Meaning & Void: Inner Experience And The Incentives In People's Lives

MEANING & VOID Inner Experience and the Incentives in People's Lives

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MEANING & VOID INNER EXPERIENCE AND THE INCENTIVES IN PEOPLE'S LIVES Eric Klinger

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS D MINNEAPOLIS

Copyright © 1977 by the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America at the North Central Publishing Company, St. Paul. Published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2037 University Avenue Southeast, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, and published in Canada by Burns & MacEachern Limited, Don Mills, Ontario Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 77-81425 ISBN 0-8166-0811-3

Preface

Meaning and Void sets out to show how human inner lives — people's thoughts and feelings — depend on and in turn influence people's commitments to goals. The book casts a wide net. It considers the way in which people's thoughts flow, the meaning of emotion and the nature of value, the causes and course of depression and alienation, satisfaction with work and marriage, the changes in people's inner lives as they get older, people's use of the mass media and of mood-changing chemicals, and the ultimate mood change, suicide. When people talk about the most basic dimensions of their lives, they often couch their thoughts in the language of "meaning" — to what extent their lives feel meaningful or empty. Meaningfulness seems to be a kind of common denominator for people, one that summarizes the way in which they are currently related to their individual world. Because the sense that one's life is meaningful is keyed to so many features of human life, it is a recurring theme in this book. Clearly, the book deals with humanistic issues, but it deals with them from the perspective of scientific psychology. It presents a picture of the way humans think and feel, a theory of human inner experience as it is bound up with the goals people strive for. The materials for this picture are the many pieces of evidence that psychological investigators have uncovered using scientifically respectable methods. I have drawn on work in both the clinical and the experimental traditions of psychology, on evidence from studies of humans and, where appropriate, from studies of animals. The synthesis that has resulted bears on many parts of psychology and, indeed, on some of the enduring great issues of the human sciences, such as the innate bases of value, the existence of universal symbols, emotion and hedonism, alienation and self-destruction. It also ap-

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pears to provide a psychological underpinning for the theory of social roles and social organization, and it offers a general unifying theme for the social sciences. It would be a mistake to conclude, however, that this book is limited to relatively abstract concerns. On the contrary, I have found the ideas I present here extraordinarily helpful to me in thinking about my own life and the lives of others, whether they were friends, family members, or clients in psychotherapy. Many of the students who have read the book in manuscript have told me spontaneously that it has helped them to think about themselves as well. The indications at this point are, then, that people can quite readily apply these ideas in their everyday lives. For instance, the sections concerning depression, alienation, drug use, and suicide should be of interest to professional helpers who encounter these problems as well as to the people who have them. The material on the effects of setting goals and on the ways in which motivation fosters or interferes with productive thinking should interest managers and also people in general who are striving for goals. Clergy may be interested not only in these topics but also in the material on the nature of human values and in the implications of the whole viewpoint for individual freedom and religious commitment. I would hope that people whose lives feel empty to them might increase their understanding of themselves. And I would hope that intellectually curious readers will find the whole range of ideas on meaningfulness, inner experience, and the nature of human nature worth the mulling. Partly for these reasons I have tried to write the book so that it could be read by readers who are not psychologists or even serious students of psychology. I had in mind the undergraduate student who comes to this book with only a beginning course in psychology or perhaps no course but some general intellectual sophistication, as well as professionals outside psychology such as clergy, managers, and educators. For their sakes I have kept technical jargon to a minimum and have explained all technical terms either in the text or in the notes. I also had in mind pastoral or educational counselors, social workers, and psychiatrists. Finally, psychology has itself become so complex and diverse that psychologists are experiencing increasing difficulty in reading the technical literature in areas of psychology outside their own. I am well aware of my own gratitude toward fellow psychologists in areas other than mine who write clearly enough to make the reading pleasant and efficient. Readers will have to judge for themselves how well I have sue-

