Studying Human Purpose through a Positive Psychology Lens

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk, associate professor of Psychology at Claremont Graduate University joins the podcast to discuss the unique approach Psychology and Positive Psychology take to research as well as some of the great work she is doing through her Adolescent Moral Development Lab on understanding and developing purpose in youths.

TRANSCRIPT

Marcus Weakley:
Hello, this is breaking the shackles of time. My name is Marcus Weakley, we are beginning a new chapter today in reimagining the podcast with a broader focus than just writing. And I couldn’t be happier than to welcome Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk, to this inaugural new reimagining episode. In terms of a brief introduction, Dr. Bronk, is an associate professor of psychology in the division of behavioral and social sciences at Claremont Graduate University. She’s a developmental psychologist interested in understanding and supporting the positive development and moral growth of young people.

Marcus Weakley:
To this end, she leads the Adolescent Moral Development Lab, which focuses on addressing primary questions around purpose and youth. Her work has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation. We’re going to go more in-depth about her specific research focus in terms of purpose in youth. But in addition to her substantive interest, she has also helped define and outline the parameters of something called the exemplar methodology, which we’ll talk about more. And of course, teaches masters in doctoral classes on a range of topics at Claremont Graduate University. Thank you so much for joining me.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Thanks for having me, Marcus. I’m glad to be here.

Marcus Weakley:
Great, awesome. Before we jump in, I just wanted to give our listeners a bit of a background into this shift in the podcast. What I’m thinking of doing now, moving away from just talking about topics around writing, the last episode on transdisciplinary thinking, which was supposed to be an integration of transdisciplinary thinking and writing, kind of inspired me, I’m really interested in different epistemologies, ways of approaching knowledge and building knowledge and how those transfer into the tools of academic study, right? Or even professional studies.

Marcus Weakley:
How those transfers into theories, practices, assumptions, methods and definitely different standards of reliability, verification, the things that when we learn how to research the world, or a phenomenon through a discipline, we might learn in practice and take for granted. I’m interested in looking at those, in folks that are doing work in different areas of academic research, and having some good discussions around that and what interesting elements we can bring to light in honing and focusing in on the background, the theories behind pursuits of knowledge and understanding.

Marcus Weakley:
For our episode today, that means we’re going to look at psychology and positive psychology more specifically. I would like to start general and then move more specific, if that’s okay. The first question Dr. Bronk is, psychology is a science or often considered a social science. What does typical psychological research do to study phenomenon?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
That’s a good question. Psychologists we’re really interested in understanding human behavior, and in order to do that, we tend to use a mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods. We also use experimental research and quasi experimental research. So just a little bit about each of those, quantitative research methods often employ surveys, you might go and administer a bunch of surveys to people to get a sense of how many people across the country, how many young people have a sense of purpose in their lives.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Qualitative research more often relies on things like interviews, or focus groups, or observations. If you wanted to understand not just how many people had purpose but what a purpose looks in the lives of young people, you might conduct interviews with some of those people who scored particularly high on your survey. According to your survey, they score high and appear to have a purpose, and then you might go conduct an interview to understand what does that purpose look like? How does it shape their lives? We often use quantitative and qualitative research methods together to study a whole range of psychological phenomena.

Marcus Weakley:
Great, how would you describe the theory behind qualitative and quantitative study of human behavior? What are some of the major views about the world and acquiring knowledge that validates those methods? What about asking via surveys or an interviews the way that you’re approaching and then the types of answers and the way you deal with those answers? How are you assured to get the types of outcomes you’re looking for, a clear picture of definitions of what human purpose looks like in the survey case, I mean, maybe statistical data about whatever questions you’re asking?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Well, you’re looking for an overarching theory that underscores or explains how we think about gathering data on human behavior?

