Tuesday, March 23, 2021

Empirical Relationships Among Five Types of Well-Being

My new article with Seth Margolis, Daniel Ozer, and Sonja Lyubomirsky is now available as part of a free, open-access anthology on well being with Oxford University Press.

Seth, Dan, Sonja, and I divide philosophical approaches to well being into five broad classes -- hedonic, life satisfaction, desire fulfillment, eudaimonic, and non-eudaimonic objective list. There are many things that a philosopher, psychologist, or ordinary person can mean when they say that someone is "doing well". They're not all the same conceptually, and as we show in the article, they are also empirically distinguishable.

Because there are several types of well-being that are conceptually and empirically different, research findings concerning one type of "well-being" shouldn't automatically be assumed to generalize to other types. For example, what is true about hedonic well-being (having a preponderance of positively valenced over negatively valenced emotions) isn't necessarily true about eudaimonic well being (flourishing in one's distinctively human capacities, such as in friendship and productive activity).

As part of the background for this comparative project, we developed new measures for four of these five types of well-being, including desire fulfillment (how well are you fulfilling the desires you regard as most important), life satisfaction, eudaimonia, and what we call Rich & Sexy Well-Being (wealth, sex, power, and physical beauty; manuscript available on request).  We found positive relationships among all types of well-being (by respondents' self-ratings), but the correlations ran from .50 to .79 (disattenuated), rather than approaching unity.

We also found that the different types of well-being correlated differently with other measures. For example, the "Big Five" personality trait of Openness to Experience has generally not been found to correlate much with measures of well-being. However, we found that it correlated at .45 with our measure of eudaimonic well-being -- a fairly high correlation by social science standards -- and .57 with the "creative imagination" subscale specifically. Openness correlated much less with the other types of well-being, .07 to .21. Thus, a researcher employing a hedonic or life-satisfaction approach to well-being might conclude that the personality trait of Openness to Experience was unrelated to psychological well-being, whereas a researcher who favors a eudaimonic approach might conclude the opposite.

Well-being research is always implicitly philosophical. It always carries contestable assumptions about what well-being consists of. One's choice of well-being measure reflects those implicit assumptions.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi. Doesn't appear to be a free download from OUP by clicking on the link.

Arnold said...

Exciting, but the areas of study seem hardly distinguishable or understandable, so let's change Subjective Well Being (SWB) to Objective Well Being (OWB)...

And "affective balance" would be measured with "effective balance", not life satisfaction...

This would be a beginning distinguishment of attitudes towards introspection and extrospection, as fundamentally necessary for studying wellness of one's own being or others being's...

Not sure if 'direct observation' could ever be modeled...

Eric Schwitzgebel said...

Unknown: Did you try clicking on the "open access" link on that page?

Arnold: I guess I'm inclined to think that they are distinguishable and understandable, though perhaps we didn't do an adequate job in that chapter! I agree that introspection and direct observation are both big methodological problems, neither of which we attempted to address in this project.

Grateful said...

I can't believe there's a free pdf-version of the book! Thank you so much for this.