emotions are strongly associated with experiences of
intrinsic motivation
• Enjoyment is usually used as a proxy measure for intrinsic
motivation
• Short-term positive feelings are often associated with feelings of flow
• Individuals who are generally happy may be more likely to experience flow
even during routine daily activities
• The empirical relationship between the conceptually distinct notions of
hedonistic happiness and eudaimonia may not be as strong as Aristotle
thought.

• Other important goods in life
• Close interpersonal relationships
• Good health
• Wisdom
• Maturity
• Charity
• Moral Development
• Self-Control
• Purposeful Striving
• Creativity
• Accomplishments

• Other important goods in life
• Some to be seem opposite of hedonism, or may require sacrifice of
happiness
• When attained, are often associated with heightened happiness
• Happiness serves as a gauge of whether our decisions we’ve made, activities
which we are engaged and so on are indeed the ingredients for a fulfilling
life.

• Consideration of Culture
• Life satisfaction in collectivist societies tend to be based also on societal
norms aside from emotional states, i.e. living up to societal standards.
• Dependent on the perception of the self
• Individualists: Self as own life as individual
• Collectivist: Self in relational terms
• Positive affect is significantly correlated with satisfaction in all cultures, but
negative affect is only important among some collectivist societies.

• Consideration of Culture
• Life satisfaction used to be understood as the balance between positive and
negative affect and the evaluation of that balance
• In cross-cultural context, life satisfaction has been determined to have two
facets which incorporates cultural norms
• Satisfaction in specific life domains
• Global satisfaction (propensity to evaluate life positively)
• Related to personality and influenced by cultural norms and practices
• Domain satisfaction accounts for within-culture subjective well-being
variability
• Positivity accounts for cross-cultural subjective well-being variability

Folk Concepts of the Good Life

• Folk notions of what makes a life good are valuable sources of
information
• We can compare these notions with those in the literature
• It can help us ground our research in the variables and values that matter to
“real people”

• Defining the Good: Desirability and Moral Goodness
• Desirability rating is more straightforward
• Evaluation of moral goodness is much more complicated
• Ask the participants whether a person is going to heaven.
• This allows the individual to not appear judgmental while making the ultimate
judgment.

• Happiness, Meaning and Money in Folk Concepts of the Good Life
• All of three are desirable among participants
• Moral goodness of happiness: Not clearly positive
• In Judeo-Christian tradition, the suffering servant is favored to go to heaven,
and the Bible encourages individuals to suffer in silence.
• The happy person is one who found contentment and peace, leading a good life,
and/or has a clear conscience and has won God’s favor
• Moral goodness of meaning:
• Devoting one’s life to a meaningful purpose is considered a moral good

• Wealth: Clearly desirable, at least to the extent that it allows people to
meet the necessities of life
• The very wealthy are not much happier
• Correlation between wealth and happiness is modest (r=.12)
• SDT: valuing of attainment of materialistic goals over organismic needs is
associated with negative outcomes.
• Materialistic aspirations might supersede other values depending on economic /
financial conditions
• Concern for personal happiness and other aspects of life may be viewed as
luxuries—provided by living in relatively good conditions.

• Wealth: Moral goodness is less than straightforward, with the moral standing
of the pursuit of wealth is less than wholly positive.
• It is easier for the camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man
to enter into the Kingdom of God (Mat. 19:24, KJV)
• Weber (1930/1976) suggested that earthly economic success might be viewed as
a sign of God’s grace and, as such, it might serve as a proxy for an individual’s
moral standing. The wealthy might be viewed as more likely to go to heaven
because God has clearly “allowed” them to enjoy earthly success.

• Wealth: Moral goodness is less than straightforward, with the moral standing
of the pursuit of wealth is less than wholly positive.
• A survey showed that many thought Mother Theresa will go to heaven (79%)
followed by Oprah (66%) and Michael Jordan (65%).
• This shows that at least for Americans, leading an impoverished life of dedication to
a cause but marked sense of joy as well as having material success are indications of
a person’s moral standing in the eyes of God.

• People do recognize the value of happiness and meaning in life and do not
overestimate the importance of money in their evaluations of the goodness
of a life.
• Initial investigations among folk notions of naïve participants showed that
• A life with high meaning and happiness is most preferred
• On meaning has a large effect on moral goodness
• Why so few make choices that reflect this knowledge?

