Jordan Wylie

Yeah, so it is the case that most people and a lot of research has found that being good is like one way to achieve the feeling of being one's true self.

Because a lot of people have the belief that humans are sort of like deep, deep down all pretty morally good.

And so that's one path to like feeling that feeling of authenticity is being good and nice to other people.

But one of the things we were interested in is, you know, what are some other spaces?

Again, because it's my intuition that like when we really think about the moral domain and all of the tensions and obligations that exist there, it doesn't like immediately seem obvious to me that that's like the perfect place for proliferation of your like true, authentic, good self.

And so the art space, again, is like just another avenue, not the only one, certainly.

And in our empirical work, we find that people think being good is like is a really good way to find one's true self.

Just art and some of these like rule bendy conventions are another path that sometimes are equal, sometimes are less and actually sometimes beat out what it feels like to be like good.

Yeah, so again, we're thinking a lot about the kinds of things that make life meaningful and whether morality is chief among them.

And there's reasons to think that it should be and that it is.

There's work in philosophy, for example, that suggests that morality is, and empirical work in psychology that morality is, and work in philosophy that suggests even that it should be the thing that people care about the most.

And so we just wanted to see what everyday people think.

And we looked at some accounts of the kinds of things that people value in their lives from other folks, Martha Nussbaum in particular, and Sen.

And we pulled those and like sort of, you know, put them together in ways that everyday people can like easily, like colloquially understand.

And we came up with a couple of categories.

So relationships are,

how you connect with other people, other animals, the environment, so your relationships to other things, morality, aesthetics and intellectual pursuits, civics, and play.

And then we just ask people to, you know, sort the world in ways that feels like that's the best, you know, if I lived a perfect life, an ideal life, this would be exactly the life that I, this is how I would allocate my time.

And what we find is that people really prioritize relationships.

So when they have to think about time as zero sum, you know, you can only devote so much time.