Marcus Weakley:
Yeah, and analyzing it. I mean, how are you assured that the answers you receive on the survey will be validated in a way where you can with certainty say, “Yes, this X is occurring given we’ve gathered about the survey,” and then we can determine these other maybe next paths forward, some other treatment, or something else. Just the reliability more or less. How is that validated by the methods that are used by psychology?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
I usually conduct qualitative research and there’s really a whole different set of assumptions that underlie quantitative approaches versus qualitative approaches. There are philosophical assumptions and interpretive frameworks, and they vary between the two different approaches. The idea behind quantitative approaches tends to be more of a positivistic approach. And again, here I’m simplifying, I should note that there’s more than one approach.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
But mostly we think about the positivist approach, which is this idea that there is an objective reality that we can study and we can get on it by trying to remove the researcher from the research process and trying to use things like surveys and this kind of thing to get people to share their picture of that reality with the researchers. And with a qualitative approach, we don’t assume there is one objective reality. Instead, there’s really this assumption that there are multiple subjective realities and that people’s conception of how the world works and why they act the way they… It really varies based on their own experiences.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And so in qualitative research, we don’t, like I said, we don’t assume is one objective reality. Instead, we assume there are multiple subjective realities, and this is why we go straight to participants and talk with them to try to understand what their subjective reality looks like. There’s also this assumption that the researcher is not necessarily absent from the research process, which is more of what the assumption that guides quantitative approaches. In qualitative work, we recognize that the researcher is really like almost one of the research tools, right?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Because based on your own background as a researcher, you bring certain experiences to the data gathering process. What kinds of are you even going to ask? And what kinds of responses are you really going to pay attention to? And which ones might you not pay so close of attention to? What questions do you ask? What questions do you not ask? We recognize that the researcher is a part, a very active part of the research process.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
It’s important for the researcher to try to bracket their experience and set it aside in qualitative research, because we really do want to understand the participants’ conception of reality not just the researchers. And so in qualitative research, we have a number of tools, or strategies, or approaches that we can employ to bracket the researchers experience so that we can really understand our participants subjective experience of reality.

Marcus Weakley:
And that sounds a challenge to me. If you want to mind, I would love to hear a bit more about what you think might be an interesting, maybe representative example of one of these tools in order to remove the maybe implicit bias or the other sorts of things that a researcher might bring to the study?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Yeah, of course. I mean, we actually see that what a researcher can bring to the research process, we don’t always think of it as negative, right? There’s sometimes being on an inside, on the inside being a part of the group that you’re interviewing. That can have some advantages, because you know what the issues are, you know what the problems might be, you know where to look for the right answers.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
That’s why in qualitative research, we don’t necessarily say you have to completely eradicate the role of the researcher. You want to use it to the extent that it’s useful. On the other hand, you do want to understand… You don’t want to be so blinded by your own perspective that you don’t hear what others are saying, especially if they might disagree or have a different conception of reality than you do.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
One of the things that we do as qualitative researchers is to write, before you begin a research project, we write an identity memo. And in this memo, it’s not really a one time thing. It’s more of a process, but you sit down and you write about who you are and what expectations and biases and experiences you bring to this particular research project. If you are researching purpose, it might make sense for you to sit down and think about, well, what does it mean to you to have a purpose in life?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And what is your purpose and how does you discover it? And all of these kinds of things are going to shape the way that you interview somebody else about purpose. And so it’s really good to have it down on paper to be really aware of your own perspectives so that hopefully you can stay open to the possibility that it may be really quite different for somebody else.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
This identity memo, and like I said, that’s something that we revisit throughout the course of the research project, so that as you hear new things, you can try to really stay open to the possibility that other people’s experiences might differ from your own. The identity memo is one approach. Something else we often do is conduct qualitative research in teams. Sometimes it can be helpful to have an insider perspective from maybe one member of the team, but some outside perspective from other members of the team.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
We’re doing some research now in Liberia, and we’re really trying to understand what does positive youth development look in a librarian culture? Most of us, the members of our team are not librarian, but we do have some librarian researchers who are members of the team. And I think have the two perspectives together, we can bounce ideas off one another and serve as a check for one another.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Having teams, I think one of the other things we often do are member checks. Again, in quantitative research, we really assume the participant is just a participant, they just provide the source of data. But in qualitative research, we often think of the participant as almost a co-investigator with us. They’re the experts, they’re the ones who understand, they have this subjective sense of reality, they’re expert in it. And we’re trying to understand it.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
We do like member checks, which means at the end of our data collection effort, we might go back to some of our participants and say, “Just want to make sure I really understood this correctly, we thought you said this.” And these member checks are another opportunity for you to really just ensure that you’re getting the perspective from your participant and hearing what they’re saying and not interpreting it. I mean, you’re definitely going to interpret it through your own lens, but not so much that you’re not hearing what they’re actually saying. Those are a few of the strategies that we use.

