Sources of meaning in life are similar across Japan, India, Poland, and the United States

Jill Suttie, 16 Ways People Find Purpose Around the World, Greater Good Magazine, July 9, 2025.

... in a new study, researchers Michael Mask and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia and their colleagues aimed to get more detail about people’s purposeful pursuits across cultures and to see their effect on “the good life.” Ultimately, they found that our purposes around the world have a lot in common.

In the first part of their study, Mask and his colleagues asked 200 American participants to write about seven things that gave them a sense of purpose in life. Then, they analyzed over 2,000 responses to come up with 16 general categories of purpose that encompassed everyone’s answers:

• Self-improvement: Becoming the best you can be
• Family: Supporting and providing for your family and caretaking
• Relationships: Searching for, finding, or maintaining close relationships
• Religion/spirituality: Living in accordance with and meeting the standards of your religious or spiritual beliefs
• Recognition: Being respected and having high status
• Happiness: Being happy, enjoying life, and feeling good
• Self-sufficiency: Being able to take care of yourself physically and financially, and having the freedom to do as you wish
• Material wealth: Getting rich, owning nice things, and buying whatever you want
• Internal standards: Knowing who you are and what you stand for and living your life according to these principles
• Positive impact: Making the world a better place
• Mattering: Inspiring others and leaving a legacy; making an impact
• Occupational fulfillment: Finding your calling through work; doing your job well and working hard
• Persevering: Handling what life throws at you—not giving up and dealing with the struggles inherent in life
• Physical health: Taking care of your body and being healthy
• Inner peace: Being grateful for what you have and accepting what you can’t change
• Service: Serving your country or community

After testing out these categories with a different group of 100 American participants, their team surveyed over 1,000 people from Japan, India, Poland, and the United States to find out how much these categories reflected their own purpose in life. Specifically, participants reported how much each source of purpose influenced the decisions they made and guided their behavior, as well as how happy, meaningful, and psychologically rich their lives were—all aspects of “the good life.” (Psychological richness involves experiencing diverse, challenging, and interesting activities that evoke complex emotions and change your perspective.)

Analyzing the results, the researchers found that people in each of these unique cultures had very similar sources of purpose and prioritized each category similarly, too. “Happiness,” “self-sufficiency,” and “family” were in the top five for each country, while “religion” and “recognition” were in the bottom five for each country.

Also, there was a lot of agreement on what sources of purpose went along with more meaning, happiness, or psychological richness in life. This finding surprised Heine, who, as a cultural psychologist, is used to seeing more variability among people of different cultures.

“What stands out from our finding is just how much agreement there was within these four quite different countries about what kinds of purposes are associated with a good life,” he says. “They’re not identical, but there is a striking amount of similarity.”

There's more at the link.