Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity. Each episode will feature a new guest who
Speaker 1: will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding
Speaker 1: of yourself, others, and the world we live in. Hopefully
Speaker 1: we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks for
Speaker 1: listening and enjoy the podcast, But right now we're really
Speaker 1: excited to be speaking with our guests, the eminent social
Speaker 1: psychologist Roy Baumeister. Roy is a Francis Eppi's Professor of
Speaker 1: Psychology at Florida State University. He's authored more than five
Speaker 1: hundred publications and has co authored or edited almost thirty books.
Speaker 1: He's one of the most highly cited psychologists of all time.
Speaker 1: It's an honor to have you on the show today. Roy, Wow,
Speaker 1: your heart, but it's no honor. I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 1: Great the amount of studies that you've done in topics
Speaker 1: that you study, we could chat for the rest of
Speaker 1: our lives. So let's start with how did you get
Speaker 1: interested in psychology? Oh? Well, so, Curtis Path, I went
Speaker 1: to college to study math because I was good at
Speaker 1: that in high school, and then higher math seemed kind
Speaker 1: of weird. Those are the hippie days, and everybody talked
Speaker 1: about relevance and profundity. So I thought, well, did I
Speaker 1: study philosophy and religion and grapple with the big questions?
Speaker 1: And then it turned out psychology had some interesting approaches
Speaker 1: to those. I was struck. I was reading moral philosophy. Well,
Speaker 1: I was over as a foreign student in Heidelbeg. The
Speaker 1: philosophers grapple with the ideas of right and wrong. I
Speaker 1: happened to read some of Freud's book so we said, well,
Speaker 1: let's look at how people actually get their ideas of
Speaker 1: right and wrong rather than analyzing the concepts. And I thought, well,
Speaker 1: that's an interesting approach. You could take kind of a
Speaker 1: scientific way of addressing and solving some of the same problems.
Speaker 1: So that kind of got me hooked. Wow, so Freud
Speaker 1: got you hooked. And you know the kind of topics
Speaker 1: that Freud studied, did they interest you? Well? These was
Speaker 1: his books on society and human nature and morality, good
Speaker 1: and evil. So those were fascinating topics. The clinical side
Speaker 1: of Freud was less exciting to me. Right, Freud did
Speaker 1: have a nice career studying people with mental illness and
Speaker 1: then talking about basic human nature. And I liked I
Speaker 1: thought for a while I would do that. But you
Speaker 1: can't do that anymore. If you want to talk about
Speaker 1: normal people, you have to actually study normal people. So
Speaker 1: Freud's little bridge there was earned a long time ago,
Speaker 1: but it worked for him. Now, what was your dissertation?
Speaker 1: Your doctoral dissertation about yeah, goodness. So back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, the self esteem movement was just starting to
Speaker 1: take off. People were studying a lot of social psychology processes,
Speaker 1: thinking maybe changes in self esteem were going on. That
Speaker 1: you get a failure experience and your self esteem goes down,
Speaker 1: and that's what affects your behavior. That's a little skeptical
Speaker 1: of that. I thought, maybe we care more about what
Speaker 1: other people think of us than what we think of ourselves.
Speaker 1: So there was just a little bit of discussion of
Speaker 1: differences in that. So in my dissertation, I tried giving
Speaker 1: people good or bad feedback about their personalities. Has had
Speaker 1: been done for a while in the guys, supposedly of
Speaker 1: manipulating self esteem. Of course, nobody checked whether it actually
Speaker 1: changed self esteem or not. They just assumed it back then.
Speaker 1: So what I did is give those same things either
Speaker 1: in a public or a private setting. Either you're the
Speaker 1: only one we'll see this confidential information it's a valuation
Speaker 1: of you, or I'm looking at it myself, I'm showing
Speaker 1: it to other people. And if it's just self esteem,
Speaker 1: it should have the same effect, right, it's the same
Speaker 1: information having the same impact on how you appraise yourself.
Speaker 1: But it turned out if you've cut the evaluation confidentially,
Speaker 1: it really had very little effect. But knowing other people
Speaker 1: had seen it that made a big, big difference. So
Speaker 1: this was the start of study of self presentation. Actually
Speaker 1: for me, it was the start. People have been talking
Speaker 1: about it for a while. It wasn't mainstream social psycho
Speaker 1: though gradually had caught on because lots of people started seeing, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: behavior really changes when other people are looking in ways
Speaker 1: that the same situation, the same information, the same cues
Speaker 1: don't change behavior if you're on your own. Sure was
Speaker 1: that classified under social psychology at that point? Oh? Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: it was a social psychology dissertation and published in the
Speaker 1: Journal of Social Personal and Social Psychology, And so I yes,
Speaker 1: that's what my career started. Great yeah, you really countered
Speaker 1: a lot of the thinking at the time, especially in
Speaker 1: the media, about self esteem. And you know the famous
Speaker 1: Seray Night Live skit about looking in the mirror rate
Speaker 1: and saying, by gosh, you know, I love me or something.