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ceeded in making the book comprehensible to them. However, there is one piece of evidence: The members of one of my classes thought, on the average, that this book is at about the same level of difficulty as a reasonably challenging introductory psychology textbook. Therefore, readers who already have the equivalent of a beginning psychology course should have no difficulty with it, and many readers who have had no previous background in psychology should find it simply challenging reading. Because the book is addressed to people with a wide range of backgrounds, the notes take on a special mission. They serve here primarily as communications to readers with special needs or interests. In a few cases, for instance, they clarify elementary concepts with which most readers will already be familiar; but most often they draw out implications, extend arguments, or consider technical matters that will be of interest primarily to psychologists. Most of the footnotes therefore assume in the reader a stronger psychological background than the text does. The notes are not necessary to maintain the flow of the argument, but occasionally they contain important qualifications or even additional theoretical contributions that the psychologist reader will probably wish to consider. Psychologists will note that the theory presented here rests on a new set of motivational concepts, of which the concept of current concern is the most central. I have developed this construct at greater length here than in previous writings. In its various manifestations it plays a role in the treatment of thinking, emotion, value, depression, alienation, and suicide. In this book I have also formulated findings on emotion into a pattern that can serve as a foundation for a theory of value and that can then be articulated with the motivational theory woven around the concept of current concern. I have somewhat extended here my earlier theory of thinking and present some of the findings of our research on thinking and motivation. Inevitably and gratefully, the work presented here also incorporates many existing theoretical concepts recognizably intact. However, it does try to originate a coherent theoretical framework for dealing with motivation, emotion, and value, and their relationships to thought, adaptation, and social behavior. My intellectual debts are plainly too numerous to acknowledge fully. The work presented here cannot be identified with any single "school" of thought or theoretical orientation. My thinking reflects a great range of formative influences, most of whom are acknowledged in the body of the book. Viktor Frankl is, of course, the figure in

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psychology who single-handedly made the case that a sense of meaning is centrally important in a person's life, not as a philosophical abstraction but as a potential life-and-death factor in human functioning. The theorizing behind this book has gone on in the context of a continuing research program in which abstractions such as current concerns must stand up to the test of usefulness in guiding research. There is no way to disentangle the development of my thought from the countless conversations, seminars, data analyses, reactions to manuscripts, and conceptual crises with my co-workers in this research, especially Steven G. Barta and Thomas W. Mahoney, but also prominently at various times Roxanne M. Anderson, John F. Andrews, Jane Delage, Joseph D. Fridgen, Paul Heyl, Madeline Maxeiner, Mary K. Martin, George A. Peterson, Rachel Froiland Quenemoen, and Deborah A. Smith. My colleague Ernest D. Kemble has provided repeated stimulation and comment during the preparation of this book. I also wish to thank the following additional people who have commented on parts or all of earlier drafts of this book or on central predecessor manuscripts: John W. Atkinson, Lynn E. Bush II, Charles G. Costello, O. Truman Driggs, John Ervin, Jr., Donald W. Fiske, George B. Flamer, Peter French, Mariam'D. Frenier, Clifton W. Gray, Heinz Heckhausen, Ronald O. Hietala, Merle N. Hirsh, Richard J. Illka, Karla M. Klinger, Donald Leavitt, Jooinn Lee, Charles Liberty, Gloria Rixen, Richard T. Santee, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., Warner Wilson, and Michael Winter. Our research program has been supported during the preparation of this book by grants from the University of Minnesota Graduate School and by Grant 1-R01-MH24804 from the National Institute of Mental Health. I am deeply grateful for this continuing support. I was enabled to spend the fall semester of 1975-76 at the Psychological Institute of Ruhr University of Bochum, Federal Republic of Germany, by the generous hospitality of Heinz Heckhausen and his Institute co-workers at Ruhr University and through the generous financial support of a Fulbright research grant and a University of Minnesota sabbatical leave. The semester was an extraordinarily stimulating one whose effects are reflected in several places in this book. In addition to illuminating dialogues with Heinz Heckhausen, I am particularly indebted to the members of a seminar on "Future Perspective and Current Concerns: Neglected Topics in Motivation" for their vigorous interchanges regarding the concept of current concern and related topics.

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The manuscript has gone through so many capable hands that I must thank many of the typists without name. However, I wish especially to thank Linda Powers for her extraordinary contribution in preparing the final draft, Marilyn Strand for preparing the figures, Gloria J. Rixen for most of the indexing, Sandra R. Johnson and Gail A. Rixen for reading proofs, and Bonnie Storck and Charlotte Syverson for innumerable services during the years the book was in preparation. I wish also to thank editor Beverly Kaemmer and the other accommodating and skillful staff members of the University of Minnesota Press. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to my University of Minnesota, Morris, colleagues, to Social Sciences Division Chairman O. Truman Driggs, Academic Dean Gordon R. Bopp, and Provost John Q. Imholte for their unwavering encouragement and support.

