Life Satisfaction
Authors: Vittersø Joar 
Published: February 2025

Life satisfaction (LS) is the major component of subjective wellbeing (SWB) and is often referred to as cognitive wellbeing. LS can be defined as a comparison between a person’s ideal life and their actual life, but it can also be defined as a broad appraisal that a person makes of their life as a whole. Both conceptualizations have their weaknesses. The first overestimates humans’ computational capacities and is unable to account for how comparisons are performed mentally. The second is underspecified and does not provide enough detail about the judgmental mechanisms involved in the subjective evaluation of the favorability of one’s life. Despite these limitations, measures of LS are reliable and provide vital information about people’s quality of life. LS items are also stable predictors of a bundle of outcome variables at both the individual and societal levels, such as health, longevity, motivation, investments, and political elections. The humanistic theory of wellbeing (HTW) argues, however, that self-reports of LS are not valid in the sense of measuring what they intend to measure. Self-reported LS does not reflect an unbiased, reflective, and broad report of all the important appraisals individuals make about the quality of their lives. The SWB literature holds LS to represent cognitive wellbeing, even though empirical evidence shows that the concept comprises strong affective cues. The HTW therefore claims that LS is similar to pleasure and other harmony feelings in that it reflects spontaneous good–bad evaluations and that the concept functionally operates to maintain universal needs for stability. But LS is not a feeling state. The cognitive attributes of LS have been specified by Diener as following a three-step procedure. The first is an examination of the conditions in one’s life, the second is a weighting of the importance of these conditions, and the third is an aggregated evaluation of the weighted conditions on a quantified scale running from dissatisfied to satisfied [Diener, E. (2009). Assessing well-being: The collected works of Ed Diener. Springer. (p. 196)]. However, survey participants only spend a few seconds responding to an LS item, which is not consistent with such a complex and time-consuming process. The workload required to calculate one’s life satisfaction according to a set of computation rules is too large for the human brain to carry out. Therefore, the HTW accuses the default version of SWB to fall for an “all things considered” myth. Rather than considering LS as an overall and reflective evaluation carried out as a System 2 process, the HTW suggests that self-reported LS is determined as a System 1 response. A System 1 approach is more consistent with the idea that affective and cognitive elements interact in forming the concept of LS. Another disagreement between mainstream SWB theory and the HTW relates to the functions of LS. Most SWB researchers consider states of high life satisfaction to be approach oriented and concerned with “doing” things. The alternative perspective is that high life satisfaction reflects a mode of “having” rather than “doing.” Since the HTW associates LS with the regulation of stability, it supports the latter view. However, the “having” and “doing” elements of LS are complex. For example, measures of LS correlate with a broad specter of active lifestyles, which speaks against the “having” hypothesis. The last section of this chapter discusses how LS relates to values. An important hypothesis offered by the HTW is that LS is biased toward values that are “spontaneous” and come easily to mind. Accordingly, reflective values tend to escape the evaluative space of an LS judgment. LS should for example be sensitive to gaps between what we want to accomplish and what we actually have accomplished. But empirical studies suggest that only gaps in “spontaneous” values have an impact on LS, while gaps related to “reflective” values leave LS unaffected.