You may not need a new job, relationship, or expensive hobby this year to find more meaning in life. You just need to pay more attention, according to psychologists.
A series of five studies led by Faculty of Arts & Science Assistant Professor Katy Tam suggest that meaning and attention are closely linked in a causal relationship. As attention rises in the everyday situations that make up our lives, meaning does too.
“I tend to think of attention as a kind of bridge between us and meaning in the world — or like a radio. When the dial is tuned just right, the static fades and the music comes through clearly,” says Tam.
Tam’s findings are detailed in “Meaning and Attention Intertwined: Experimental and Experience-Sampling Findings,” published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The paper was written alongside Wijnand van Tilburg, Christian Chan, and Michael Inzlicht.
Humans have a fundamental need for meaning. When our lives make sense, have a purpose, and seem to matter, we see them as more meaningful.
“Greater meaning in life is related to higher satisfaction with life, less depressive symptoms, less anxiety, and less stress," says Tam.
Attention is a process that involves focusing cognitive resources on specific aspects of the environment while ignoring others. It might look like putting your phone away while listening to your friend’s holiday stories over dinner.
While each has been extensively studied, meaning and attention have rarely been considered together. By bridging these lines of research, Tam and her collaborators have identified an easy way to find more meaning in the everyday.
These insights are especially relevant in our digital age, where distractions are everywhere and virtually constant.
Examining the meaning-attention relationship
Tam and her collaborators propose that paying attention is a process in which we construct and perceive meaning. At the same time, meaning captures and sustains attention.
“When people pay attention, they find things more meaningful,” says Tam. “Attention shapes people’s sense of meaning, and meaning captures people’s attention.”
To test this hypothesis, the researchers produced two 5-minute animated videos featuring simple geometric shapes moving with accompanying sounds. One was designed to have a high level of meaning, while the other was designed to be low meaning.
Both videos feature identical shapes, but those in the high meaning video follow the Three Little Pigs story, while those in the low meaning video move randomly. They paired these videos with the same audio segment — an instrumental from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. However, the audio in the high meaning video is unedited and coherent, while in the low meaning video, it is sliced up and rearranged to sound nonsensical and chaotic.
They found that participants paid more attention to the high meaning video versus the low meaning video. In other words, meaning captures attention.
To examine how attention affects people’s sense of meaning, they instructed one group of participants to pay attention to the high meaning video and another to let their thoughts wander and reflect on their day while watching it. They found that participants who were explicitly told to pay attention reported a stronger sense of meaning compared to participants who were not. Participants in the distracted group either found more meaning in the low meaning video or found less meaning in the high meaning one. Effectively, attention altered participants’ sense of meaning.
“When people are distracted, when they’re not paying attention, they can attribute greater meaning to something that is meaningless,” says Tam. “Or they will miss out on the meaning in something that is meaningful.”
The researchers extended their experimental findings to the real world to determine how the meaning-attention relationship functions in everyday life. They sent 191 students at the University of Hong Kong a brief survey at five random times a day for seven days. For each, participants selected an activity that best described what they were doing within the last 30 minutes, and reported their levels of situational meaning, attention, boredom, and negative emotions at the time.
They found that participants who reported greater situational attention in their daily lives also reported a greater sense of meaning on average. At times of higher meaning or higher attention, participants also experienced lower levels of boredom and lower negative emotions. Participants who felt their lives had more meaning or who could focus their attention better reported better subjective well-being.
“We find across all kinds of daily activities — like studying, working, commuting — people report higher senses of meaning when they pay more attention,” says Tam.
Looking ahead, Tam is studying whether digital media use, specifically digital distractions, actually alter people’s sense of meaning.