Marcus Weakley:
That’s great. I like all of those, to be honest with you. I had never heard of the identity memo before this and I really the idea of building in a self-reflective process like that, to understand your own positionality a bit in regards to the research site that you’re doing. And a big part of transdisciplinary research is the idea of moving towards really a community research model and what you were talking about there. I mean, having team members from Liberia, in the example that you gave, is really a big step in that direction, where it’s like, you’re not going to be able to ensure as well that the research that you are doing within the community is beneficial for that community without having some, I guess, insider knowledge or folks from that community itself taking part in the research. I think those are great examples.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah, thank you. Good.

Marcus Weakley:
I would love to transition over a bit now from the more just general background of psychology as a whole, both in the quantitative and qualitative senses and move more towards positive psychology specifically. From my understanding, positive psychology is a relatively recent development in the field and it was developed, I mean, correct me if I’m wrong at any point with this. It was developed to fill a gap in many respects in the field, not necessarily saying that the field is wrong so much as a lot of previous psychological research hadn’t taken into account a whole area of human behavior.

Marcus Weakley:
I mean, it had focused in what I’ve heard called the disease model, more in terms of let’s diagnose, let’s define disorders, let’s measure or classify them, come up with reliable diagnoses, understand causation, and then see if we can treat or possibly even cure these disorders that had left out a huge area of human behavior that positive psychology developed to study in more depth. Could you maybe start by telling us a bit about this comparison here about the disease model, and then a bit about what positive psychology did differently to help us understand the latter a bit more?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Of course. Historically, I think the aims of psychology have been to really work with people who are struggling. People who might be clinically depressed or dealing with high, high levels of anxiety, and the goal has really been to address those shortcomings, to help people to feel less depressed and to feel less anxious so that they could hopefully go on and live healthy lives.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And I think that in the early 2000s, and there were some examples of positive psychology popping up a little bit before this, but right around 2000 Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, published a pretty significant piece in American psychologists, where they introduced this idea of positive psychology. And they really talked about how as psychologists, maybe we’re not doing enough just to alleviate people’s depression and anxiety and other kinds of negative mental states.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Maybe that’s not enough, maybe we should be doing more, just because people are not clinically depressed doesn’t necessarily mean they’re living full and healthy, happy lives. And so as psychologists, they begin to wonder if maybe there wasn’t more to be done. And so they introduced this idea of positive psychology. And along with that, it’s a new view of health. Health isn’t just the… And actually the world health organization adopted this definition, which is cool. It’s not just the absence of negative health issues, but also the presence of positive health. And so really that’s been the goal of positive psychologists, is to understand not just how to eradicate negative states, but how to encourage positive states of health and wellbeing.

Marcus Weakley:
Awesome, what are some of the major areas that positive psychology focuses on to understand more about this?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Well, I think one of the first things that we had to really tackle was what does positive health look like, right? It’s pretty easy to identify negative health. We have the DSM 5 and all of these diagnostic and statistical manuals that help us really categorize and recognize and diagnose all the different psychological problems that people can can be dealing with, but we really didn’t have any what does positive health look like?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And so early in the study, that was really where the focus was, is trying to identify what does it mean to be thriving or to be flourishing, or what are these different terms refer to? And so we’ve had a number of psychologists, positive psychologists who have put forth different theories, theoretical frameworks for what it means to be thriving. Some of these have focused, we’ve got researchers who deal with older adults. And so they’ve looked at positive aging. What does it mean to be flourishing later in the life span?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
There’s also a lot of research interested in younger people. There’s an area of positive youth development. What does it mean to be thriving as a young person? I think that’s really where we started, and then we also did need some new methods, because is a lot of the approaches that we’ve taken have looked at… If you think about the whole range of human functioning, you have people who are deficit in an area, typical in an area. And that’s really where we stopped, but of course, you also have people who are really exceptional in an area.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
If you look at things know positive effect, right? Is somebody who is deficit would be probably depressed. Somebody who’s typical might have some amount of it, but what would somebody look who is really thriving? It displays lots of positive effect. And that’s where this exemplar methodology came in, this is something that my colleagues and I, it’s not something that we really developed. I mean, an exemplar methodology has existed and been used here and there for long before I came along. But we really tried to sit down and better lay out what it looks to conduct exemplar studies. And in these exemplar studies, we’re really interested in that last group, the people who do something really well. It’s really-