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Table of Contents

1. MEANING, GOALS, AND ACTION The Meaning of Meaningfulness The Social Significance of Meaning 9 How Can We Study Meaning? 9 Meaningfulness and Inner Experience Incentives and Action Goals Govern Life and Behavior 12 Goals and Incentives: Straightening Out the Terminology 14 Evidence That Incentives Control Behavior 15 Incentives Work. What Else Do We Need to Know? 24 2. INCENTIVES AND THOUGHTS The Nature and Organization of Thought Kinds of Thought Segments Blank States 28 Operant Segments 30 Respondent Segments 31 Commitment and Concern Concerns and the Content of Thought Concerns and Thoughts: The Control of Attention 41 Concerns and the Control of Attention: Some Evidence 45 The Induction Principle: Concerns, Cues, and the Content of Thought Induction in Respondent Thinking 52 Induction in Operant Thinking 58 Summary 3. INCENTIVES AND EMOTIONS Keeping the Terms Straight 65

3 5

10 12

27 27 28

35 38

52

62 64

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What Are Emotions? Emotions and Instincts 67 Kinds of Emotions 75 Components of Emotion: Affect and Gross Physiology 79 Implications of This View 81 The Roles of Emotion in Human Functioning Emotions as Incipient Behavior 82 Emotions and Incentive Value 83 Emotion as Evaluative Feedback 84 Happiness, Mood, and Incentive Relationships Conclusions

66

4. THE UPS AND DOWNS OF VALUE The Growth of Value Learning to Value 99 Changes in Value Resulting from Changes in Context 111 Obstacles 114 Summary 115 The Decline of Value Satiation, Extinction, and Habituation 118 Is It All One Process? 122 What Habituates? What Does Not? 124 Habituation and Satiation of Innately Valued Incentives 128 Implications for the Meaningfulness of Human Lives On Finding Habituation-Resistant Incentives 131 Reviving Sensory Pleasures 134 Moderation and Restraint 135 Synergy and Peak Experiences 136

97 98

82

91 95

116

131

5. CONSEQUENCES OF LOSING 137 The Phases of the Cycle: Features and Evidence 141 Invigoration 141 Aggression 144 Depression 151 Recovery 166 Do the Disengagement Phases Really Constitute a Cycle? . . . . 170 Behavioral Evidence for a Cycle 171 Evidence on Brain Mechanisms 172 Adaptive Functions 175 Individual Differences 178 Factors That Dispose People to Give Up 180 Inner Experience and the Incentive-Disengagement Cycle . . . 182 How Thought Is Organized during the Cycle 183 Gloomy Views of Self and World 186 Fluctuations and the Stability of Mood 187 The Sense That One's Life Is Meaningful 187 Clinical Implications of the Incentive-Disengagement Cycle .. 188

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Implications for Clinical Research 189 Implications for Treatment 193 Education for Mental Health 195 Summary

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197

6. ALIENATION, FUTILITY, DISCONTENT 199 Alienation and Discontent 201 Problems of Measurement 204 Opportunity and Aspiration: Social Class and Education . . . . 207 Alienation from Work 208 Factors in Satisfaction with and Alienation from Work 209 Work Enrichment 213 Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction in Marriage 216 Factors Related to Marital Satisfaction and Stability 217 Factors Related to Marital Dissatisfaction and Divorce 219 Conclusion 220 Satisfaction and Advancing Age 222 The Gradual Decline of Happiness 223 Individual Differences in Aging 225 The Changing Incentive World 226 Social Constraints on the Behavior of Old People 228 Engagement, Disengagement, and Satisfaction with Life 230 Incentives and the Psychological Deficits of Aging 231 Conclusions 233 Alienation and Inner Experience 234 Affect in Alienation 235 Alienation, Attention, and Thinking 236 Personality Dispositions to Become Alienated 239 Developing a Sense of Effectiveness 239 Becoming Immobilized by Conflict 241 Options for the Alienated 243 7. TAMPERING WITH THE MESSAGE SYSTEM 245 Methods for Manipulating Affects 247 Harnessing Natural Incentive Systems 247 Spiritual Approaches 249 Passive Massage of the Affect System 250 Intervention with Chemicals 252 Value Judgments 252 Incentives and the Mass Media 254 Functions of Television 255 Who Watches Television? 256 Drugs and Life Situations 257

