How sources of purpose predict meaning in life, happiness, and psychological richness, across cultures

Past research has shown many benefits of having a sense of purpose. However, less is known about the specific kinds of purpose that guide individual's lives. Using over 2000 open-ended purposes supplied by American adults, we identified 16 common kinds of purposes. We then collected data (n = 1048) from participants in the United States, Poland, Japan and India in order to explore the cross-cultural generalizability of these purposes and to see how well they predicted three forms of the good life; meaningful, happy, and psychologically rich. Overall, the 16 different sources of purpose were commonly endorsed and to a strikingly similar degree across cultures. These different sources of purpose also similarly predicted forms of the good life across nations, with some cultural variation. Taken together, our findings suggest that some kinds of purposes are especially relevant in predicting people's well-being and that these relations are largely robust across cultures.