Underestimating Meaning

People make many decisions in life (e.g., what job to take, whether to have kids) based on how they expect those decisions to make them feel. Ultimately, people want to make choices that contribute to leading a meaningful life, and doing so results in greater well-being, giving back to their communities through service, and pursuing careers that benefit society such as nursing and teaching. However, people can underestimate how meaningful an experience will be (e.g., that attending medical school would enhance their sense of purpose deeply), leading them to pursue suboptimal paths. This project studies the conditions that impact people's underestimations of the meaningfulness of future experiences, why they are errant in these assessments, and how to make better life decisions. This project examines errors people make in underestimating the meaning of future experiences by identifying the boundary conditions and mechanisms underlying how people anticipate meaningfulness in life decisions. In field and lab experiments, the work tests the hypotheses that people routinely underestimate the meaning of life experiences, and whether these errors extend equally to positive and negative experiences and to both milestone and mundane life events. Finally, the project examines when and why people are most likely to underestimate meaning to help improve meaningfulness forecasting accuracy. Many meaningful growth experiences involve discomfort, and if people underestimate the meaning of such experiences, they may pursue relatively meaningless but comfortable experiences over meaningful and challenging ones. Correctly anticipating that life experiences may be more meaningful than anticipated may improve people's ability to make more informed choices and can encourage them to pursue meaningful activities (e.g., volunteering, prosocial careers) that enhance society. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.