Table Of ContentMeanings
of Life
Roy F. Baumeister
THE GUILFORD PRESS
New York London
© 1991 The Guilford Press
A Division of Guilford Publications, Inc.
72 Spring Street, New York, N. Y. 10012
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
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ying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from
the Publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Last digit is print number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baumeister, Roy F.
Meanings of life / by Roy F. Baumeister.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-89862-763-X (cloth) 0-89862-531-9 (paperback)
1. Meaning (Psychology) 2. Life. 1. Title.
BF778.B32 1991
150—dc20
91-17859
CIP
Preface
During the seven years I have spent writing this book, I have come to realize that
there are several unusual difficulties peculiar to a project of this sort. There is no
commonly accepted pattern for social science works on broad topics such as life's
meaning, and indeed even interdisciplinary literature reviews do not necessarily
follow the same lines that more conventional (intradisciplinary) reviews do.
I have had some previous experience with interdisciplinary writing. Indeed, it was
during the writing of a previous book, Identity, that I began to realize that the logical
next step would be a work on the meanings of life. I began collecting materials for
this next project while I was still concentrating on identity. That way, by the time I
was doing the final revisions, indexing, and other wrapping-up exercises with that
book I was already working seriously on the meanings of life.
Still, this project turned out to be more complex and difficult that I had anticipated.
One sign, perhaps, is that two other books were completed in the meantime, both of
which were in some ways spin-offs from this one. I had hoped that phenomena such
as masochism and suicide would shed valuable light on how people find meaning in
life, but it gradually became apparent that the solutions to those puzzles led in quite
different directions.
Let me now offer some general and technical observations for readers who are
professional social scientists. The work that this book represents is an attempt to
bring social science knowledge to bear on a very broad problem that is, indeed, a
philosophical one in the general sense. There are two components of this work: first,
a series of interdisciplinary literature reviews that assemble the facts, and second, a
conceptual structure that attempts to impose order on the welter of research findings
and to answer the fundamental questions that form the book's focus. Each has its
peculiar challenges and requires some explanation.
The interdisciplinary literature review is not a widely practiced art. Ideally, I suppose,
and interdisciplinary reviewer should hold advanced degrees, preferably doctorates,
in every specialty he or she covers. Hardly anyone holds such
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multifaceted qualifications these days, and indeed it may even be, in practical terms,
impossible to gain such expertise, for by the time one had finished one's fourth or
fifth doctoral program the expertise from the first might be obsolete. As a result,
interdisciplinary research requires individuals to work outside of their areas of
expertise. At the very least, one must rely on the conclusions of researchers in other
areas without being able to critique those researchers' methods at a highly
sophisticated level. I have therefore relied heavily on the primary work and
conclusions of scholars in other fields rather than doing original research in those
fields myself. Thus, this work reflects a basic trust in the competence and validity of
the work done by my fellow social scientists in other disciplines. If that trust is
misplaced, then this book is built on an unsound foundation.
Some may conclude that interdisciplinary research should not be done if one cannot
be simultaneously expert in all disciplines, and individuals who feel that way are not
likely to be sympathetic to this book. My main justification for going ahead anyway is
that the alternative of forsaking interdisciplinary work altogether is unacceptable. It
seems better that we do the best we can to assemble, compare, and integrate
research findings from across different fields, than simply to allow the various social
sciences to go on assembling their vast collections of information about humanity
without paying any attention to what is going on in other, related fields.
In particular, it is important to keep in mind that nearly all the research that is
published in the social sciences is necessarily underinterpreted. A single experiment
or study cannot point to firm conclusions about very broad themes and issues. If the
author tries, the journal editors are likely to insist on removing such discussion as
speculative or irresponsible—as indeed it is, if based on a single study. A broad
literature review is another matter, however. Only the reviewer of many studies can
draw conclusions about certain broad, general patterns or integrative themes. The
jigsaw puzzle analogy is apt. The creation of single pieces is the primary task of the
individual social scientist, but no individual piece can reveal what the full puzzle looks
like. It is therefore essential that somebody occasionally try to put them together.
Otherwise we shall simply have a large, jumbled pile of excellently crafted pieces.
My own background is in psychology, and in the final analysis this book is a work of
psychology. It is thus interdisciplinary only in a limited sense. I am not seeking to
make positive contributions to the fields of history, sociology, anthropology, or any
others. Rather, I seek to draw on the knowledge that these fields have constructed,
in order to make my contribution to psychology. In other words, it is not my intention
to practice history or sociology without a license, so to speak; my intention is solely
to use historical and sociological research as input, as data, to create an empirical
basis for practicing psychology.
