Stylianos Syropoulos on legacy motivations
Stylianos Syropoulos is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Boston College, in The Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society. He earned his PhD and M.S. in Social Psychology, with emphasis on the psychology of peace and the prevention of violence, from the University of Massachussetts Amherst. He earned his BA in Psychology, with a minor in the Classics, from Franklin and Marshall College. He is also a Research Associate at the See Change Institute and a Methodology Consultant for the Center for Research on Families. Stylios is interested in studying intergenerational concerns, environmental decision-making, and group identity and intergroup conflict, and he’s earned a variety of research-related grants and awards.
Stylios on the web: Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Google Scholar
By Kenneth Vail, Cleveland State University. December 10, 2022.
ISSEP: How did you first become aware of and interested in existentialism and existential psychology?
Clockwise from top: The Greek village of Oia, on Therasia and Thira in the South Aegean; the ancient Acropolis of Athens; and Raphael’s School of Athens (1509-1511), depicting the great philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists of ancient Greece.
Stylianos Syropoulos: Growing up in Greece, we had to take a lot of philosophy and study ancient Greek Classics as part of our education. So I was exposed to a lot of theories about how people think, feel, and behave in the world. Then when I studied psychology, later in my undergraduate, I was surprised to see so many research studies quantifying those theories and testing them. I thought that was a really interesting and valuable advance, and I felt I knew a lot about those concepts and found them interesting as well, which inspired me to want to join in and help contribute to the research effort.
One of the first topics I worked on, as an undergraduate, was the concept of existential safety, with the idea being that concerns about existential safety might dominate all the other more complex emotions. That led me to learn about Maslow’s theory of a hierarchy of needs, which is more humanistic than existential, but it still has some existential qualities to it. Anyway, Maslow’s theory has a lot of issues and isn’t very well supported by data, so I also started to look elsewhere and discovered the science of existential psychology.
I was initially fascinated by research on meaning in life, existential threat and death anxiety, and freedom and authenticity. I got really excited about the work on meaning in life being done by researchers like Laura King and Michael Steger. Then, when I got into the Peace and Prevention of Violence Program, at U Mass Amherst, I turned to research on existential threat and conflict, and became captivated by research done by Gilad Hirschberger and Tom Pyszczynski. That led to collaborations with Uri Lifshin in Israel and Jeff Greenberg in Arizona. And since then, I’ve begun to see so many aspects of mental and social life through the lens of the science of existential concerns.
ISSEP: You’ve been doing some great work to better understand and measure legacy motivations. Can you tell us more about that research?
Stylianos Syropoulos: I came to U Mass Amherst to work with Dr. Ezra Markowitz, who had been doing some research finding that legacy motivation could lead to pro-environmental behaviors. At the time, I wasn’t particularly interested in the environmental stuff as much as I was interested in the legacy side of that work. The Greek version of the concept is hysterofemia—which basically means “late fame,” or fame after you’re dead. I found it super interesting and of course related to a variety of areas of theory and research, such as the literature on Erickson’s concept of generativity (the concern with establishing and guiding future generations).
Clockwise from top left: US President Barack Obama; grandparents reading with their granddaughter; actress Jennifer Aniston; teachers having many influences on student development; bookseller turned e-commerce mogul Jeff Bezos; people taking actions, large and small, to help care for the environment; author and activist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
But whereas previous research had only focused on legacy as a unidimensional construct, I began to develop the idea that there might actually be two distinct legacy motivations:
A reputation-focused legacy motivation is when people primarily want to be remembered, so they might try to help other people or contribute to society but only to the extent that it helps improve their reputation and earns them a place in our cultural memory.
An impact-oriented legacy motivation, on the other hand, would be when people want their actions to make the world a better place regardless of whether they’re remembered or not.
So we teamed up with Hanne Watkins and Geoffrey Goodwin, at the University of Pennsylvania, and created an instrument to measure these two dimensions.
To measure reputation-focused legacy motivation, participants use a Likert-type instrument (1 = Disagree, 10 = Agree) to complete the following:
When thinking about the future…
I want people to remember me.
I want people to be thinking of me after I die.
I don’t want my life to be forgotten.
I don’t want my name to be forgotten after my death.
To measure impact-oriented legacy motivation, participants use a similar instrument to complete the following:
When thinking about the future…
It is impor.tant for me to leave a legacy of benefiting others.
