The scale you completed was the Hedonism Value Scale, currently in development as a collaboration between BeyondThePurchase.Org and its sister website, YourMorals.Org.

This scale measures hedonism - the pursuit of pleasure at the expense of important responsibilities and life values. Who doesn’t want to be happy? Not too many people. However, some of us chase pleasure to an unhealthy extreme, and this is the tendency measured here.

Additionally, we realize that pleasure is hard to define. That is why we asked you what pleasure means to you and what you find most pleasurable: intellectual engagement, physical sensation, socializing, altruism, or thrill. Possibly, these types of pleasure will differ in the extent to which people pursue them hedonistically.

The graph below shows the extent to which you sacrifice your responsibilities and values to experience pleasure (in green). Your hedonism score is compared to scores of people who are less happy (in red) and more happy (in blue) than average.








This graph breaks down the activity types from which you derive pleasure. Your pleasure preference (in green) is again comapred to those of people who are less happy (in red) and more happy (in blue) than average.






Why is hedonism important for well-being?
Unfortunately, the relationship between the happiness you feel and the happiness you seek is not simple. We are actually happiest when we are not trying too hard to be happy. However, our pursuit of happiness varies based on how we pursue it. As more people take this survey, we expect to see that it’s more risky for your psychological well-being to hedonistically pursue physical sensation and thrill than intellectual engagement, socializing, and altruism.

You may be interested to find out how you differentite between pleasure and happiness. Take the Beliefs about Well-Being Scale and see how pleasure and happiness shape your undestanding of psychological health. Also, hedonism isn't the only value in life - see how you score on 9 other dimensions of principles that guide your life by taking the Schwartz Values Scale .

Do you have ideas on improving this study? Or did you encounter any difficulties in answering the questions? Click here to send a message to the creators of this study.



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