Measuring The Mind
The belief in the meaning of life
Something that got me hooked on psychology, and still continues to fascinate me to this day, is that we can measure what’s going on in our extremely complex minds, from beliefs (in conspiracy theories, for example), traits (personality), attitudes (our political tendencies), emotions (whether we experience gratitude, joy or contempt), and so on. Obviously, not every measure is perfect. But the mere idea that those things can even be approximately measured and become the object of methodical and rigorous investigation is baffling.
If you had asked me during my bachelor, I think I would not have believed you, or I would have said it was pure scientism, a modern illusion. But when I actively delved into the myriad of work dealing with measurements during my master degree, I quickly realized how wrong I was
So when I started my PhD, one of the many things I wanted to achieve was to validate a questionnaire to measure something. I didn’t know what yet, but my plan was to acquire the necessary skills to do that. Oh, it didn’t have to be as deep and complex as the NEO PI-R, one of the best available tools to measure personality to date. I wanted it to be modest, but functional and efficient. So when my PI suggested we could empirically investigate the topic of the belief in the meaning of life, that is, what this belief is actually about, I immediately jumped at the opportunity of such a great idea, and told myself it was the perfect time to achieve this goal of mine, because there was no existing scale yet to measure this belief, and we needed one to test our hypothesis (in our case, that the belief in the meaning of life is linked to reliogiosity, and spirituality, while finding that one's own life has meaning, is more related to well-being).
It was very challenging, as I’m not a genius of any kind, and developing a measurement tool requires very specific and hard-to-master skills. But while I may not be a genius, I’m filled with passion and motivation, and I’m a hard worker (not to say stubborn).
I like to see myself as a knowledge artisan, using all tools of some sort to create something. And in this case, I had to read linear algebra (I may have forgot everything since then), and guide for what is called exploratory factor analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis, and to learn how to implement that correctly in R language. It was all exhausting, and depressing at times, but also very rewarding.
After countless hours of discussions, writing, and analysis, we finally ended up developing the following scale:
The Belief in Meaning of Life Questionnaire (BiMoLQ)
To what extent do you agree with the following statements?
Scale from -3: Strongly disagree to 3: Strongly agree.
- In my opinion, human existence doesn’t have any purpose. (R)
- All human beings exist for a purpose.
- Human life matters in the grand scheme of things.
- Life on earth is here for a reason.
- There is no reason why we exist. (R)
(R) = items reverse-coded.
As I’ve said, it is indeed very modest. But to arrive at this result, we had to go through many different steps, and those five items are the 'survivors' of a much longer list of items that did not make the cut. Now, however, we have a way to measure whether individuals believe in the meaning of life, and to conduct studies to better understand the role this plays in our psychology and our culture.
More information can be found in our paper reporting our results here.
It should be noted that the paper is currently under review and is not officially published yet (but it will be, for sure).
— Joffrey Fuhrer