Evaluating Life Reflection Techniques to Help People Select Virtuous Life Goals

2022

Conference Paper

re

The purpose of the present studies was to identify an effective tool for helping people to select virtuous life goals that promote their own well-being and contribute to the well-being of others (well-doing). Across two studies, we tested four candidate interventions against each other and a control condition. In the first study (N = 218), the intervention conditions were the eulogy and valued living questionnaire exercises from the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy literature. In the second study (N = 537), the intervention conditions were self-affirmation and value self-confrontation from the social psychology literature and the eulogy exercise. The eulogy exercise is a very brief reflection (3-5 minutes) on how one would like to be remembered by friends and family speaking at one’s funeral. The valued living questionnaire exercise involves rating 10 life domains for importance and behavioral consistency with that importance and reflecting on discrepancies. Self-affirmation involves writing about a time when one acted in line with one’s values. And value self-confrontation involves inducing a discrepancy between participants’ values and those of a socially desirable group. Participants were randomly assigned to one of these brief interventions or a control condition. They were then asked to select a life goal that they would like to start pursuing or make more progress on in the near future. In Study 1, selection was open-ended and participants indicated which of 5 life domains it best fit, including interpersonal goals. In Study 2, the goal was selected from a list of prosocial, personal growth, or materialistic life goals. Across both studies, we found that the eulogy exercise stood out as an effective intervention for helping people select life goals that are likely to promote well-being and well-doing, such as wanting to improve other people’s lives, and avoid life goals that are associated with vices, such as wanting to have many expensive possessions. These findings point to the usefulness of humanistic-existential approaches for promoting character development via life goals and provide an example of how philosophically-informed psychological interventions can be effective.

@conference{PrenticeGonzalezLieder2022JCCV-Virtuous,
  title = {Evaluating Life Reflection Techniques to Help People Select Virtuous Life Goals},
  author = {Prentice, Mike and Gonzalez Cruz, Hernán and Lieder, Falk},
  booktitle = {Integrating Research on Character and Virtues: 10 Years of Impact},
  institution = {University Of Birmingham, the Jubilee Centre for Character & Virtues},
  address = {Oriel College, Oxford},
  month = jan,
  year = {2022},
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {1}
}