Thank you for sharing this post! It’s definitely useful to think about different ways of conceptualizing/measuring well-being. Here’s one part of the post I wasn’t fully convinced by:
“While life satisfaction theories of well-being are usually understood as distinct from desire theories (Haybron, 2016), life satisfaction might instead be taken as an aggregate of one’s global desires: I am satisfied with my life to the extent that it achieves my overall desires about it.”
From a measurement perspective, is there evidence suggesting that peoples’ judgments of life satisfaction are highly correlated with their achievement of overall desires? I would guess that life satisfaction (at least the way it’s operationalized on Diener’s scale) would only correlate modestly with one’s appraisal of specific desires.
Measurement aside, I still think it may be important to distinguish between “life satisfaction” (i.e., an individual’s subjective appraisal of how well their life is going—which could be influenced by positive affective, desire fulfillment, or other factors) and “satisfaction of global desires.”
The post seems to suggest that “satisfaction of global desires” should be equated with “life satisfaction.” I disagree. It seems like having a construct that refers to “an individual’s subjective appraisal of their life” is useful, and it seems like people are currently using the term “life satisfaction” to refer to this. Perhaps a new term could be created to refer to “satisfaction of global desires” (for instance, maybe we would call this “objective life satisfaction” as opposed to “subjective life satisfaction”, which is what popular life satisfaction scales currently measure).
One thing you could test, as an empirical matter, would be to ask people break their life down into various domains (e.g. health, wealth, relationships, etc.), getting people to score those, then for them to assign weights to each domain, to so create an overall score. This would be their satisfaction of global desires.
You could then compare this their single judgement of life satisfaction.
I don’t see why this would be particularly interesting though, and I can’t think why the two scores would be different except due to user error. It’s not at all clear what life satisfaction is supposed to be if not the aggregate of one’s global desires. I discuss this further in my working paper which is linked to on the blog post.
Thank you, Michael! I think this hypothetical is useful & makes the topic easier to discuss.
Short question: What do you mean by “user error?”
Longer version of the question:
Let’s assume that I fill out weights for the various categories of desire (e.g., health, wealth, relationships) & my satisfaction in each of those areas.
Then, let’s say you erase that experience from my mind, and then you ask me to rate my global life satisfaction.
Let’s now assume there was a modest difference between the two ratings. It is not instinctively clear to me why I should prefer judgment #1 to judgment #2. That is, I think it’s an open question whether the “desire-based life satisfaction judgment” or the “desire-free life satisfaction judgment” is the more “valid” response.
To me, “user error” could mean several things:
The “desire-free” judgment is flawed because the user is not thinking holistically enough or reflecting enough. They are not thinking carefully about what they care about & how those things have actually went.
The “desire-based” judgment is flawed because the list of desires misses some things that the user actually finds important (i.e., it’s impossible to create a comprehensive list)
The “desire-based” judgment is flawed because the user is not assigning weights properly (i.e., I might report that wealth matters twice as much to my life satisfaction than friendship, but I might be misperceiving my true preferences, which are better reflected in the “desire-free” case).
In other words, if we could eliminate these forms of user error, I would probably agree with you that this distinction is arbitrary. In practice, though, I think these “desire-based” and “desire-free” versions of life satisfaction ought to be considered distinct (albeit I’d expect them to be modestly correlated). I also don’t think it’s clear to me that the “desire-based” judgment should be considered better (i.e., more valid). And even if it should be considered better, I think I’d still want to know about the
Furthermore, when making decisions, I would probably want to see both judgments. For example, let’s assume:
Intervention A improves “desire-based life satisfaction judgments” by 15% and “desire-free life satisfaction judgments” by 5%
Intervention B improves “desire-based life satisfaction judgments” by 10% and “desire-free life satisfaction judgments” by 10%
Intervention C improves “desire-based life satisfaction judgments” by 15% and “desire-free life satisfaction judgments” by 15%.
I would prefer Intervention C over intervention A, even though they both improve “desire-based satisfaction judgments” by the same amount. I also think reasonable people would disagree when comparing Intervention A to Intervention B.
For these reasons, I wonder if it’s practically useful to consider “desire-based” and “desire-free” life satisfactions as separate constructs.