For this reason, one should not expect historians, sociologists, or other social
scientists to be fully comfortable with my treatment of material that is familiar to
them. In my experience, each discipline has its own rules of infer
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ence about what sorts of conclusions follow from what sorts and quantities of evidence.
Inevitably I will tend to break those rules of other fields, because I am seeking to draw
psychological conclusions. Thus, I am drawing conclusions from historical research that the
historian might well not draw, which is likely to be an unsettling surprise to the historian who
reads this work. Meanwhile, the historian is likely to think that I have missed the most
important or interesting or obvious conclusion—because, again, I am working toward
psychological conclusions, not historical ones. I suspect that such reactions are an inevitable
part of interdisciplinary work, and they may tend to further discourage people from
undertaking it. In the final analysis, one practices one's own discipline, even if one practices it
with materials that are sometimes considered the property of another discipline.
If there are special difficulties to interdisciplinary work, there are also special advantages. One
very important epistemological benefit of interdisciplinary work needs to be appreciated. Let
us assume that each field has its own methodologies and that no social science methodology is
perfect. If two very different methodologies support a particular conclusion, then one has
more confidence in it than if a pair of studies with the same methodology concur. The different
methodologies may each have flaws, but presumably they are different flaws, and so each
may be free of the other's. Convergence of evidence from multidisciplinary sources is therefore
far superior to mere replication that uses fundamentally similar methods.
When reviewing a body of literature within a particular field, one generally evaluates the
conclusions based on the amount of evidence. In an interdisciplinary review, however
the variety of the evidence can become more important than the quantity. This point is
perhaps especially relevant to the chapter in this book that deals with life change. There is not
a great deal of evidence to go on—far less, for example, than is available on happiness or
suffering or parenthood—but it is scattered among widely different disciplines. The
concurrence of such widely discrepant sources suggests that the conclusions are not simply
artifacts of one particular methodology.
Let me turn now to the overarching conceptual structure. How ought the basic ideas and
hypotheses be developed for a social science work on life's meaning? Conventional wisdom
says that social scientists should always derive their hypotheses in advance and only then turn
to empirical work to test them. In my experience, relatively few social scientists work
completely this way, and even that straight and narrow path has some pitfalls that can detract
from scientific impeccability—such as a procrustean determination to conclude that one's
theory is correct regardless of what the data say. It is hard to imagine how one could generate
a full theory about life's meaning in a vacuum, but even if one did, it might not be the best
thing for an investigator to have settled on all his or her basic ideas before beginning to
examine the evidence.
The literature reviewer is less subject than the experimentalist to the obligation to derive all
hypotheses in advance, for literature reviewers are in
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principle less able to bias their conclusions—which, after all, simply integrate material
already published by others. So perhaps there ought to be a greater tolerance of
post-hoc theorizing in a project such as this than in, say, an experimental
investigation.
For better or for worse, my approach in this work was intended to minimize the
influence of my own preconceptions. Rather than starting out with a fixed set of
ideas, I sought to keep evolving, elaborating, and refining my ideas as I collected
evidence. I certainly had some ideas when I began this work, but I tried to regard
them as tentative rough drafts rather than as firm hypotheses to be verified. As I
assembled information, I continued to revise my ideas as much and as frequently as
seemed necessary, and to add new constructs wherever appropriate. Some ideas,
hypotheses, an categories simply had to be discarded. Although I did eventually
reach the point at which the conceptual structure seemed to hold up, I had no firm
advance criteria for knowing when I had reached this stage. I simply noticed that
certain ideas had not needed revision or elaboration for a long time despite
substantial new information.
For example, consider the four needs for meaning, which form one of the conceptual
cornerstones of this work. The process of conceptual development is not described in
the book, for that process is a long and rather dull story. I started with the notion
that people will be motivated to find meaning in certain ways, as if to answer certain
questions or to resolve particular issues. But how could one settle on a list of these
questions, issues, needs? My initial, speculatively generated list proved to be
seriously inadequate to account for much of the information about individuals'
searches for meaning. And so the list began to get longer. On the other hand, I held
to the criterion that the needs for meaning must be arguably universal. So some
possible issues (e.g., life after death, or the existence of God) did not qualify. The list
of needs for meaning that I finally settled on managed to endure a considerable
onslaught of further evidence without requiring further revision, and that is the form
in which it is presented here.
Let me turn now to some considerations peculiar to the issue of life's meaning. At
first glance there is very little that is relevant, for few social scientists are specifically
concerned with learning about the meaning of life. However, it is only necessary to
broaden one's focus slightly in order to discover that the volume of potentially
relevant material is immense. The greatest single problem I had was keeping the
scope limited and deciding what to include or exclude. On that score, perhaps
inevitably, subjective judgments must play a heavy role, and it seems certain that
any other researcher doing a book like this would end up with a somewhat different
final set of things to include. It is reassuring to note, however, that when I came
upon Eric Klinger's 1977 book, Meaning and Void (which is probably the only
previous work in psychology similar to this), I found that he had indeed included a
fair number of topics that are included here, and he also used several additional ones
(such as suicide) that I had investigated with high hopes but eventually discarded as
not having
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enough relevant material to offer. Thus, allowing for some variations among
researchers as to hunches or preferences, one may conclude with some confidence
that there is indeed a basic core of empirical issues that do pertain to life's meaning.