Marcus Weakley:
What are some of the challenges then in measuring or studying that aren’t present? Are you just looking for, I don’t know, deficit behaviors?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Right. Well, I mean, it’s more difficult to use just a random sample. A lot of times you want to look… We’ve studied things bravery, what does an exemplar of bravery look like? What does an exemplar of care look like? What does an exemplar of purpose look like? And usually if you really want to hone in on those exemplars, you can’t use just a random sample. You have to get a good sense of what it is that you’re looking for and use some nominated sample, which is again, why I’ve conducted more qualitative research, which tends to rely more on nominated samples.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
That can make it tough, I think one of the other things is that when you’re looking at nominated samples, you often don’t have as large of a sample size. There was a study conducted in Canada by some researchers at the university of British Columbia, and they were interested in looking at bravery and care exemplars. And as it turns out that Canadian government actually gives awards for bravery and for caring each year. I know. Right?

Marcus Weakley:
It sounds like something that would exist, I don’t know.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Exactly, it sounds very Canadian, doesn’t it? And so they used as their criteria for identifying exemplars of bravery and care, there criteria was that it had to be somebody who had won one of these awards. And so that’s an important thing hen you’re are looking at an exemplary sample, you have to have really clear criteria for what constitutes exemplary behavior in whatever construct it is you’re trying to study.

Marcus Weakley:
Do these criteria change given cultural context? Let’s use brave bravery as an example. I mean, my sense is the cultural inner subjective agreements that often exist. I can imagine there being a different picture of bravery in Liberia, for example, than here in the United States, or even in different groups in the United States, is that a challenge as well?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
That is definitely a challenge. Yeah, definitely a challenge. And again, with qualitative research, the goal is not… And not all of this research, this one particular study was actually more quantitative in nature, but a lot of the exemplar studies tend to be more qualitative in nature. And in qualitative studies, because we’re working with a nominated sample, we don’t usually try to generalize our findings.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
What we’re trying to do is say, if people’s experiences are going to differ, so this isn’t necessarily everybody’s experience, but here are what some of these experiences look like. And so, yes, you would definitely want to note that it’s only among individuals gathered from this particular culture and not even just culture, but also time, right? Over time, our conception of what it means to be brave has changed. I think today a big characteristic of bravery is often people who engage in whistleblower activities and that might not have a period decades, hundreds of years ago. I think it’s constrained by time and by culture and by a variety of variables.

Marcus Weakley:
Cool. Then just moving from there, it seems another important aspect of positive psychology is giving folks things that they can do to increase these aspects of life, right? So if you want to be happier, if you want to maybe increase the meaning of your life, you can try this or that technique. Can you tell us a bit about some of those maybe specifically in your own work, and then also how you… Given the way that you study, where you’re just trying to talk about something that’s going on in a specific slice of time with a specific group of people. How are you able to take that study and then transfer it into recommendation to increase the purpose of your life and things along those lines?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
I actually consider myself more of a developmental scientist. And one of the goals of developmental scientists are to describe, explain and optimize wellbeing. We try to understand how people describe what do these positive states look like, explain how do individuals achieve them. And then optimize, how can we like you said, turn these into practices that other people can use?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And I think it that’s one of the big appeals of positive psychology is that, it’s not just we know how something works and we put it up on the shelf and leave it there. We really do try to put it into action, if we understand how people can live healthier, happier, fuller lives. We want to share that information with people who can put it into practice.

Marcus Weakley:
Very practical, definitely. Definitely think it’s a-

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Yeah, I agree, because I feel that’s not always where psychology was. There was really a time where the focus was on basic psychology and we just needed to understand how all of these things worked. And that was kind of that was it, then we were done. And today I think that’s changing, and I think there’s, especially at CGO, that’s really, I think one of the things that sets CGO apart, there’s a very strong focus on applied research. So taking what we’re doing and helping to apply it.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
With purpose in particular, we’ve definitely been interested in, I mean, we know that individuals who lead a life of purpose report all kinds of physical and psychological health benefits. So they’re happier, they’re more hopeful, they’re more optimistic. From a physical health perspective, they have better cardiovascular functioning, they sleep better. They live longer lives. I know, right? It’s pretty significant.