Speaker 1: What did you find were some of the downsides of
Speaker 1: having too high of a self esteem? I was positive
Speaker 1: about self esteem for a long time. I thought it
Speaker 1: was a great thing to study, and I worked on it.
Speaker 1: But I always pay extra attention to critical comments, and
Speaker 1: I remember the first few people saying, how come self
Speaker 1: esteem doesn't really predict much it's important, and I was
Speaker 1: indignant that, oh, it does predict important things. In my laboratory,
Speaker 1: it works. But I was looking at fairly specific kinds
Speaker 1: of responses, and so I started looking out at the
Speaker 1: more broad based studies of self esteem most of the the
Speaker 1: things other people were doing, and yes, it often failed
Speaker 1: to deliver. So gradually I began to question it and
Speaker 1: doubt it, and I still feel a little bad about it.
Speaker 1: Self esteem was one of my first interests, and if
Speaker 1: it had done all the stuff we hoped it would do,
Speaker 1: I would have been a picture or something like that.
Speaker 1: But anyway, in terms of the downside, of high self esteem.
Speaker 1: Over time, I started to look at the world in
Speaker 1: terms of trade offs, that there are very few things
Speaker 1: that are unmitigated good or bad, and it goes against
Speaker 1: the way we think. A lot of people go into
Speaker 1: psychology and social science thinking they're going to change the world.
Speaker 1: This is the right way to be and other ways
Speaker 1: are wrong, and we just got to show people that
Speaker 1: this is what we should do. Over time, I've become
Speaker 1: much more toward trade offs, and so, yeah, there'll be
Speaker 1: some advantages to high self esteem, but some disadvantages too.
Speaker 1: One formulation that several of us came to is that
Speaker 1: the benefits of self esteem mostly come to yourself in
Speaker 1: that it feels good. It's nice to think you're a superior,
Speaker 1: competent being, and so on. But the costs are born
Speaker 1: by the other people around you. If you've had a
Speaker 1: romantic partner or a roommate or coworker or whatever with
Speaker 1: a very high self esteem, you probably know what I mean.
Speaker 1: They can be a pain and a difficulty to deal with,
Speaker 1: and they become very sensitive to criticism and they feel
Speaker 1: more entitled. So just inflating self esteem for its own sake,
Speaker 1: I think it contains the significant risks and leads into
Speaker 1: what later came to be known as narcissism, which is
Speaker 1: this unfounded sense of superiority, and narcissism contributes to a
Speaker 1: lot of higher aggression and less tolerance of others and
Speaker 1: so forth. Self esteem high self esteem is a mixed
Speaker 1: category and the effects are very different. There are people
Speaker 1: with high self esteem who are simply good people, competent
Speaker 1: and moral and so on, and they know it and
Speaker 1: so that's not so bad. There are other people, though,
Speaker 1: who just think they're a lot better than they are
Speaker 1: just so in them, high self esteem leads to defensiveness
Speaker 1: and aggressiveness and all sorts of negative, risky outcomes. Right,
Speaker 1: So like unstable self esteem versus actually that distinction in
Speaker 1: the literature, Yes, that's correlated with the narcissism. They have
Speaker 1: the unstable high self esteem. They want to think they're superior,
Speaker 1: but somebody criticizes them or whatever. Then their self esteem
Speaker 1: drops temporarily, and they hate that. That feeling of self
Speaker 1: esteem goes down is quite a bad feeling. So the
Speaker 1: unstable ones become then hyper sensitive. Is there's this person
Speaker 1: about to criticize me, and they lash out very quickly
Speaker 1: when they think someone is being critical, and that's part
Speaker 1: of what makes those people difficult to get along with.
Speaker 1: But the true high self esteem you people who just
Speaker 1: think they're wonderful and nothing phases them. The stable high
Speaker 1: self esteem doesn't matter good day, bad day, success, failure.
Speaker 1: You still think you're great. Well, they're not aggressive or anything.
Speaker 1: They think of them as sort of floating through life
Speaker 1: on a cloud of their own wonderfulness. Nothing's bothering them,
Speaker 1: so wow, why should they get to it? Sure? And
Speaker 1: this topic has kind of been part of a larger
Speaker 1: investigation you've had on the nature of the self more
Speaker 1: generally and what is the self? And I noticed in
Speaker 1: your earliest some of your earliest investigations of the self,
Speaker 1: you looked into masochism. I don't think a lot of
Speaker 1: people are aware of that line of research you did.
Speaker 1: You viewed masochism as an escape from self, and you
Speaker 1: wrote later in one of your books that you were
Speaker 1: kind of disappointed with You thought that was going to
Speaker 1: be kind of the holy grail of understanding the self,
Speaker 1: but you actually realized that it wasn't the answer. I
Speaker 1: thought maybe you could talk a little bit about that
Speaker 1: line of research. Okay, I don't know about the Holy Grail.