Thank you for sharing this post! It’s definitely useful to think about different ways of conceptualizing/measuring well-being. Here’s one part of the post I wasn’t fully convinced by:
“While life satisfaction theories of well-being are usually understood as distinct from desire theories (Haybron, 2016), life satisfaction might instead be taken as an aggregate of one’s global desires: I am satisfied with my life to the extent that it achieves my overall desires about it.”
From a measurement perspective, is there evidence suggesting that peoples’ judgments of life satisfaction are highly correlated with their achievement of overall desires? I would guess that life satisfaction (at least the way it’s operationalized on Diener’s scale) would only correlate modestly with one’s appraisal of specific desires.
Measurement aside, I still think it may be important to distinguish between “life satisfaction” (i.e., an individual’s subjective appraisal of how well their life is going—which could be influenced by positive affective, desire fulfillment, or other factors) and “satisfaction of global desires.”
The post seems to suggest that “satisfaction of global desires” should be equated with “life satisfaction.” I disagree. It seems like having a construct that refers to “an individual’s subjective appraisal of their life” is useful, and it seems like people are currently using the term “life satisfaction” to refer to this. Perhaps a new term could be created to refer to “satisfaction of global desires” (for instance, maybe we would call this “objective life satisfaction” as opposed to “subjective life satisfaction”, which is what popular life satisfaction scales currently measure).
Hello Akash, thanks for this!
One thing you could test, as an empirical matter, would be to ask people break their life down into various domains (e.g. health, wealth, relationships, etc.), getting people to score those, then for them to assign weights to each domain, to so create an overall score. This would be their satisfaction of global desires.
You could then compare this their single judgement of life satisfaction.
I don’t see why this would be particularly interesting though, and I can’t think why the two scores would be different except due to user error. It’s not at all clear what life satisfaction is supposed to be if not the aggregate of one’s global desires. I discuss this further in my working paper which is linked to on the blog post.
Thank you, Michael! I think this hypothetical is useful & makes the topic easier to discuss.
Short question: What do you mean by “user error?”
Longer version of the question:
Let’s assume that I fill out weights for the various categories of desire (e.g., health, wealth, relationships) & my satisfaction in each of those areas.
Then, let’s say you erase that experience from my mind, and then you ask me to rate my global life satisfaction.
Let’s now assume there was a modest difference between the two ratings. It is not instinctively clear to me why I should prefer judgment #1 to judgment #2. That is, I think it’s an open question whether the “desire-based life satisfaction judgment” or the “desire-free life satisfaction judgment” is the more “valid” response.
To me, “user error” could mean several things:
The “desire-free” judgment is flawed because the user is not thinking holistically enough or reflecting enough. They are not thinking carefully about what they care about & how those things have actually went.
The “desire-based” judgment is flawed because the list of desires misses some things that the user actually finds important (i.e., it’s impossible to create a comprehensive list)
The “desire-based” judgment is flawed because the user is not assigning weights properly (i.e., I might report that wealth matters twice as much to my life satisfaction than friendship, but I might be misperceiving my true preferences, which are better reflected in the “desire-free” case).
In other words, if we could eliminate these forms of user error, I would probably agree with you that this distinction is arbitrary. In practice, though, I think these “desire-based” and “desire-free” versions of life satisfaction ought to be considered distinct (albeit I’d expect them to be modestly correlated). I also don’t think it’s clear to me that the “desire-based” judgment should be considered better (i.e., more valid). And even if it should be considered better, I think I’d still want to know about the
Furthermore, when making decisions, I would probably want to see both judgments. For example, let’s assume:
Intervention A improves “desire-based life satisfaction judgments” by 15% and “desire-free life satisfaction judgments” by 5%
Intervention B improves “desire-based life satisfaction judgments” by 10% and “desire-free life satisfaction judgments” by 10%
Intervention C improves “desire-based life satisfaction judgments” by 15% and “desire-free life satisfaction judgments” by 15%.
I would prefer Intervention C over intervention A, even though they both improve “desire-based satisfaction judgments” by the same amount. I also think reasonable people would disagree when comparing Intervention A to Intervention B.
For these reasons, I wonder if it’s practically useful to consider “desire-based” and “desire-free” life satisfactions as separate constructs.