Marcus Weakley:
I could use a few of those, I think.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
There you go. Yeah, no, there’s some really interesting research too, that suggests these aren’t just correlation. It’s not just a correlation, it’s actually, there’s some interesting epigenetic research going on in med schools. And they look at different genotypes and phenotypes and all of this, but we know that the different ways that you live your life affect the different ways that your genes express themselves and individuals who live their lives, lives of purpose, tend to have very healthy genetic expressions, which is, leads to things better immuno functioning and really interesting research going on there.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
But anyway, so we knew that leading a life of purpose was a good thing. And then we also knew that it was actually relatively rare. Again, we did those surveys where we were looking at individuals across the lifespan, or at least across the first half of the life I span in trying to understand how frequently do people lead life’s of purpose? And it’s not as frequent as you’d think, purpose tends to develop in adolescence and into adulthood.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And I think we probably still need some more research to really get our arms around exactly how prevalent it is. But at least the early research in this space suggests only about one in three young adults in their twenties reports leading a life of purpose. And so taking these two findings together that leading a life of purpose is a good thing. And yet it’s pretty rare, we did start thinking about, well, how could we cultivate purpose? What are some steps we could take to help individuals discover a purpose for their lives.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And actually some of our work in this space got started by accident, which is just the way all good psychological research should go, right? But we were conducting these inner surveys I should say, of purpose, and like I said, we were surveying thousands of young people across the country and trying to understand how frequently people reported leading a life of purpose. And then we just randomly selected a subset of those young people to conduct interviews with.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And it was so interesting to conduct these interviews, because the young people really enjoyed it. They’d say things like, “Oh my gosh, I said some good stuff in there. Can you send me the recording,” right? Because we’d record these interviews. We had others who would call us up and say, “Did you ever get a chance to transcribe that? Can you send me the transcription?” And we were like, “Wow, we really seemed to be hitting a nerve.” We’d ask young people for 30 minutes of time and they’d be going an hour later, they’d still be talking. And so we wondered, is it possible that this interview-

Marcus Weakley:
It sounds it might even have been a process of self-discovery or they realized things about themselves they hadn’t put into words before.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Exactly. Right. We just started to wonder, is it possible that this interview is a intervention? I mean, not an intentional one, but is it making a difference? And we had already planned to conduct a second round of survey research months later. At that time we did look at the young people who we had selected to participate in interviews. And we compared their purpose scores to the young people who had not participated in the interviews. And lo and behold, we found that those young people who participated in this one time, roughly 45 minute interview had significantly higher rates of purpose months later.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
We realized, yeah, this is so something that we can cultivate. In fact, we did it without meaning to. We also tried to be really reflective on, what’s going on in this interview that was so powerful? And so we deconstructed it and I think it was the opportunity to really reflect on a lot of times when we talk, this was research we did with young adults. Adolescents and young adults, and a lot of times in our conversations with adolescents and young adults, we ask much more about the here and now, what are you doing today?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Did you get your homework done this week? What are you doing maybe next week? Or what college are you applying to next semester? But we don’t very often engage them in conversations about the long term, what do you really want out of your life? What do you hope to accomplish in your life? And why? Why is that really important to you? And I think those conversations really resonated with young people from a developmental perspective, we know that adolescents and young adults are really poised to be tackling these kinds of questions.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And so I think it was a really developmentally appropriate time to ask them these things and they enjoyed thinking about it and through the process of talking it all out and having us as the interviewers push them a little bit. They did come to some conclusions or at least start to come to some conclusions that were pretty meaningful to them.

Marcus Weakley:
Yeah, that seems to probably be an important aspect of it, that it is an interview and it is someone who’s potentially willing to push you more than you might yourself in maybe doing some writing about it or thinking about it, or even talking with a friend.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Exactly.

Marcus Weakley:
That’s one of the important part.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Well, and I think one of the things we asked a lot in the interview was the why. You say you want to become a teacher, but why? Why is that important to you? And I remember this young woman in Indiana and she was saying, “Well, you know what? I don’t want to be one of those teachers that just clocks in and clocks out. I really want to be one of these teachers that makes a friends in her students lives.”

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And why, why we kept asking. And she’s like, “As it turns out, my parents went through a bad divorce and I had a teacher who really reached out to me and this teacher was so wonderful and so helpful. And I’m just so grateful for all that she did for me, she was there for me at time when I really needed her and I want to be able to be there for my too and they’re going through tough times.”