Speaker 1: But it it did post it be elucidating. You thought
Speaker 1: at least would be elucidating, right, Yeah. I was not
Speaker 1: sabbatical at the University of Texas, and I thought I
Speaker 1: published a book on identity and how people decided who
Speaker 1: they are and so on. I thought, well, I would
Speaker 1: do another one on how people find meaning in life.
Speaker 1: This goes back to my time in philosophy. I sort
Speaker 1: of come up with a plan of let me pick
Speaker 1: the made philosophical problems and write social science books about them.
Speaker 1: So meaning of life obviously is a grand philosophical one.
Speaker 1: I think when social scientist says a lot have a
Speaker 1: lot to contribute, let me just read everything and see
Speaker 1: what it comes out. So I just started looking around
Speaker 1: for interesting things to read, and a couple of things
Speaker 1: that I mean this way. One was I thought, well,
Speaker 1: these people who engage in kinky sex so wanting to
Speaker 1: be tied up and spanked and stuff like that, that
Speaker 1: they must have really interesting lives. So they're called going
Speaker 1: over to the library at Texas there spending a day
Speaker 1: or two, and pretty soon I realized that I was
Speaker 1: not going to learn much about the meaning of life
Speaker 1: from these people doing and doing weird sex. But what
Speaker 1: struck me is that this was a challenge to our
Speaker 1: theories of self. When we think of the self as
Speaker 1: you're trying to maximize esteem, you're trying to maximize control,
Speaker 1: and basically, you know, find pleasure and avoid pain, and
Speaker 1: these people systematically do the opposite. They wanted to be humiliated, embarrassed,
Speaker 1: they wanted to be deprived of control, sometimes very obviously,
Speaker 1: tied up and rendered helpless and so on, and of
Speaker 1: course they accept pain rather than the pleasure. So I said,
Speaker 1: just goes exactly opposite of what we think about the self.
Speaker 1: How are we going to reconcile this? I have to
Speaker 1: figure this out. And after a while I realized there
Speaker 1: wasn't going to be any magic resolution that somehow the
Speaker 1: self really did have control or whatever underneath. That read
Speaker 1: really doing these things was a way to get rid
Speaker 1: of the self. That the masochists embrace these things that
Speaker 1: are precisely contrary to their ordinary self as a way
Speaker 1: of getting out of their normal self, and that enables
Speaker 1: them to or there several possible appeals of that. One is,
Speaker 1: you know, you forget yourself when it's stressful to be yourself,
Speaker 1: over a long period of time. Perhaps it liberates you
Speaker 1: from inhibitions and so on and produces these sort of
Speaker 1: sexual pleasures that they get out of it. So it
Speaker 1: was an interesting detour, and that whole project was done
Speaker 1: long before the Meaning of Life book ever got finished.
Speaker 1: It was the same with suicide about the meaning of life.
Speaker 1: I have to understand what causes suicide, because that's people
Speaker 1: who decided life doesn't have any meaning. And there's a
Speaker 1: lot more literature on suicide than on masochism. But as
Speaker 1: I read through that, I realized, no, it's not a
Speaker 1: rejection of your whole life, since it's not a life
Speaker 1: is meaningless thing. It's more that the present is intolerable,
Speaker 1: and it's more an escape from this week rather than
Speaker 1: from your life as a whole. So I had another
Speaker 1: paper sort of following up the masochism on suicide, The
Speaker 1: suicide has Escaped from self. Masochism was very frustrating to
Speaker 1: work on because there was so little information that you
Speaker 1: could think of all these theoretical issues and questions, but
Speaker 1: these people don't want to be studied, and there's just
Speaker 1: not much to find about the sexual masochists, whereas a
Speaker 1: suicide there are tons of studies. Their entire journals are
Speaker 1: going back decades. You're not all the information is great,
Speaker 1: but there's at least information. Any question you want to formulate,
Speaker 1: you can probably find something to answer it. So to me,
Speaker 1: studying suicide was a very positive, happy experience. I know
Speaker 1: that sounds weird, and you know, later went to a
Speaker 1: conference or two of suicide researchers, and for most of
Speaker 1: them it's a personal thing. They knew somebody who killed
Speaker 1: self or whatever. I didn't know anybody who killed self.
Speaker 1: I didn't have any interest in it. For me, it
Speaker 1: was just an intellectual puzzle and it was a very
Speaker 1: satisfying one to work on. And I was able to
Speaker 1: work out the escape from self theory much better than
Speaker 1: I could dealing with the kinky sex stuff. But again
Speaker 1: too that that was done and came out long before
Speaker 1: the meaning of life stuff was all done. You raised
Speaker 1: a lot of things that you just talked about. One
Speaker 1: is a very interesting point about death as an escape
Speaker 1: from self. I mean essentially that is, you know, we're
Speaker 1: the ones that make death such an event to ourselves
Speaker 1: because we hold our identity as the core of who
Speaker 1: we are, and so when that dies permanently. That's when
Speaker 1: we say it's the end of us. If we were
Speaker 1: to get our arm cut off, we wouldn't say we're dead.
Speaker 1: But when we get our brain cut off, you know,
Speaker 1: people say we're dead. Right, So we don't say yes.