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Drug Use and Social Context 258 Drugs and Incentive Impoverishment 260 Enhancing the Incentive World: Marijuana and the Psychedelics 264 Escape from Unpleasantness: Opiates and Other Downers 268 Manufactured Optimism: Alcohol and the Amphetamines 272 Preference versus Addiction 276 Conclusion: Drugs and Incentives 280 8. SELF-ANNIHILATION 283 What Kinds of People Are Most Likely to Kill Themselves? .. 284 Group Statistics 284 Special Conditions That Affect Suicide 285 Patterns 286 Events That Precipitate Suicide 289 States of Mind at the Point of Suicide 295 The Wish to Change Events 295 Clearheadedness 297 Meaninglessness 298 The Decision for Suicide: Conclusions 299 9. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 302 Incentives, Inner Experience, and Behavior 302 The Linkages between Incentives and Behavior 302 Incentives and Thought 304 Incentives and Affect 306 Value 308 Reactions to Loss and Impoverishment of Incentives 310 Meaning and Void 314 The Nature of Human Nature 317 Human Rationality 318 Hedonism 320 "Free Will" 322 Implications for the Social Sciences 326 Innate Symbols and Universal Meanings 327 Commitment and the Impact of Incentives on Behavior 329 Social Organization and Role Theory 330 Political Theory 339 Economic Theory 341 The Concept of Incentive in the Social Sciences: Conclusion 344 NOTES

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REFERENCES

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INDEXES

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MEANING & VOID Inner Experience and the Incentives in People's Lives

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Chapter 1

Meaning, Goals, and Action

This is a book about people's sense that their lives are meaningful. It is about the conditions under which people feel that way and about the conditions that erode that feeling; and it traces the consequences in emotion, thought, and action. These consequences are by no means trivial or superficial. They penetrate the core of a person's being. They wind themselves around all the fibers of body and soul. When the margin of survival has worn thin, they include life and death. For two and a half years, the people of Leningrad lived under Nazi siege, and many died. Salisbury (1969) wrote of their ordeal: "Living in the cold, hungry, dark city, people held themselves together by the consciousness of being needed. They began to die when they had nothing to do. Nothing-to-do was more terrible than a bombing raid" (P. 463). Viktor Frankl considers humankind's "will to meaning" the motive central to human existence. His years as an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp convinced him of this. He recounted an especially dramatic instance of another inmate, once a "fairly well-known composer and librettist" (Frankl, 1963, P. 118), who told him about a dream prophecy that the camp would be liberated on March 30, 1945. Frankl wrote (1963): When F told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced that the voice of his dream would be right. But as the promised day drew nearer, the war news which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date. On March twentyninth, F suddenly became ill and ran a high temperature. On March thirtieth, the day his prophecy had told him that the war and suffering would be over for him, he became delirious and lost consciousness. On March thirty-first, he was dead. To all outward appearances, he had died of typhus. (Pp. 119-120) 3

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. . . Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. (P. 121)

People whose life circumstances are more comfortable than these are less likely to die of meaninglessness than to sicken in spirit. People need to be absorbed. They need to be preoccupied nearly all the time with something that can make them feel awe, curiosity, pleasure, love, hate, relief, amusement, pride, lust, devotion, communion. An enormous part of the human drama is taken up with finding content for the form. Young people search for purpose in their lives; older people seek to revive it. People bless their religions, their children, their charities, new lovers, new wars, new careers, social causes, elaborate hobbies, and sometimes even personal catastrophes for having given their lives a new sense of meaning. This is a certain kind of book about meaning. It is written in the tradition of scientific psychology. It is therefore in the form of a theory based on experimental results and other systematic observations. Theories are constructions, pictures of a reality that transcends individual facts. In some ways scientific evidence is like the numbered dots on a page that can be connected with a pencil to produce a drawing; but in science the dots are not numbered. When there are few dots, a person could conceivably connect the dots in many different ways and still create equally plausible drawings. When there are many dots, the pattern is more obvious, and people are apt to connect them in fewer different ways. The ideas presented in this book vary in the firmness of evidence on which they draw. In each case, however, the book makes clear what the evidence is, so that readers can judge for themselves. The argument, very briefly, is as follows. People are organized around pursuing and enjoying objects, events, and experiences that are emotionally compelling for them, which I shall call incentives. They are organized around incentives in two senses. First, people plan their actions to obtain their incentives; but, second, pursuing and enjoying incentives also determines the nature and quality of their inner experience — the thoughts and feelings that, along with their sensations, make up the sum total of human consciousness. The very tenor and tempo of people's thoughts and feelings depend on how successfully they are achieving and enjoying goals they value. Whether they feel good and their lives feel meaningful, whether they esteem themselves and feel up to accepting challenges, whether they feel invigorated, angry, disappointed, depressed, alienated, or apathetic — all these depend on their relationships to their incen-

