In a series of studies, researchers have discovered that viewing one’s life through the lens of the Hero’s Journey – a narrative framework where a protagonist overcomes challenges and undergoes transformation – can significantly enhance the sense of meaning in life. The findings, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, provide evidence that reshaping personal narratives to align with this archetypal story can lead to increased well-being and resilience.
Motivation Behind the Study
The inspiration for this study stemmed from a modern societal challenge – the quest for a meaningful life in an era marked by social, economic, and existential uncertainties. Researchers were driven by the hypothesis that the Hero’s Journey, a narrative pattern identified by mythologist Joseph Campbell and prevalent in stories worldwide, could be a key to unlocking a deeper sense of purpose and significance in one’s life. This narrative has resonated across cultures and epochs, suggesting its potential as a universal tool for enhancing life’s meaning.
“Much of my research is dedicated to assisting individuals in finding greater meaning in their lives and professional paths. This is particularly relevant today, as many sense a prevailing crisis of meaning in contemporary times, with traditional sources like religion and community connections diminishing in influence,” explained study author Benjamin Rogers, an assistant professor of management and organization at Boston College.
“A fundamental approach people use to derive meaning is through constructing their own life narratives, interpreting and contextualizing their experiences. Each person’s life story is unique, tailored by the choices they make in highlighting or omitting events, and the links they draw between these experiences. Such stories profoundly influence our perception of the world and self-identity, implying that a life story imbued with deeper meaning can enhance the overall sense of purpose in life.”
“Together with my colleagues, we explored what might constitute a more ‘ideal’ narrative for one’s life story, leading us to the concept of the Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell. Common advice in screenwriting guides is to employ structures similar to the Hero’s Journey, as it forms a compelling narrative framework. This prompted us to consider applying such principles to personal life stories. We theorized that life stories aligning with this timeless, universally appealing narrative would be perceived as more meaningful, reflecting its enduring themes and cultural relevance.”
Overview
The research was extensive, comprising eight main studies and six supplementary studies, with a combined total of thousands of participants. These studies employed various methodologies, including self-reported online surveys from platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific, in-depth life story interviews with community members, and experiments.
Rogers and his colleagues developed a new instrument, the Hero’s Journey Scale, to assess how closely participants’ lives aligned with the Hero’s Journey narrative. The scale consists of 21 items, each reflecting seven key elements of the Hero’s Journey narrative: recognizing oneself as a hero, an encounter with a pivotal shift, embarking on a quest, gaining allies, facing challenges, and undergoing a personal transformation, culminating in a legacy that benefits the community. Participants rate their agreement with statements related to each element on a scale from “strong disagreement” to “strong agreement.”
The researchers found that participants who viewed their lives through the Hero’s Journey narrative reported a stronger sense of meaning in their lives. This was true across various demographics, indicating the narrative’s broad appeal and effectiveness. Furthermore, the study found that this narrative reshaping not only influenced how people saw their past and present but also affected their outlook on personal challenges and their resilience in facing them. In particular, the Hero’s Journey re-storying intervention – where participants actively reframed their life stories to align with this narrative – led to an increased sense of flourishing and positive reappraisal of personal problems.
“Our research leads to two key insights for an average person. First, it reveals that our life stories aren’t just a mirror of our lives but also shape how we perceive them. While there are limits to reshaping your life narrative, identifying with powerful stories and applying them to your own life can link your experiences to a larger sense of meaning. We have the power to craft a ‘better’ life story by drawing on narrative forms we instinctively know and that align with our values. Second, people often hesitate to see themselves as heroes for various reasons, but this might be a missed opportunity.
“Our simplified take on the Hero’s Journey makes it relatable to everyday life. We demonstrate that the seven essential elements of heroic tales exist in nearly everyone’s life, making it possible for anyone to be a hero on their journey. Being a hero comes in many forms, and recognizing how you are a hero in your own story can bring psychological benefits, without feeling fake or overly self-centered about seeing yourself as an epic hero.”
Methodology and Findings
In an initial set of three studies, the researchers found evidence that individuals who perceived their life stories as closely resembling the Hero’s Journey tended to report a higher sense of meaning in their lives.