Speaker 1: But it's very interesting to think about, you know, where
Speaker 1: the self is located. Yeah, there's some interesting theoretical issues
Speaker 1: on this is the Ernest Becker wrote The Denial of
Speaker 1: Death and the Dayson got a Pulitzer Prize or something,
Speaker 1: arguing that much of human life is motivated by this
Speaker 1: fear of our own mortality, and that so very bright
Speaker 1: social psychologists have developed this into a theory they called
Speaker 1: terror management, and they say that self esteem is erected
Speaker 1: as a defense against death. To me, that's never made sense,
Speaker 1: because yourself is what dies when you die, So the
Speaker 1: more value you put on the self, the worse it
Speaker 1: makes death. That it seems to go in the opposite
Speaker 1: direction that if you really wanted to to get rid
Speaker 1: of the fear of death and cope with it, you
Speaker 1: should lower your self esteem so that it's no big
Speaker 1: deal that you die. Indeed, was as researching the Meaning
Speaker 1: of Life book when it came to perceive and conclude
Speaker 1: is that as our society is put more and more
Speaker 1: emphasis on the self as a source of value, it's
Speaker 1: creating a very fragile meaning of life. People used to
Speaker 1: get meaning of life. You draw meaning from something that
Speaker 1: has a broader context and a bigger time span. And
Speaker 1: the standard advice for you want to increase the meaning
Speaker 1: of your life is get involved in something bigger than yourself.
Speaker 1: So it's presumably something that will last after you're gone,
Speaker 1: a religious or a political movement, or a scientific or
Speaker 1: artistic you know, the idea that I will create something
Speaker 1: and this will live on after my life. That's what
Speaker 1: gives meaning. If you draw the meaning of your life
Speaker 1: from focusing on self, that makes you all that more vulnerable,
Speaker 1: because when you die, yourself dies. And people like to
Speaker 1: think they'll be remembered, but the empirical evidence is people
Speaker 1: are not remembered very long. And most people can hardly
Speaker 1: come up with a few sentences about their grandparents and
Speaker 1: don't even know the names of their great grandparents. And
Speaker 1: so you know, after you die, it's a little bit
Speaker 1: of a doubtor. I suppose to reflect it. But after
Speaker 1: you die, the people who know you will remember you
Speaker 1: and think of you now and then. But the people
Speaker 1: who didn't know you will probably not give you another thought.
Speaker 1: And even as I said, your grandchildren who are young
Speaker 1: when you're old, they don't, you know, don't think about you.
Speaker 1: But the way you think of your grandparents, which is
Speaker 1: in most cases not very deeply or often. I think
Speaker 1: about my grandparents a lot. I tell you, you may
Speaker 1: be fortunate to be tied into more of a family
Speaker 1: sort of thing, but for most people, their grandparents are
Speaker 1: different people with different lives. And sure, so you raise
Speaker 1: a good point, because there is a study that came
Speaker 1: out recently showing that self transcendence, Like if you prime
Speaker 1: people to think of transof transcendent things, they do show
Speaker 1: reductions in terror management as opposed to thinking about the self.
Speaker 1: So there is a stuff the experimentally proving that. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's a good point. Suggesting that is okay. So your
Speaker 1: point was a good point, a good study supporting that point.
Speaker 1: So that is true. But the idea of the self,
Speaker 1: it's such a complicated question. Ask what is the self?
Speaker 1: We both would agree that it is a very fragmented thing.
Speaker 1: It's a very multi dimensional construct. But what is the
Speaker 1: association between our self and our identity. Are they the
Speaker 1: same thing? Is it unity? Okay, getting into some difficult
Speaker 1: definitional issues. First of all, yeah, the self has lots
Speaker 1: of pieces and parts, but to say it's fragmented, you're
Speaker 1: sort of an essential feature of the self is unity.
Speaker 1: You have oneself. And now the term self and identity
Speaker 1: are used in different ways by different people, and some
Speaker 1: use them almost interchangeably. But one way to make the
Speaker 1: distinction is sort of the identity is the definition of
Speaker 1: the self, and so in a sense, that's your position
Speaker 1: in society. Your identity is your roles, it's what other
Speaker 1: people would how they would characterize you, whereas the self
Speaker 1: might be the psychological processes that produce it and would
Speaker 1: include your self concept. If you've lived alone, you might
Speaker 1: have some self concept. You wouldn't have much of an identity.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you never met another person, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: even need a name, you wouldn't own anything, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: have a reputation. You know, a lot of the things
Speaker 1: that are really important central concerns for the self and
Speaker 1: the things that define your identity, which is who you are,
Speaker 1: is kind of the literal definition of identity. Those are
Speaker 1: all dependent on social interaction. As we said before talking
Speaker 1: about my dissertation on the theme of my career, is
Speaker 1: that a lot more things are based on interpersonal relations
Speaker 1: than we think. That's such a habit in psychology to
Speaker 1: think of one mind at a time, and that's what
Speaker 1: I came up against in my dissertation. People are thinking
Speaker 1: all these effects are due to changes in self esteem
Speaker 1: and so on. Starting to say and self esteem that
Speaker 1: matter much. What people care a lot about what other
Speaker 1: people think of them. So the self too, an identity
Speaker 1: is very much a tool for connecting with other people.