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5

lives. The influences are sometimes subtle, and the factors that determine people's relationships to incentives are often more heavily a matter of inner processes than of objective circumstances. When people are deprived of important incentives, either objectively or for reasons within themselves, their lives seem less meaningful and they are then more likely to try altering their inner experience — chemically through alcohol and other drugs, by changing major aspects of their life situations such as their marriages, careers, or life styles, or by committing suicide. Understanding how all this comes about, how it is that even economically affluent people can become psychologically impoverished, and what might be done about it, obviously has much to tell us both about our individual lives and about the soundness of the social policies that to a great extent govern them.

The Meaning of Meaningfulness When we ask people whether their lives are meaningful, most of them act as if they understand intuitively what the question means. Viewed philosophically, "meaning" in the sense that I am using the term means something akin to "purpose." It is possible to think of "purpose" in two ways, as aim or as function (Baier, 1957). That is, people's purposes can be either the things they intend to do or the things they are put on earth for — wishing to earn a fortune (an aim), for instance, or having been created to glorify God (a function). The second of these meanings of meaning — what humans have been created for — poses a theological question, rather than a psychological or a social-scientific one, that we shall not consider further. We shall be concerned with the other sense of meaning: having aims. This, also, is the sense in which most people seem to interpret the word when asked about the meaningfulness of their individual lives. In order to find out something about how people view their own sense of meaningfulness, we asked college students from large classes on three campuses to fill out questionnaires. One question on both questionnaires asked them how meaningful they regarded their present lives to be. Of the 320 students who filled out the questionnaires, 68 checked "full of meaning" and 146 checked "very meaningful," accounting between them for two-thirds, or 67%, of the respondents. Another 78 (24%) regarded their lives as "somewhat meaning ful," 13 (4%) checked "slightly meaningful," and two checked "mean ingless." Only 13 failed to answer the question. Most of this group, then, regard their lives to be at least very meaningful, a judgment that

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might be rather hard to make if the respondent is unsure what it means. To help clarify just what the respondents had in mind, we asked 138 of them to describe in their own words what it was that made their lives meaningful. The main classes of answers are listed in Table 1-1. The overwhelming majority of answers listed either human relationships of some kind or goals that lay in the future, or the feelings and activities associated with them (Table 1-1, column 1). Most of these students (89%) mentioned one or another kind of personal relationship as something that contributed meaning to their lives. For many, it was the only thing they mentioned. The other things they mentioned are of two principal kinds: immediate pleasures or future goals. What all these answers have in common is that they are all, in the sense that I shall use the term, incentives. An incentive is any object or event that tends to attract a person (or, in the case of negative incentives, to repel him or her). An incentive may be something the person expects to attain in the future, such as an interesting job after graduation, or it may be something the person is enjoying right now, such as the rest of a sandwich. A particular personal relationship is an incentive for someone who values it and wishes to preserve it. People need not choose to pursue and enjoy everything that is for them an incentive, but anything they pursue or enjoy is one, by definition. Incentives provide purposes. People sacrifice so that they may finish their educations or so that they may better the lives of loved ones. They eat sandwiches so that they may enjoy them and be nourished. We can reasonably conclude that when people describe what makes their lives meaningful, they list the important incentives in their lives, which they strive to maintain and obtain when they are not simply enjoying them, and which provide purposes for acting. The 138 students who wrote answers to our first questionnaire were doing so "off the top of their heads." They had probably never been asked such questions before, and they may have forgotten to list some of the things that contribute to their sense of meaningfulness. To find out what would happen if we jogged our respondents' memories, we presented other students with a list of categories (see Table 1-1) based on the answers of the first group and asked them to estimate how important each kind of thing was in "giving your life meaning."1 Many more of these respondents acknowledged that the kinds of things listed contribute to their sense that their lives are meaningful (Table 1-1, columns 2 and 3). Nearly all acknowledged friendships to be more than slightly important, and more than three-