Study 1
The researchers recruited a large, nationally representative sample of 640 Americans through Prolific, focusing on a diverse range of ages, sexes, and ethnicities. After exclusions, 592 participants completed the study measures. They employed the 21-item Hero’s Journey Scale (HJS) where participants rated their agreement with statements relating to each of the seven elements of the Hero’s Journey. Additionally, the study used a measure of meaning in life developed by Costin and Vignoles (2020), along with other measures for convergent and divergent validity. The study also aimed to further validate the HJS and explore its generalizability across different genders.
The study found a robust relationship between the HJS scores and perceived meaning in life. This relationship held even when controlling for nine commonly-identified predictors of meaning. The HJS was also associated with higher well-being, higher life satisfaction, and lower rates of depression. The relationship between HJS and meaning in life was replicated using two other popular measures of life meaning, illustrating the robustness of the HJS-meaning in life relationship.
Study 2
Participants were asked to audio record their life stories on Amazon Mechanical Turk, resulting in a final sample of 414 participants. These recordings were transcribed and independently coded by research assistants for the presence of Hero’s Journey elements. Participants also completed the Hero’s Journey Scale and other measures, including a measure of meaning in life. The study further used structural topic modeling, a natural language processing technique, to explore prevalent topics in the participants’ life stories.
Participants who viewed their lives as a Hero’s Journey indeed narrated their life stories in line with this narrative. The structural topic model analysis revealed that life stories emphasizing the Hero’s Journey elements, especially the life obstacles topic, were associated with higher self-reported HJS scores. Coders’ ratings of the Hero’s Journey elements in participants’ life stories predicted greater meaning in life, flourishing, life satisfaction, and lower levels of depression.
Study 3
This study utilized 60 intensive case studies from the Life Story Interview of late-midlife community adults in the Chicago area, focusing on detailed, rich accounts of their life experiences. The interviews were coded for the presence of Hero’s Journey elements and redemption sequences. Participants also completed a comprehensive survey, including measures of flourishing and generativity.
The study found that life stories with more redemption sequences also reflected more of the Hero’s Journey narrative. The Hero’s Journey ratings significantly predicted participant flourishing, above and beyond the influence of redemption sequences. This suggested that while the Hero’s Journey narrative includes aspects of redemption, its influence on well-being extends beyond just the redemption sequences, capturing a broader range of narrative elements that contribute to an individual’s flourishing.
“I think the most surprising finding for us was the variety of ways in which the connection between the Hero’s Journey and meaning in life appeared across our studies. Our first set of studies showed how people who see their life as a Hero’s Journey in their internally-held narratives, as measured by a numerical scale, reported having more meaning in their life.
“This positive relationship between the Hero’s Journey also appeared when we simply asked people to tell us their life stories unguided and we had research assistants rate their life stories for how many Hero’s Journey elements were present. Consistent with the first set of studies, the people who naturally told life stories that featured more Hero’s Journey elements were also those who rated their life as more meaningful. To us, this provided really strong evidence of the unique connection between seeing your life as a Hero’s Journey and feeling life is meaningful.”
In five subsequent studies, the researchers delved deeper into the transformative power of the Hero’s Journey narrative by examining its causal impact on enhancing life meaning through a “re-storying” intervention. In these studies, participants were asked to rewrite their life stories, incorporating these elements in a narrative arc resembling the Hero’s Journey.
Study 4
In Study 4, 275 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk were asked initially to write their life story. They were then randomly assigned to either a Hero’s Journey re-storying intervention or a control condition. The intervention involved a series of writing prompts designed to help participants construct their life stories as Hero’s Journey narratives, while the control condition involved neutral writing tasks. Following the intervention, participants were again asked to write their life story. The study aimed to assess the immediate impact of the intervention on how participants narrated their life stories.
The study revealed that life stories from participants in the re-storying intervention condition were rated by coders as more similar to a Hero’s Journey compared to those in the control condition. This suggests that the re-storying intervention successfully influenced participants to reconceptualize and narrate their life stories more in line with the Hero’s Journey framework. Additionally, participants in the intervention condition perceived their lives as more closely aligning with a Hero’s Journey, indicating the intervention’s efficacy in reshaping personal narratives.