Speaker 1: It's what our species evolved to do, and it's our
Speaker 1: strategy for survival and reproduction. As social animals. We need
Speaker 1: to connect with others. We've come up with fairly elaborate
Speaker 1: social systems, much more than elsewhere in nature, but they
Speaker 1: depend on differentiated identities. Really, I don't feel like we
Speaker 1: ever really defined what the self is, you know, I
Speaker 1: take your point that the self is it feels unitary,
Speaker 1: But what I meant by fragment is it is actually
Speaker 1: comprised of lots of different, sometimes contradictory processes, and a
Speaker 1: lot of people throughout the history of psychology've talked about
Speaker 1: the importance of integrating these various selves, so to speak,
Speaker 1: to have optimal human functioning. So what is the self?
Speaker 1: Though again they trying to come up with a definition
Speaker 1: is one of the hardest things. I think the self
Speaker 1: is not a thing. It's not a piece of the brain,
Speaker 1: but rather it's more of a process of performance. You
Speaker 1: talk about the different parts. Yeah, integration is in a
Speaker 1: sense the last step that self comes into being bottom up.
Speaker 1: And you know, the brain doesn't even have a central
Speaker 1: processing unit, It just does things separately. The brain doesn't
Speaker 1: really need a self, and like a solitary organism, doesn't
Speaker 1: be on limited degrees either. That it's a requirement of
Speaker 1: complex social systems. We have a REVIEWERICO coming out and
Speaker 1: fairly soon brain behavioral sciences. We look through all the
Speaker 1: group's literature. Sometimes human groups are more than some other
Speaker 1: parts and sometimes less, and we try to say, what's
Speaker 1: the moderator, what makes the difference. The conclusion was groups
Speaker 1: function well when people are individually identified and participate as
Speaker 1: separate individuals. When people all blend into the group, then
Speaker 1: the groups that produces the bad effects like mob violence
Speaker 1: and the individuation and not helping and social loafing and
Speaker 1: all those negative things. So human groups really do better
Speaker 1: with differentiated selves. The requirement to be a unique individual
Speaker 1: doesn't come from inside the person. It comes from the
Speaker 1: social system. Now we evolve to make those systems work,
Speaker 1: and they do bring immense benefits, so and we take
Speaker 1: part in them. But the self, you know, the brain
Speaker 1: operates an identity in the social group. You know, that's
Speaker 1: how the self comes into being. As I said, it's
Speaker 1: a process of performance. It's not a thing. You're such
Speaker 1: a social psychologist. Thanks. It's funny to hear, you know,
Speaker 1: because like you could hear a different perspective from someone
Speaker 1: who like just studies the brain, or someone who like
Speaker 1: a cognitive psychology or individual differences in psychology, it's the
Speaker 1: cognitive and the brain. People are sometimes skeptical that there
Speaker 1: is such as a self, as a hefty tradition running
Speaker 1: through them saying the self is an illusion, but they
Speaker 1: can't find any particular piece of the brain. They study
Speaker 1: all these little processes and subroutines. I had a reviewer
Speaker 1: once on a paper saying, it's really this is a
Speaker 1: profound comment that's stuck with me ever since. Obviously it's
Speaker 1: instructive to look at which disciplines need the self and
Speaker 1: which are skeptical of it, and the ones just looking
Speaker 1: at the inner workings of the mind and the parts
Speaker 1: they're not so sure there's such a thing as a
Speaker 1: self or some like I said, some of them call
Speaker 1: it an illusion and so on. But you couldn't do
Speaker 1: economics or sociology without identities and economics, what's the point
Speaker 1: of buying something if you don't have the self to
Speaker 1: own it next week? It's the point of selling something
Speaker 1: if you don't have a self to get the money
Speaker 1: and use it for something else that the self wants.
Speaker 1: So the assumption of continuity of identity and of selfhood
Speaker 1: is indispensable for the disciplines that study social systems. For
Speaker 1: the ones that go down into the individual mind, well,
Speaker 1: that's not so important to me. That's a profound point
Speaker 1: that the need for the self arises in personal relations,
Speaker 1: not in terms of the requirements of the single mind.