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Table 1-1. Things That Contribute to the Meaningfulness of Respondents' Lives Percentage of Respondents Who Listed at Least One Thing of Kind of Contributor to Meaningf ulness Each Kind 8 Friends, communicating, understanding Parents and siblings Religious faith, relationship to God Process of education, finishing college Spouse, fiance, boyfriend, girlfriend own children Leisure-time activities Nature, environment, small pleasures0 Happiness, security, things in general" Job, sense of responsibility, success Helping and sharing, loving others, feeling useful Inner searching, exploring, g r o w t Feeling loved and wanted Having goals to strive for (general)6 Plans for vocational future f

Checked Each Kind1'

Checked "Fairly Great" or "Extreme" Importance

71% 50

96% 85

90% 71

27

52

30

25

75

57

25 21

79 92

68 64

18

83

61

16

79

68

15

67

43

14 11 8 8 6

83 72 91 71 69

67 51 76 48 54

a First questionnaire, open-ended. Other categories were used by less than 5% of the respondents. There were 138 respondents, 55 men and 83 women. b Second questionnaire, response-limited. There were 182 respondents, 103 men and 78 women. Since 14 knew of the theories being tested, the figures are based on 168 cases. The percentage given is for those who regarded each kind as of more than "only slight importance in giving your life meaning." c The category on the second questionnaire was phrased, "Enjoying nature and things around me." d The category on the second questionnaire was phrased, "Being alive and things in general." e On the second questionnaire, goals other than major life goals. f On the second questionnaire, vocational or other major life goals.

quarters considered them to be of fairly great or extreme importance. Only one other category (not shown in Table 1-1) was that important for a majority of these young students: "Being on my own." "Money and possessions" were of great importance to only 19% of this group and drugs to only 7%. Some theorists have suggested that for one's life to feel meaningful

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one had to become dedicated to a single, consuming, relatively lofty purpose, preferably spiritual. However, the pattern of our results suggests otherwise. Only 23% of our students claimed a single extremely important source of meaning, and only half reported having any extremely important source at all. Furthermore, two of the traditionally loftiest sources of meaning — religion and vocation — were among the weakest. Religion, in particular, was of great importance to only 30% of these students. This is by no means an isolated finding, true only for our predominantly small-town Minnesotans. A majority of 56 Californians found their greatest source of meaningfulness in their family relationships (Young, 1974), whereas a "particular purpose or belief" was for most members of the group only the third or fourth most important source of meaning (out of eight categories). Elisabeth Lukas (1971, 1972) stopped 1000 Viennese on the street and asked them whether there was something so valuable for them that it gave their lives meaning, and, if so, to describe it. About half found their source of meaning in family, children, or home, and another 9% in love or social relationships. For 17% the major source of meaning lay in their success, work, or education, and for 10% it was general self-development. These categories of personal relationships, vocational development, and personal growth thus account for more than half of the answers. Religion claimed less than 3%, possessions 6%, and general comfort 8%. Thus, most of these respondents found their sense of meaning in pursuing and enjoying conventional, everyday kinds of incentives. Interestingly, those who appeared to have the most clearly ascertainable sense of meaningfulness tended to give the most concrete sources of their meaning: categories such as family, children, vocation, possessions, and hobbies, in contrast to the more abstract replies such as "self-development," "agreeable life," and "social tasks" given by those less certain of their sense of meaning. Few people found their greatest meaning in suffering or in their attitudes toward their lives, such as maintaining a sense of nobility in the face of personal adversity. Thus, it appears that people derive their sense of meaningfulness from enjoying and pursuing many kinds of incentives, some lofty and remote, but most everyday and homely. Furthermore, there is evidence that the more kinds of incentives people can respond to, the greater their sense of meaning. Thus, among our college students who acknowledged finding meaning in more than 20 of our categories, 81% reported their lives to be "very meaningful" or "full

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of meaning." That was true for only 35% of the students who found meaning in less than 12 of the categories. (The difference is statistically significant beyond the .001 level.2) Other investigators have found that college students who score high in a test of meaningfulness (the Purpose in Life Test3) belong to more organizations (Doerries, 1970) and are more certain of their future college majors, vocations, and spouses (Tryon & Radzin, 1972) than those who score low. The Social Significance of Meaning Whether or not people have a sense that their lives are meaningful has some very practical consequences. In our second student group, those who feel their lives are less meaningful than average also are more depressed. The correlation is .46 (p