• Love and Work in Folk Concepts of the Good Life
• Does it matter where a person enjoys a life full of meaning and happiness?
• Research shows that:
• Both mattered at least for desirability, but a life of relationship fulfillment was
judged as more desirable and morally superior than work fulfillment
• Work fulfillment contributed to more positive evaluations of a life only when it
was paired with high relationship fulfillment.
• Work fulfillment was largely irrelevant to moral judgments of life.

• Does it matter where a person enjoys a life full of meaning and happiness?
• Research shows that:
• Meeting the organismic / intrinsic needs are more likely at the relationship
domain than work domain.
• Individuals who experienced more intrinsic need satisfaction work tend to judge
the life high in relationship fulfillment more negatively, and vice-versa.
• Even in individualistic samples, it seems that people and relationships that
matter, not success.

• Though folk concepts jibe well with psychological notions of the good life,
there is a question of application.
• More value placed on pursuit of wealth over a unifying philosophy in life
• The reasonableness and rationality of life decisions are generally justified for
economic reasons
• American workers are spending more time at work.
• It seems that people have a sense of what it takes to make a fulfilling life yet
they continue to behave in ways that contradict this intuitions.

• Is The Good Life the Easy Life?
• Does the folk concept of the good life imply simply hedonic pleasure, or
does it incorporate effort?
• Psychological theories of optimal states require effort and sacrifice.

• Research showed that the place of effort in folk concepts of the good life
depends on the type of effort:
• Effort long working hours: Both students and adults preferred the easy life
• Effort as engagement in resource depleting activity: Students rated a life of
effort higher and morally superior. Adults preferred an easy but meaningful life.
• Effort as chosen effortful engagement: Hard life was rated as more desirable
and morally superior.
• For participants, a life is more meaningful if it included difficult work
accompanied by joy
• People who have a happy life with little meaning as most likely to be judged as
going to hell.

• The role of hard work in the good life is difficult to appreciate
• Palatability increases if paired with positive emotion
• Folk concepts of the good life only incorporate hard work when that work is
operationalized as unrealistically easy.

• People have an inkling that the good life might be a difficult life, but
generally think that it is a happy, meaningful one. Such a conception of the
good life seems to imply that the good life is lived during times of
contentment and enjoyment
• Yet, if our notions of the good life are to incorporate whole lives, they must
not be limited to sun-filled weekends but include rainy days and Mondays as
well.
• A good life should include all experiences

The Role of Suffering:
When Bad Things Happen to Good Lives

• What is the place of suffering or difficult times in the good life?
• Negative experiences motivates us to search meaning, to make sense, to
find something good
• Looking beyond negative events are related to enhanced adjustment and
health benefits
• Coping might not just lead to a return to happiness but to more significant
changes in the person and in the meaning of happiness itself.

• Maturity - include the idea that the person is made more complex as a
result of the maturation process
• experiences with difficult life circumstances can foster the process of
development
• Assimilation and Accommodation in driving personality development
• The outcome of accommodative process is a new way of existing in the
world.
• Personality development nor measure of accommodation are related to
measures of happiness

• Maturity - is defined by the struggle to grasp the complexities of life and of
one’s place in the world of meaning.

A Happy Immature Person
one who is generally content but who
has a fairly simple view of himself or
herself and the world.
A Happy Mature Person
one who has grappled with life’s
difficult circumstances and come to a
sophisticated, complex view of self
and world but who has also retained
a capacity for joy and a sense of
optimism.
A Unhappy Immature Person
one who is generally unhappy and
who sees the world and himself or
herself in very straightforward terms.
A Unhappy Immature Person
one who has confronted life’s
difficulties and come to experience
the world in very complex ways but
who has, perhaps, as a result,
become overwhelmed by complexity
or who has been rendered cynical by
the vicissitudes of life.

In Conclusion:
A Multitude of Best Lives
• There may not be one good life but rather a multitude of potentially
good lives.
• It is difficult to argue with the goodness of the variety of lives that we
encounter in the world every day
• The value placed on any one outcome must be viewed in the context of
other important goods in life
• There are many paths to the life well lived, and some of the flagstones
likely to be found along these paths include happiness, meaning,
effortful engagement, relationships, maturity, and even difficult times.
• The precise layout of these many components on any given person’s path
varies according to his or her unique collection of dispositions,
experiences, and cultural context.

The good life broadly and narrowly considered

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