Speaker 1: I find that very interesting. I also find it very
Speaker 1: interesting that you said that the brain does not require
Speaker 1: the self, and that is clearly illustrated when we're dreaming,
Speaker 1: because well, when we're dreaming, we certainly don't have an identity, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, but does that mean we're I'm not sure
Speaker 1: that's true. I mean, you have a dream which has
Speaker 1: yourself in it. Okay, we don't have self reflection, I guess, yeah,
Speaker 1: not in the same way. It's the unconscious mind constructs
Speaker 1: a little scenario and it makes sense out of stimuli,
Speaker 1: makes a story that your storymaking is one of the
Speaker 1: basic activities of the human mind, and dreams are a
Speaker 1: version of that. So you think the identity is still
Speaker 1: involved in dream formation, Yes, I think so. I mean
Speaker 1: again without participation of the conscious self. These are things
Speaker 1: I don't have fu full grasp on yet, but certainly
Speaker 1: in a dream wake up you know you're write down
Speaker 1: your dream. There's I I did this, and that's a reconstruction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But the point is it was there in the dream,
Speaker 1: the difference between you and someone else. So typically you're
Speaker 1: dreaming about yourself doing something, being in some situation. You
Speaker 1: don't dream about the people you never met or heard of,
Speaker 1: or other things going on. Maybe some people do occasionally,
Speaker 1: but most usually people are in their own dreams, and
Speaker 1: so there is at least in fact of self identity
Speaker 1: it is used there. You don't have all the control
Speaker 1: that you have in an ordinary life to make decisions
Speaker 1: and take responsibility, and strange things happen that certainly in dreams.
Speaker 1: But there is the basic idea of I know who
Speaker 1: I am, you know, that's still there in the dream.
Speaker 1: Very interesting. Okay, it's a good point. It's a good point.
Speaker 1: Let's move on to the meanings of life. Something that
Speaker 1: was really seminal in we're moving from one to like
Speaker 1: huge topic to another huge. I mean, they're not really
Speaker 1: light topic. So are they death self? You go big
Speaker 1: or go home? Right? Yeah, But with the means of life,
Speaker 1: you know, something that was very seminal in your work
Speaker 1: was differentiating between happiness and meaning, saying we also have
Speaker 1: this striving for meaning in life. And obviously not the
Speaker 1: only one to say that, you know, Victor Frankel said
Speaker 1: it as well, and his idea of will to meaning.
Speaker 1: But you came up with four needs for meaning. I
Speaker 1: thought you can maybe just talk about the four okay. Well.
Speaker 1: Franco was a genius. He was the first one to
Speaker 1: dare to bring the idea of meaning and meaning of
Speaker 1: life into psychology. For him, it was pretty much about purpose,
Speaker 1: you know. When he talks about meaning it's having a purpose.
Speaker 1: And he started with his observations and concentration camps, and
Speaker 1: I went on to study people and so ons some
Speaker 1: purposes there, and a purpose is certainly a big aspect
Speaker 1: of meaning of life. So to me that was one
Speaker 1: of the four needs for meaning, and I would have
Speaker 1: been happy if that explained everything. But as I read
Speaker 1: endless amounts of stuff to try to put together that book,
Speaker 1: you wanted to say, Okay, what is it that a
Speaker 1: person needs wants when you were looking for a meeting
Speaker 1: of life? So purpose is one. But just having a
Speaker 1: purpose wasn't enough. I seem there also has to be
Speaker 1: some sense of right and wrong, some basic values in
Speaker 1: some way, even to justify yourself so that you think
Speaker 1: you are a good person and right. You know, if
Speaker 1: you have a purpose but it's associated with something bad
Speaker 1: or whatever, that's not fully satisfactory. And then if that
Speaker 1: two more came in after a while. The third is efficacy.
Speaker 1: You have to believe you can make a difference. Having
Speaker 1: a purpose is not going to make your life meaningful
Speaker 1: if there's nothing you can do to fulfill that purpose.
Speaker 1: So apart from having the idea that this is the
Speaker 1: purpose of my life, it's also there has to be
Speaker 1: something I can do to make that true, to advance that,
Speaker 1: to reach those goals, to achieve fulfillment, to get to heaven,
Speaker 1: to provide for my children, or whatever. The purpose is
Speaker 1: so efficacy, and then thinking again about self esteem and
Speaker 1: so on, some basis for thinking that you're a person
Speaker 1: of value of worth. That's also implicated with those four
Speaker 1: people who have a purpose that they're striving for. I
Speaker 1: have a strong sense of what's right and wrong, of value,
Speaker 1: who feel some efficacy of being able to make a
Speaker 1: difference in life in a positive way, and who have
Speaker 1: some basis for thinking that they're a worthwhile person. For them,
Speaker 1: life is pretty meaningful. For people who don't have those things, well,
Speaker 1: I think they have a problem and meaning of life
Speaker 1: and will tend to say no, things don't make sense,
Speaker 1: My life is not meaningful. But something to address each
Speaker 1: of those four basic needs. Sure, and you also argue
Speaker 1: that there is a myth of higher meaning, of there
Speaker 1: being a higher meaning. Can you tell me why that's
Speaker 1: a myth? Yes? Well you like that question? You like
Speaker 1: that question? Yes? Yes. A lot of things develop in
Speaker 1: a bottom up fashion. We said this about the self.
Speaker 1: You know, that you have different responses and so on,
Speaker 1: but to integrate them into a single self is a
Speaker 1: gradual process that perhaps never becomes complete, and a lot
Speaker 1: of reality is like that, and biologically it makes a sense.
