People who judge their lives to be highly meaningful are better off compared to those who rate their lives to be less meaningful in a host of important ways, including higher quality of life, slower age-related cognitive decline, and decreased risk of mortality. However, understanding exactly what people mean when they rate the meaningfulness of their lives has proven difficult. Moreover, no research has directly addressed why the experience of meaning in life is potentially adaptive: What adaptive function does this experience serve? The proposed studies address these important issues, focusing on a potentially unexpected source of meaning in life: The existence of pattern and regularity in the environment. In this sense, the feeling of meaning can be attached to an important adaptive problem - identifying reliable pattern in the environment - which is a central goal for all species. This perspective highlights the relevance of associative learning and basic processes of perception to the experience of meaning in life. A series of 11 studies will test the prediction that meaning in life ratings track the coherence of environmental stimuli. The studies involve exposing participants to stimuli that are characterized by pattern (or randomness) and measuring meaning in life. In some studies, the stimuli are presented explicitly and in others implicitly, allowing a test of whether awareness is required for these effects. A final study examines the effects of systematic variation in a discriminative stimulus in an operant conditioning paradigm on subsequent meaning in life. These studies would suggest that the feeling that life is meaningful provides important information for person: It tells us when the world is making sense.
This program of research promises to demystify the human experience of meaning in life and provide experimental evidence for the potential adaptive function of this experience. The proposed studies provide a foundation for future research integrating meaning in life, a cornerstone of psychological well-being, with cognitive science, neuroscience, and perception. Further, this research lays the groundwork for potentially innovative approaches for applied settings; for example, routine and habit may be viewed as sources meaning in life, which is an important possibility for populations that lack the introspective capacities more commonly viewed as important to meaning in life. This research aims to inform a broader perspective on meaning in life, embedded in the natural world and informed by the adaptive problems faced by human beings.
