Psychological Richness Scale

Most people, when asked what makes a good life, answer in one of two ways: a happy life (comfort, stability, positive emotions) or a meaningful life (purpose, contribution, making a difference). But psychologist Shigehiro Oishi and his colleagues identified a third option that a nontrivial minority of people across nine countries consistently choose — a psychologically rich life. Not necessarily pleasant, not necessarily purposeful, but genuinely interesting. Filled with novelty, complexity, and moments that change how you see the world.

This test measures where you fall on that dimension. There are no subscales and no "type" result — just a single score reflecting how much variety, perspective change, and experiential depth you perceive in your life.

The idea that well-being comes in more than two flavors emerged from a simple observation: some experiences are neither happy nor meaningful but still feel deeply valuable. Surviving a difficult year abroad, reading a novel that upends your worldview, living through a natural disaster that reshapes your priorities — these experiences can be stressful, confusing, even painful, yet people consistently describe them as having made their lives richer. Oishi, Westgate, and their collaborators¹ developed the Psychologically Rich Life Questionnaire to capture this dimension, testing it across four studies with over 2,600 participants. The scale proved unidimensional — a single factor explaining how much a person perceives their life as filled with interesting, novel, and perspective-changing experiences.

What makes psychological richness distinct from happiness and meaning is not just conceptual but empirical. Happiness is best predicted by extraversion and low neuroticism. Meaning is tied to conscientiousness and agreeableness. Richness, uniquely, is most strongly predicted by openness to experience (correlations ranging from r = .38 to .51 across validation samples) and extraversion (r = .43 to .58)¹. The personality signature is different because the underlying experience is different. Happy people feel good. Meaningful people feel purposeful. Rich people feel changed — repeatedly, across many domains. In obituary-coding studies reported by Oishi and Westgate², richness was actually negatively correlated with happiness (meta-analytic r = -.17), confirming that a rich life need not be a pleasant one. A person who has lived through war, immigration, career upheaval, and cultural displacement may score high on richness and low on happiness — and still consider their life a good one.

The cross-cultural evidence is striking. Oishi and colleagues³ surveyed 3,728 people across nine nations and found that when forced to choose a single ideal life, 7-17% of respondents in every country chose the psychologically rich life over the happy or meaningful life. In the United States, approximately 28% of respondents said that undoing their biggest life regret would have made their lives richer rather than happier or more meaningful. This is not a fringe preference — it represents a substantial minority whose conception of the good life is systematically overlooked by traditional well-being frameworks. The theorized unique outcome of a psychologically rich life is wisdom: the kind of broad, flexible understanding that comes from encountering genuine variety and surviving perspective-altering experiences.

It is worth clarifying what psychological richness is not. It is not sensation seeking — the scale developers deliberately removed items that overlapped with thrill-seeking measures. It is not exclusively about travel or expensive experiences; reading novels from unfamiliar cultures, engaging with challenging ideas, or navigating a difficult relationship can all contribute to richness. It is not the opposite of happiness — the two are positively correlated (r = .48 with life satisfaction). And critically, it is not a fixed personality trait. It is a self-assessment of life experiences that can change over time. Longitudinal data from a study-abroad design showed that international experiences causally increased richness scores², suggesting that richness is something you can build through the choices you make about how to spend your time and attention.

A politically interesting finding: happiness and meaning both correlate with conservative worldview beliefs, while psychological richness shows no such association — it is unrelated to conservatism and slightly associated with political liberalism². This makes sense intuitively. Conservatism values stability, tradition, and continuity — qualities that align with the hedonic and eudaimonic conceptions of a good life. Richness, by contrast, requires disruption, unfamiliarity, and the willingness to have your perspective overturned. Neither orientation is better. But they represent genuinely different conceptions of what makes life worth living, and knowing which one resonates with you can clarify decisions about career changes, travel, relationships, and how much comfort you are willing to sacrifice for the sake of an interesting experience.

This test uses 12 items scored on a 7-point Likert scale. Your responses are averaged to produce a single composite score, which is then converted to a population-normed percentile. A high score means you perceive your life as filled with variety, novelty, and perspective change. A low score means you perceive your life as more routine and predictable — which is not a criticism. Routine and predictability are what make a life stable and comfortable. The question is simply which dimension matters most to you.

Footnotes

1. Oishi, S., Choi, H., Buttrick, N., Heintzelman, S. J., Kushlev, K., Westgate, E. C., Tucker, J., Ebersole, C. R., Axt, J., Gilbert, E., Ng, B. W., & Besser, L. L. (2019). The psychologically rich life questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality, 81, 257–270. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2019.06.010 ↩ ↩²

2. Oishi, S. & Westgate, E. C. (2022). A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning. Psychological Review, 129(4), 790–811. doi:10.1037/rev0000317 ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Oishi, S., Choi, H., Koo, M., Galinha, I., Ishii, K., Komiya, A., Luhmann, M., Scollon, C., Shin, J., Lee, H., Suh, E. M., Vittersø, J., Heintzelman, S. J., Kushlev, K., Westgate, E. C., Buttrick, N., Tucker, J., Ebersole, C. R., Axt, J., Gilbert, E., Ng, B. W., Kurtz, J., & Besser, L. L. (2020). Happiness, meaning, and psychological richness. Affective Science, 1(2), 107–115. doi:10.1007/s42761-020-00011-z ↩