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And so that’s the pushing that we would give, and I think that it’s easy to say, “Oh, you want to be a teacher. Okay, great, done.” Right, but when you keep pushing, you’re like, “What does matter to me? And might there be other ways in which I could achieve the same goal?” But the values, the things that you really value in your life, I think are really from the foundation of your purpose. And so that’s a lot of what we were getting at, was really trying to push young people to think seriously about what it is they value and what it is they care about.

Marcus Weakley:
That’s great. If you wanted to just choose a few, what are some of the other key findings that you’ve found, or that you’re in the process, or that you can talk about about human purpose? What are some of the essential aspects of it?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Do you want to talk about the interventions that help people discover a purpose for their life, or just more the truths about the construct? Or both

Marcus Weakley:
I’m interested in both. Maybe let’s do both, let’s do a little bit of both if we can.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Well, I do think one of the interesting things about purpose is, and I think this is a growing area of research, is the role in cycle in physical health, because it makes sense that leading a life of purpose would make you feel good and that it would help you feel this deep sense of contentedness that you know where you’re headed. But I think it’s really interesting is the role that it plays in physical health.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And of course, this makes sense, right? If your mental health is good, your physical health is going to be better. We know those two are not divorced from one another, they’re connected and they’re related to one another. But I think the research that really bears that out is pretty powerful, because sometimes it’s easy for people to sort of, “Oh, this is all fine and well and touchy feely and all of that.” But until they see the physical health research and then they start to realize, “Oh, okay, wait, this really does make a difference.”

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
In terms of the intervention, we love the idea of the interview, but of course, the truth is, we can’t go around and interview all young people across the country and help them discover a purpose for their lives. One of the things that we did was we took the interview and we really tried to translate it into an online tool and we tried to recreate basically the experience of the interview in an online tool. And we tested each component of this tool separately, and then we rolled it all up and tested it together. And it turned out it was actually pretty effective.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
We have a bunch of activities that we have found through our research really do help young people reflect on what matters most to them. One of the activities is actually a is a video of Jimmy Fallon. He’s a late night talk show host, and he’s talking about how he fell. He tripped and he… Well, he broke his finger, but it was worse than just a break. He was actually at risk of losing his finger. And so it was hospitalized for quite some time as they were dealing with this, going through surgeries and all this.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And somebody had brought him Victor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning. And so he talks in this little three minute YouTube clip about what it means to have a purpose in life, and he talks about what his own purpose in life is. And he says, “Being here in this hospital where everybody’s sad, down, this isn’t a really happy place to always be.” He said, “I realize my purpose is I make people laugh.”

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And it’s a really fun clip because I think it’s one that young people can relate to. It’s only three minutes long, but it’s a good example of modeling, right? He’s really modeling his own purpose in life. And so we have young people watch the clip and then reflect on what is… He talks about it as a gift? What is your gift? What are the special talents or skills that you have and how can you put them to work to make a difference in the world around you?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
One of the other things that we do in this online, because I do think that human interaction is really key to cultivating purpose. And in an online setting, you don’t necessarily get that. We tried to build in experiences where students or the participants are forced to go interact with other people. One of the things we had them do was to think about the thing that mattered most to them and come up with some symbol for it.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Maybe what really matters to you is preserving the environment. And so maybe the symbol would be a plant or an animal or something, or maybe what matters most to you is your religious faith. And so some symbol for that might be a cross or some other religious symbol. And the idea is that they would actually draw this symbol in as a form of a temporary tattoo on their body, somewhere that is visible to the outside world. And they’re supposed it around for at least a week.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And the idea behind that is that people see it and they ask them about it. And so it forces the person to have basically the same conversation where they’re explaining their purpose to other people around them. And we found that that was actually pretty powerful. It’s just somebody talked about wearing this symbol to a job interview and they had an opportunity in this job interview to really talk about something that mattered deeply to them. And the interviewer enjoyed it because they got to know them on a little deeper level in the interview. We had this opportunity to, again, reflect on what matters most to her and why.

Marcus Weakley:
That’s a really unique approach, you’re forcing-

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Creative, right?

