Purpose As a Psychological Need: Evaluation Against Established Criteria, Development of a Measure, and Empirical Evidence for a Link to Well-being

It is established that a sense of purpose in life is linked to well-being, but the case has yet to be made that purpose is a fundamental psychological need. In this research, we identify the purpose component from the tripartite model of meaning in life (George Park, 2016; Martela Steger, 2016) as having distinct motivational properties that might qualify it as a need according to Baumeister and Leary’s (1995) established criteria. We provide some evidence from the extant literature, but note that it is limited by the absence of measures of purpose conceptualized as a need. Thus, our primary objective was to develop and evaluate the Satisfaction and Frustration of Purpose Scales (SFPS) to use in more direct tests of the need for purpose against the established criteria. We applied established measure-development procedures and used data from an online sample of adults (N = 232) to select four items each to measure need satisfaction and frustration. In a second study with a nationally representative U.S. sample (N = 399), we confirmed the psychometric properties of the SFPS and demonstrated that the measures were distinct from satisfaction of the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness from self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan Deci, 2000). We also found that purpose accounted for unique variance in several well-being indices beyond the SDT needs. These findings fulfill some core criteria, including that a ‘new’ need not be derivative of established needs. Importantly, the SFPS are now available for continued evaluation of purpose as a psychological need.