Speaker 1: That's how we evolve. So with meaning, we like to
Speaker 1: think there's one explanation that will all fit together. The
Speaker 1: process of constructing meaning is gradually putting things and integrating
Speaker 1: them and so on, and to imagine eventually it will
Speaker 1: all all come together and all makes sense. There's no
Speaker 1: guarantee that that's true, but it's an appealing idea. So
Speaker 1: people ask what is the meaning of life, as if
Speaker 1: there's going to be a single answer or one formula
Speaker 1: that explains and integrates everything, Whereas, in fact, it struck
Speaker 1: me that the meaning of most people lives is something
Speaker 1: stitched together out of several unrelated things. They have their
Speaker 1: family and romantic relationships and one, and they have their work,
Speaker 1: and those may or may not be related, they may
Speaker 1: be quite separate. And they may have their religious faith,
Speaker 1: which is yet another thing, or other sources of meaning.
Speaker 1: People might have hobbies and other activities. So idea, though
Speaker 1: even one person's life, that there is a single meaning
Speaker 1: to it that's probably not right or at least doesn't
Speaker 1: fit the data. But that faith I see signs of it.
Speaker 1: People think it's all going to make sense and all
Speaker 1: going to come together. So that's what I meant by
Speaker 1: the myth of higher meaning that eventually will get to
Speaker 1: a place where you know, we can understand it all.
Speaker 1: But I'm not sure we will. Even with a single life.
Speaker 1: There's so many events in a particular life. You can
Speaker 1: write the most perfect, exquisite biography, but it's not going
Speaker 1: to include every thing that you did in your life.
Speaker 1: And the time you've got lost and you're looking for
Speaker 1: the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the time you had
Speaker 1: the flu and you vomited in the living room. You know,
Speaker 1: those are a meaning of life. There's a stitch together integration,
Speaker 1: picking out some high lights. I'm particularly interested in the
Speaker 1: same person writes several different autobiographies that how do they
Speaker 1: reinterpret and reconstruct their life and they take some things
Speaker 1: out and add new things in, and even going back
Speaker 1: that write your autobiography as a young adult, and then
Speaker 1: later maybe you have some big religious awakening or political
Speaker 1: conversion or something, you would write a new autobiography and
Speaker 1: when stuff that happened when you were a childhood that
Speaker 1: might have been left out of the first biography is
Speaker 1: sort of out of the way. Suddenly that might become
Speaker 1: central and important as the first steps that the integration
Speaker 1: wasn't there till later. Meaning is basically connection meaning as
Speaker 1: in everything from meaning of life to the meaning of
Speaker 1: a sentence or the meaning of a word. It connects
Speaker 1: things in a non physical way. It's not moleculed and molecule,
Speaker 1: but it's a more of a symbolic connection. That's why
Speaker 1: meaning comes in webs and structures and clusters. So as
Speaker 1: we're talking about constructing a meaning of life, we're talking
Speaker 1: about putting things together and integrating things and do that
Speaker 1: to a greater and greater extent. If you think a
Speaker 1: great detail about your life, but you're probably never going
Speaker 1: to get it all in the same story, You're not
Speaker 1: going to come up with one means sense. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: that does make sense. And we may have multiple purposes
Speaker 1: throughout our lives or feel there's multiple things in our
Speaker 1: life that have a whole different meaning at different points
Speaker 1: in our lives. So that speaks to this against this
Speaker 1: notion of there being a single higher meaning like a higher,
Speaker 1: superordinate meaning that that transcends our whole life, that we
Speaker 1: need this better whole life searching for. So I think
Speaker 1: that makes sense. Well, thank god, just kidding, it's a
Speaker 1: little bit. I came grad it round about, so you know.
Speaker 1: But the idea isn't so much messier theory that I
Speaker 1: came up with, and I like clean, elegant theory, so
Speaker 1: it's too bad. But sometimes that's the way reality is
Speaker 1: that if there were a meaning of life, that you
Speaker 1: could pick one person and say, okay, the meaning of
Speaker 1: your life is blah blah blah and say it in
Speaker 1: one sentence, that would be That would be lovely and elegant.
Speaker 1: But more it's a matter of do you have what
Speaker 1: are the purpose says you strive for, what are the
Speaker 1: basis for knowing what's right and wrong? And how do
Speaker 1: you justify what you're doing? You have efficacy, you have
Speaker 1: self worth. You might have several different schemes or aspects
Speaker 1: of your life that satisfy different ones of those, but
Speaker 1: if you've got them all covered one way or another,
Speaker 1: you probably think life is meaningful. Even if they don't
Speaker 1: all fit into a single meaning. That's right, But ultimately
Speaker 1: meaning comes from what other people find you doing, Like
Speaker 1: if other people find what you're doing meaningful, that's meaning.
Speaker 1: You know. It's funny we measure in positive psychology with
Speaker 1: self report scales of meaning, and it's kind of silly
Speaker 1: in a way that like we're measuring whether you have
Speaker 1: meaning based on your self reported Like what if like
Speaker 1: what you're doing does not offer meaning to anyone else
Speaker 1: in your environment? Is you know? Like and then you die?