Study 5
Study 5 involved 450 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk, who completed a two-part survey. On the first day, participants rated their general meaning in life and described why they started working on Amazon Mechanical Turk. On the following day, they were randomly assigned to either the Hero’s Journey re-storying intervention or a control task. After the intervention, participants completed measures of meaning in life and flourishing.
The results showed that participants in the re-storying intervention condition perceived their lives as more meaningful and experienced a greater sense of flourishing compared to those in the control condition. This finding suggests that the re-storying intervention not only influenced how participants viewed their life stories but also positively affected their sense of life meaning and overall well-being.
Study 6
In Study 6, 449 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk were assigned to one of four conditions: the Hero’s Journey re-storying intervention, a Heroic Episodes condition (where participants imagined themselves as heroes without the Hero’s Journey narrative), a Random Prompts condition (reflecting on Hero’s Journey elements in a random order), and a control condition. The study aimed to discern the specific contributions of identifying Hero’s Journey elements and constructing a unified Heroic narrative to the sense of meaning in life.
The study found significant effects of both reflecting on the elements of the Hero’s Journey and connecting them into a unified heroic narrative on participants’ perceptions of meaning in life. Participants in the Hero’s Journey re-storying intervention condition reported the highest levels of life meaning, indicating that both identifying Hero’s Journey elements and constructing them into a coherent narrative framework are important for enhancing life meaning.
Study 7
Study 7 involved 275 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk who, after completing the re-storying intervention or control task, engaged in an implicit grammar task. This task involved scrutinizing letter strings for correspondence to an underlying grammatical pattern. The study aimed to test if the Hero’s Journey re-storying intervention could prime participants to perceive meaning in ambiguous contexts, beyond their personal life narratives.
The results showed that participants in the re-storying intervention condition were more likely to select letter strings as matching the grammatical pattern, suggesting an increased tendency to perceive meaning in ambiguous contexts. However, the intervention did not improve the accuracy of detecting actual meaning in the strings, indicating that while the intervention influenced meaning perception, it did not enhance the ability to discern ‘true’ meaning in ambiguous stimuli.
Study 8
In Study 8, 267 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk first wrote about their most important personal problem. The next day, they completed the Hero’s Journey re-storying intervention or a control task, followed by assessments of their perceptions of the problem and their coping strategies. The study aimed to examine whether the intervention could enhance resilience by reframing personal problems in the context of a Hero’s Journey.
Participants in the re-storying intervention condition exhibited increased positive reappraisal of their personal problems and reported using more resilient coping strategies. This suggests that the intervention not only altered how participants viewed their challenges but also enhanced their ability to cope with them effectively. The intervention appeared to foster a perspective where personal challenges were seen as integral parts of a meaningful journey, thus promoting psychological resilience.
Caveats
Though extensive, the study was not without its limitations. A significant portion of the data relied on self-reported measures from online samples, which, while diverse, may not fully represent the broader population. Additionally, all participants were from the United States, raising questions about the findings’ cross-cultural applicability.
Furthermore, the Hero’s Journey Scale, while innovative, did not fully capture the narrative order, a key aspect of story coherence. Most studies were cross-sectional or conducted at a single time point, limiting insights into the long-term effects of the narrative reshaping. Thus, the enduring impact of the re-storying intervention remains an open question.
“While the studies we present in the paper shows that most people are able to see their life as a Hero’s Journey – whether they do so naturally or do so after our restorying intervention – we acknowledge that there are likely limits to who may be comfortable seeing their story from that frame. In particular, those in truly difficult life situations may not feel the elements of the Hero’s Journey are present in their lives. For people facing those difficulties, we recommend they pursue professional resources to aid them in processing the events in their lives.”
The study, “Seeing your life story as a Hero’s Journey increases meaning in life“, was authored by Benjamin A. Rogers, Herrison Chicas, John Michael Kelly, Emily Kubin, Michael S. Christian, Frank J. Kachanoff, Jonah Berger, Curtis Puryear, Dan P. McAdams, and Kurt Gray.