Marcus Weakley:
Forcing an intervention in the world almost, or using someone’s everyday life in the interactions they have. It’s like, “Nope, you’re going to talk about this, you’re going to return back to this.”

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Exactly. And we did another one along those same lines, where we had them send emails to three adults who know them well, so they could be coaches, teachers, mentors, family friends, they were supposed to be outside your immediate family though. And these adults were asked in just five minutes or less to answer three questions about the young person. What do you think I do particularly well? What do you think I really enjoy doing? And how do you think I’ll leave my mark on the world?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
And so the idea was that you’d say, “Don’t spend too much time thinking about this, I just want to know real quickly what you see?” But they’d get emails back from friends and family who know them well. And that could be really illuminating too. Sometimes you don’t know what your purpose is, but people around you might have a pretty good idea. And so we found that was really effective in helping people to reflect. Lots of activities and things that we’ve come up with to help people reflect on their purpose. And some of these do involve other people, some of them are more solitary.

Marcus Weakley:
But I think those are some great examples to give people an idea of what these interventions actually look like, because when you hear the word intervention, your mind might go all sorts of places, but these are super practical. As you said, some are probably self-reflective and others really are relational, but they’re the things that help you gain insights about yourself in ways that you probably want to do otherwise.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Yeah, I think that’s right. And most of them are pretty fun, they’re pretty non-threatening.

Marcus Weakley:
Yeah, exactly. Which is also perfect for the, well, for folks in general, but definitely for that age group too.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Right, right, we want people to actually give them a try. We actually had this, there was an organization out of Berkeley, the Greater Good Science Center. And they had gotten a grant to try to get more of a national conversation going around purpose. I worked with them a little and encourage them to, they could approach it through a variety of different age groups. And I said, “Got to consider young people.” And I was lucky enough that they took our suggestion and in the end they actually decided to do a scholarship.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
They got money to offer up to $50,000 in college scholarships. And the idea was that the young people, they completed our online toolkit of purpose fostering activities. And then they’d write a purpose inspired college essay and essays were selected based on how purposeful they really were. And the winning essays were given up to $50,000 in college scholarships, which was fun. And it was neat for us, because like I said, historically a lot of this research that we’ve done has been put on the shelf and this was an opportunity to see our research being used and people benefiting from it, which was pretty inspiring.

Marcus Weakley:
I think it’s great. And I also think the focus on young folks is really important too. I mean, there’s plenty of research backing up how impactful that time of life is and forming identity.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
That’s right.

Marcus Weakley:
And if you’re interjecting some work to really develop a more robust sense of purpose, or maybe one at all, the process of self-discovery. I think this is great work.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Thank you.

Marcus Weakley:
Wrapping up, I just want to give you the opportunity. I mean, is there anything that you haven’t had a chance to say, any takeaways you’d to leave our listeners with about either the work you do or anything else that we’ve discussed today?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Gosh, I can’t think of anything really specific. I mean, I think that, if you’re interested in the work around positive psychology feel free to reach out, there are lots of resources online, and in books, and in podcasts and things that. But I think it’s a really inspiring topic to study, I think that the the things that we choose to dedicate our lives professionally from a career perspective, they do give us a lens through which we view the world. And I feel pretty fortunate to have this positive psychic lens that I view the world through. It’s an inspiring way to see the world.

Marcus Weakley:
I mean our least education draws a distinction between a deficit model and a, I don’t want to say, an asset model. If I remember correctly, it seems to definitely lean more on the side of the asset model. Folks can find more of your work at Adolescent Moral Development Lab website, I’m sure.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
That’s right.

Marcus Weakley:
And maybe some of these, I don’t want to say tutorials, but these intervention tools that you’ve talked about, the online ones, would they be able to find more information about those on that website as well?

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Yes, they would. The actual online tool kits are available there for anybody to use for free.

Marcus Weakley:
Okay, awesome. Great, Dr. Kendall Bronk, thank you so much for visiting the podcast today. I really appreciate it. And for giving us a bit more of an insight into psychology, but also significantly in the positive psychology in the work you’re doing around purpose. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Kendall Cotton Bronk:
Well, thanks so much for having me. I’ve enjoyed having the opportunity to talk a little bit about the work.

Marcus Weakley:
From Studio B3 at Claremont Graduate University, this is Breaking the Shackles of Time. Thank you so much for listening and we’ll see you next time.