Speaker 1: Was their meaning? Do you know what I mean? I
Speaker 1: think I know what you mean? And you're bringing up
Speaker 1: another point again, the interpersonal, that we're not solitary self
Speaker 1: contained units, and meaning is connection and some of that
Speaker 1: in books in a personal connection. So it's possible to
Speaker 1: be quite deluded and have a meaning for your life
Speaker 1: that nobody else can see. You might think you're a
Speaker 1: great artist or something, and everybody else takes one look
Speaker 1: at your paintings and says, oh, get me out of here.
Speaker 1: But then I guess that's how they reacted to van Go,
Speaker 1: and later he was people judged to be one of
Speaker 1: the great geniuses of all time. Sometimes the one's own
Speaker 1: meaning is right, but more often it requires validation from others.
Speaker 1: And I think you're good at something and nobody else thinks.
Speaker 1: So odds are others are all right and you're not sure? Sure? Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I think that it'd be good to develop measures of
Speaker 1: meaning that survey your community, your peers, your friends, not
Speaker 1: just yourself. Actually, Tom Stoppard me this point in a
Speaker 1: Q and A he had with the philosopher David Chalmers.
Speaker 1: So asked about meaning, and he said, how can I
Speaker 1: ever assess meaning? That's for other people to us about
Speaker 1: me anyway? So it just made me, you know, I
Speaker 1: thought that was a really good point. I'm a big
Speaker 1: fan of his. But in empirical fact, people do iss
Speaker 1: as the meaning of their lives. They may be wrong,
Speaker 1: which maybe is fine, but they certainly are able to
Speaker 1: do it. But it suggests what are they responding? In
Speaker 1: a really spread of these studies where the dependent variable
Speaker 1: is they'll have college students rate on a twelve point
Speaker 1: scale or whatever, how meaningful is their life. We don't
Speaker 1: really know what goes into them saying yes or no.
Speaker 1: It's easy to say, oh yeah, my life has cobs
Speaker 1: of meaning. But I think the next generation of research
Speaker 1: we need to push them a little further and say, okay,
Speaker 1: what exactly does your life mean can you articulate what
Speaker 1: this meaning is? Meaningfulness might just be a feeling if
Speaker 1: something seems emotionally rich, maybe that is enough to seem
Speaker 1: meaningful and sway people into that. But is that really
Speaker 1: an answer or not? Right? And well, you've done great
Speaker 1: work differentiating happiness from meaning and meaning being. A key
Speaker 1: difference is this integrate of complexity from your past, your future,
Speaker 1: and your presence. And maybe when people are coming up
Speaker 1: with that sort of judgment, they're trying to integrate all
Speaker 1: these three levels of time. Yeah, meaning a happiness thing.
Speaker 1: Clearly happiness is part of the meaning. That was incidentally
Speaker 1: one I thought, going to research my book on meaning
Speaker 1: of life, I'll have to read the literature on happiness,
Speaker 1: And that did get in. That's clearly there. It's being
Speaker 1: happy and having meaningful life. I'm not the same thing,
Speaker 1: but there's certainly some overlap. Sure, you can be a
Speaker 1: meaningful life without being very happy, But I'm not sure
Speaker 1: about the revise that you can be really happy if
Speaker 1: you find your life meaningless. That I'd rather doubt. Right, So,
Speaker 1: even if you live an entirely hedonistic lifestyle, it's still
Speaker 1: likely that you'll find meaning in that right, I mean
Speaker 1: you'll say that's what I'm kind of here for in
Speaker 1: a way. Yeah, we had more studies on people who
Speaker 1: actually do that and what they think and feel and
Speaker 1: do they rationalize, do they come up with at least
Speaker 1: meaningful constructions or are they able to say, I'm just
Speaker 1: here to eat candy, take drugs, masturbate, I don't know,
Speaker 1: just going for the pleasure from day to day. Conventional wisdom,
Speaker 1: which probably right on this, is that living a purely
Speaker 1: hedonistic life doesn't satisfy you in the long run, which
Speaker 1: sure Victor Francle's point that we need something more, We
Speaker 1: need meaning too. There also some studies suggesting that you
Speaker 1: pursue happiness for its own sake, and pursuit of happiness
Speaker 1: of course one of the founding American ideals. Pursuing happiness
Speaker 1: for your own sake doesn't really work. But if you
Speaker 1: try to cultivate a meaningful life, that can work and
Speaker 1: that will make you then happy too. So Fitz that
Speaker 1: I said meeting is more of a prerequisite for happiness
Speaker 1: and not so much the other way around. Excellent point.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned everyone for next week for part two of
Speaker 1: this two part series with Roy. Thanks for listening to
Speaker 1: the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott barrk Kaufman. I hope
Speaker 1: you found this episode just as thought provoking an interesting
Speaker 1: as I did. If you'd like to read the show
Speaker 1: notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can
Speaker 1: visit the Psychology Podcast dot com