After all, it is hard to imagine how a work on life's meaning could completely neglect
happiness, love, work, or religion.
Another question is how much evidence to accumulate on each point. In a work such
as this, one could go indefinitely looking for evidence about each assertion and each
conclusion. When conducting literature reviews, I tend to lean toward the thorough
side, although others might be even more thorough. My own inclination was made
somewhat embarrassingly plain to me when I taught a seminar on this material
during the intermediate stages of this work. One student commented at the end of
the semester that each two-hour lecture should have been reduced to about fifteen
minutes! He explained that the key ideas could have been covered much more
concisely if I hadn't been so intent on providing multiple empirical confirmations of
each point.
Of course, to a reader who disagrees with a particular conclusion, it is likely to seem
that I did not consider enough evidence to avoid some error. Ultimately, there is no
fully satisfactory guideline, for one could continue indefinitely and spend one's entire
life assembling evidence, and then the book might never be finished. I suspect it is
not possible, at least for me, to write this book in a manner that will satisfy every
reader, expert, or reviewer. My approach to the 'How much evidence is enough?'
question was therefore rather crude. I continued as long as I thought was
appropriate, then I continued a moderate amount further, and then I stopped. The
cue I relied on to tell me I was nearly done was duplication without further
contribution—that is, whenever I noticed that a sizable amount of new information
had simply confirmed previous evidence without providing anything substantially new
or different on the conceptual level. As I said, I generally read somewhat further just
to be safe, but that was the final stage, unless something new and important
emerged then or later.
Aside from the problem of collecting evidence, there is the problem of how to present
it, and the central dilemma is how to achieve a balance between in-depth coverage
of a few main points and findings, and more superficial but broader coverage. A book
on meaning has to develop the contexts and implications of the key topics it covers,
and incomplete coverage would detract from the scientific value. On the other hand,
it is possible to go overboard and make this a thorough but laboriously slow-moving
work. Many first drafts of chapters contained detailed discussions of certain research
literatures, which reviewers uniformly felt seemed like long digressions. A well-
written book ought to devote space to each topic in proportion to its importance to
the book's argument; but how does one reconcile that wish with the occasional
presence of dozens of studies and controversial complexities on topics that would
seemingly deserve only a page or two? One solution has been to move some of these
lengthy reviews to Appendices. That way, experts and people with particular
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interests can scrutinize the evidence, while others do not have to wade through page
after page of tangential material.
This book has been the most difficult but also the most stimulating and satisfying
research project of my career, and I am indebted to the many people who aided me
in various ways. I particularly wish to thank Todd Heatherton, Dan Wegner, Peter
Salovey, Nancy Cantor, and Minda Tessler for their encouragement and suggestions.
Seymour Weingarten's editorial guidance has been welcome and valuable. I am
grateful to the many students in seminars who helped me refine various ideas. The
support of Case Western Reserve University has been a great help, and most
noticeably my recent department chairman, Cleve Gilmore, greatly facilitated my
efforts on this book. I also benefited greatly from my sabbatical at the University of
Texas, particularly the contacts with Bill Swann and Dan Gilbert. Above all, I am
deeply indebted to the multifaceted contributions of Dianne Tice, who helped and
supported me in all stages of this work and in all its parts.
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Contents
PART I
Basic Patterns of Life and Meaning
ONE Who Says Life Has No Meaning? 3
TWO Coming to Terms with Meaning 12
THREE The Four Needs for Meaning: An Existential 29
Shopping List
FOUR The Myth of Higher Meaning 58
PART II
Looking for Answers
FIVE Self-Identity and the Value Gap 77
SIX Work, Work, Work, Work 116
SEVEN Passionate Love, Domestic Bliss 145
EIGHT Religion 182
PART III
Adjustment, Well-being, and Threat
NINE Happiness 209
TEN Suffering and Unhappiness 232
ELEVEN Meanings of Death 269
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P A R T IV
Changes in Meaning
T W E L V E Life Change: Adding and Subtracting 295
Meanings
T H I R T E E N Why Women Once Disliked Sex 328
Epilogu
357
e
A P P E N D I X A The Work Ethic 371
A P P E N D I X B The Parenthood Paradox 388
R E F E R E N C E S 397
INDEX X 419
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