{"id":79835,"date":"2018-06-20T07:02:22","date_gmt":"2018-06-20T14:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/around-the-world-people-have-surprisingly-modest-notions-of-the-ideal-life"},"modified":"2018-06-21T13:01:52","modified_gmt":"2018-06-21T20:01:52","slug":"around-the-world-people-have-surprisingly-modest-notions-of-the-ideal-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/06\/around-the-world-people-have-surprisingly-modest-notions-of-the-ideal-life","title":{"rendered":"Around the world, people have surprisingly modest notions of the \u2018ideal\u2019 life"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

It seems reasonable that people would want to maximize various aspects of life if they were given the opportunity to do so, whether it\u2019s the pleasure they feel, how intelligent they are, or how much personal freedom they have. In actuality, people around the world seem to aspire for more moderate levels of these and other traits, according to findings published in Psychological Science<\/i>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science<\/i>.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur research shows that people\u2019s sense of perfection is surprisingly modest,\u201d says psychological scientist Matthew J. Hornsey of the University of Queensland, first author on the research. \u201cPeople wanted to have positive qualities, such as health and happiness, but not to the exclusion of other darker experiences\u2014they wanted about 75% of a good thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Furthermore, people said, on average, that they ideally wanted to live until they were 90 years old, which is only slightly higher than the current average life expectancy<\/a>. Even when participants<\/a> imagined that they could take a magic pill guaranteeing eternal youth<\/a>, their ideal life expectancy increased by only a few decades, to a median of 120 years old. And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130\u2014a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems reasonable that people would want to maximize various aspects of life if they were given the opportunity to do so, whether it\u2019s the pleasure they feel, how intelligent they are, or how much personal freedom they have. In actuality, people around the world seem to aspire for more moderate levels of these and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":467,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,269],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-life-extension"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/467"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79835"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79855,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79835\/revisions\/79855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}