Stoic Ideology and Well-being

Abstract

Ancient philosophy identified a wide range of possible approaches to life which are supposed to enable wellbeing. The stoic approach to life focused on emotional restraint and an overall orientation towards meaning in life. While few individuals are explicit adherents to stoicism, individuals can also adopt an approach to life representing a naive stoic ideology. While in the past this approach has been largely investigated in relation to ideals of masculinity, recently the focus has widened to examine how stoic ideology might be related to wellbeing across individuals. While initial research focusing on hedonic conceptualizations of wellbeing has found substantial negative effects of stoic ideology, no study so far has examined the differential effects that stoic ideology might have on eudaimonic and hedonic wellbeing. In this pre-registered study, 636 participants reported their stoic ideology, eudaimonic and hedonic wellbeing, as well as their orientations to happiness. Overall, we found that the recently developed measure of stoic ideology showed good measurement properties and we confirmed the negative effects of stoic beliefs on hedonic wellbeing observed in previous studies. Additionally, we found that in contrast to our hypothesis stoic ideology significantly negatively predicted eudaimonic wellbeing and eudaimonic wellbeing orientation, as well as engagement in life. This indicates that a naive endorsement of stoic ideology might be detrimental to individuals’ wellbeing independent of the specific aspect.

Unraveling values and well-being—Disentangling within- and between-person dynamics via a psychometric network perspective.

“…Hedonic perspectives focus on the experience of positive affective states and the avoidance of negatively valenced experiences (sometimes referred to as a life full of pleasure and free of pain), whereas eudaimonic perspectives of well-being emphasize meaning and self-realization as important for the functioning of a person (Ryan & Deci, 2001; Ryff & Keyes, 1995). Although conceptually distinct, the two dimensions often highly correlate (Baselmans & Bartels, 2018; Karl et al, 2020) suggesting that they capture an overall level of a person’s functioning. As this literature integrating hedonic and eudaimonic well-being highlights, it is important to highlight that well-being is the result of more than pure-emotion processing and positive affect, but also contains aspects of meaning-making (Ryan & Deci, 2001).…”