People around the world have surprising modest ideas of what a ‘perfect’ life is.
People would probably want to maximize different aspects of their lives if given the chance, regardless of whether they’re maximizing the level they experience in terms or pleasure, intelligence, or personal freedom. According to Psychological Science, the journal of the Association for Psychological Science’s, findings show that people all over the world aspire to moderate levels of intelligence, pleasure, and freedom.
The first author of the study, Matthew J. Hornsey of University of Queensland’s Department of Psychology, said that the findings showed that people have a modest sense of perfection. People wanted positive qualities like health and happiness but not at the expense of darker experiences. They wanted 75% of something good.
In addition, the average person said that their ideal life expectancy was 90 years, which is just slightly more than today’s average. Even though participants imagined they could take a magical pill that guaranteed eternal youth, the median life expectancy of their ideal was only 120 years. When asked to select their ideal IQ score, the median was 130, which would qualify someone as intelligent, but not a brilliant.
Source:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-world-people-surprisingly-modest-notions.html
