If you could choose, how old would you live? Would you be smarter? How would you imagine the company? These questions were asked of 2,392 people from 9 different countries. The results, analyzed by researchers from the university of queensland, in Australia, were published in the journal Psychological Science. You would think that anyone would maximize various aspects of their life if given the chance. Yet the majority of people seem to aspire to a modest life without going to extremes.
The study participants came from Australia, Chile, China, India, Japan, Peru, Russia and the United States. These countries have been divided into two categories: holistic for China, India and Japan and non-holistic for others. A holistic culture means that the country is mainly influenced by religions or philosophies based on Buddhism, Hinduism or Taoism.
Personal VS societal ideal
Participants from each region received a questionnaire translated into their mother tongue. They had to indicate their ideal level of intelligence, their life expectancy under normal circumstances and how long they would choose to live if they could take a magic pill to ensure the eternal youth !
Using a scale from 0 to 100, participants indicated their ideal levels of health, individual freedom, happinessand fun. They used the same scale to rate their aspirations for society, such as morality, equal opportunity, technological advancement, and national security.
A life expectancy of 90 years
Generally speaking, the volunteers wanted health and happiness, but did not exclude other negative experiences: they wanted their life to be made up of 75% of “good things”. On average, they would like to reach the age of 90 (which is slightly higher than the current life expectancy). Even when participants imagined they could take the infamous magic pill, their ideal life expectancy only increased by a few decades, reaching a median of 120 years. As it concerns the IQ, for the volunteers, the ideal score was 130, which corresponds to an intelligence well above the average, the latter being between 90 and 110.
Regarding the differences between countries, holistic cultures had chosen levels of personal ideals (happiness, pleasure, freedom, health, longevity, IQ) that were consistently lower than those reported by non-holistic countries. Regarding the ideals of society, no difference between countries was noted. The study shows that the principle of maximization – where people naturally aspire to the highest possible level of something good, if all constraints are removed – is not a universal aspect of human nature and that it does exist. foreseeable cultural differences in the notion of “perfection”.
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