Well, most of this week we've been talking about the impact of people's life goals on their well being. What we've seen is that people who are pursuing more extrinsic life goals, people who were after money or after fame, or after becoming more attractive, tend to be more unhappy than people who emphasize those goals less than life. These findings are a result of lower need satisfaction in people pursuing such goals. As it turns out when you're pursuing those kinds of goals, you feel less autonomy, less competence and relatedness, and this is why there's lower well being. This is a pattern that as we've shown exists across cultures, and I guess exists across ages. Even when you're successful at extrinsic goals, it doesn't significantly add to happiness. This was recently poignantly demonstrated in some studies that were done in Belgium with older adults who were asked to look back retrospectively on their life and the attainments that they had accomplished. This was done by Van Hiel and Vansteenkiste in Belgium. In their first study, they interviewed people who were on average 68 years old and said, "To what extent have you attained your intrinsic aspirations, attained good relationships, attained giving to your community or personally grown over your lifetime? That predicted strong well-being in these older adults, and greater ego integrity and lower despair. Interestingly, those who had been very successful at their extrinsic attainments did not show higher well-being and actually showed higher despair. In a somewhat older age group, this same team of researchers interviewed people who were now on average over 75 years old. They found the same results which is those older adults who'd reported that they had attained their intrinsic goals in life, had higher well-being, lower depressive symptoms, more ego integrity. Interestingly, they were much less afraid of their impending old age. They had more death acceptance and lower death anxiety. This was not true of the people who had attained extrinsic goals in their lifetime. These things were not predictive of better outcomes at that age. So, even in old age, even retrospectively, we can see that its intrinsic attainments that are really behind higher well-being. Now, there's a couple of reasons why extrinsic goals interfere with wellness. One of the main ones is just moment to moment as you're pursuing extrinsic goals, they're likely to be less satisfying or basic psychological needs. As we showed with the example with lawyers, lawyers who were pursuing money even though they were successfully attaining more money, they had less autonomy on a day to day basis. This interfered with their overall well-being. Similarly, people who are focused on image and fame are more likely to feel socially competitive to be comparing themselves with others, and to be less attuned to be empathic with others as well. So, it pulls them away from relatedness, satisfactions, as well as autonomy. It's through such mechanisms that pursuit of extrinsic goals in a very proximal moment to moment way interferes with the satisfactions that lead to well-being. But there's another reason why we find consistently that people who put a lot of importance on extrinsic goals have less wellness. That's because they already started out with less wellness. We had the hypothesis early on in our work in this area that, many times people adopt extrinsic goals like needing a lot of money or caring about their image as a compensatory strategy to make up for insecurities they feel due to failures in earlier need satisfaction in development. For instance, we hypothesized that if parents were more controlling or more cold and rejecting to their children. Their children would grow up with a kind of insecurity and they'd be trying to make up for this insecurity, this lack of us feeling of worth by getting the external trappings of worth. That would be represented by material acquisitions. So, our assumption was if parents were less need supportive in early childhood, their children would grow up to be more materialistic. In a longitudinal study, Tim Kasser and I verified this hypothesis or confirmed this hypothesis in a study of teenagers in the Rochester New York area. Interviews with their mothers as well as the children's self report on the parenting style, show that when mothers in particular were more controlling or less warm to their children, those children years later showed up to be more materialistic. More interested in material acquisitions, and they had higher psychopathology, more conduct disorders and other signs of internal distress as well. So, a focus on extrinsic goals is really a compensatory strategy many times of people trying to find some basis of worth. But unfortunately, even when they attain that it doesn't solve the problem for them. They still have lower well-being. So, that hypothesis also is the other way in which extrinsic goals interfere with well being. So, when we then think about why do people so prevalently adopt extrinsic goals, why are we so much after money, after fame or after appearance? Well, a lot of it has to do with just our culture. Media exposure itself tells us that these are the pathways to happiness. Sometimes we're even told that having the right car, having the right clothes, having the right material possessions, those would be the things that will lead us to be happy. Indeed, our research shows that the more your media exposure for instance the more people watch TV, the more they endorse extrinsic goals. The more they care about money, the more they care about their image and the result of that is the less happy they are. When we look across our own cultural patterns in the United States over the past 70 years, we see that there's been an increasing focus on extrinsic goals. In some ways to the detriment of our well-being. There's a study that was done by Twenge and colleagues that came out in 2010, where they were looking at 70 years of MMPI scores in incoming college students. These MMPI scores are really ways that you can assess psychopathology in a given population. They found over this, over 70 years at cohorts of entering college students in the US, it showed increasing signs of anti social attitudes or what was called psychopathic deviation on the MMPI, and increased signs of depression among other indicators that well being hasn't gone up over the last 70 years in our current college students. So, they tried to analyze their data in terms of what would account for this increasing distress that is being seen in our college populations. They tried all kinds of things. They tried to control for changes in economics, changes in religion, changes in family structure, and none of these macro variables really predicted this temporal trend toward lower mental health in the college population. What they found however, is that the pattern of change really fit greater endorsement of extrinsic over intrinsic goals in youth. Indeed, what they concluded and I quote from their study here, they said, " Over time, American culture has increasingly shifted toward an environment in which more and more young people experience poor mental health and psychopathology, possibly due to an increased focus on money, on appearance, and on status rather than a focus on community and close relationships." In other words, their data showed that it was the increasing adoption of extrinsic goals that was associated culturally with an increased adoption, with the increased psychopathology experienced by college students. Now, American culture is not unique in this respect. If we look across the world with globalization and consumers, we can see that there's always a push for us to become more extrinsic. One of the lessons that we've learned from our research is that when it comes to happiness, this isn't the golden pathway. In fact, it's the intrinsic goals that matter most as Aristotle long ago hypothesized.