It is important to me that my actions help future people.
I want to have an enduring positive effect on society.
I want my life to impact others in a positive way.
We did exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, and found they are two distinct constructs. And we included them in a multiple regression, to predict pro-environmental behaviors. We found that impact-oriented legacy motivation was related to pro-environmental behavior when it was visible and even when it was not visible to others. In contrast, reputation-focused legacy motivation was only positively related to pro-environmental behavior when it was visible, but was negatively related to pro-environmental behavior when it was not visible to others! So, people with stronger reputation-focused legacy motives were mostly just interested in virtue signaling (displaying socially desirable actions publicly), whereas those with stronger impact-oriented legacy motives were the ones who actually cared about making the world a better place.
ISSEP: Can your work help us make sense of important human experiences or better understand pop culture?
Stylianos Syropoulos: Certainly. One of the most pervasive existential concerns, throughout each of our lives, is the knowledge that one day our lives will end. Psychological motivations emerged and developed to help cope with that awareness, including the motivation to leave a legacy. The knowledge that our lives will end motivates us to want to be remembered or at least know that our life mattered.
Clockwise from top left: The Great Pyramids of Giza, Egypt; Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada; Johns Hopkins university and hospital in Baltimore, USA; Taj Mahal in Agra, India; US Capitol Building, Washington DC, USA.
I like to take a positive view of legacy motivations. Impact-oriented legacy motivation is often rather beautiful; it’s the motivation to help make the world a better place for others, even if our names might not be remembered. It’s not quite altruism, because it’s still about mitigating one’s own existential concerns, but it sort of feels like altruism. It’s what motivates us to want to teach schoolchildren, make anonymous donations to charity, help establish national parks, and vote in democratic elections—things that won’t bolster our reputations or memorialize our names but will definitely impact future generations.
And I’d argue that even reputation-focused legacy motivation, which we might be tempted to look at with greater pessimism, is also pretty great. Human evolution unfolded such that we have a baldly selfish motivation to burnish a lasting personal reputation, but the way to do that—most often, in my view—is by improving other people’s lives in ways that would make them want to remember us. It’s true that it can be what motivates people to want to build huge monuments to themselves, such as Trump Tower, the Great Pyramids of Giza, or the Taj Mahal of Agra. But it’s also true that it can motivate people to want to get a hospital or college named after themselves by donating enough money to fund those things in their communities; or become famous by inventing science or technology that others find useful, art and music that others find enjoyable, or various religious or political contributions that improve the lives of others.
ISSEP: You’ve attended, and presented research at, our Existential Psychology Preconferences; how has your experience been with those?
Stylianos Syropoulos: The Existential Psychology Preconference was so useful. It was great to present my research in an environment where other researchers were also interested in these types of existential motivational orientations. I met some great people, and several of them have since become collaborators on further projects about legacy motivation. I also really enjoyed hearing Dr. Laura King’s keynote presentation about meaning in life, and the acceptance speech given by Drs. Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon when they won the Distinguished Career Contributions Award. It was so inspiring to see those giants in the field tell about their experiences, and then be able to talk with them afterward. Overall, it was a very welcoming and pleasant environment—very rewarding!
ISSEP: What is one piece of advice you would give to future students who have an interest in following in your footsteps?
“First, read the non-scientific literature to better develop, operationalize, and illustrate ideas. ”
Stylianos Syropoulos: My first advice is that if you’re interested in an idea, read about it in the psych science literature—but also in the non-scientific literatures too. Some really insightful folks have spent a long time thinking about these topics and have shared those insights and ideas in the form of philosophy, fiction/novels, and the humanities more broadly. Those ideas are great starting points and guides for developing hypotheses, illustrating the importance of topics, and even suggesting possible methodological approaches. It’s great food for thought, and once you’ve explored that work you can begin to operationalize it for scientific study.
“Second, don’t worry about “getting scooped;” discuss openly, collaborate, and advance the field. ”
Another bit of advice is to assure you that there is no such thing as getting “scooped” in psych science, and that you do not need to be guarded with your ideas, your study designs, or your data patterns. Read widely, develop and advance your projects, and discuss freely with your colleagues. If you learn that someone else studied that topic before you—no worries, your project is unlikely to be exactly the same, so think about how it differs and what that might mean for the field. If it is basically the same, that’s no worries, either, because now you can simply think of your study as the first step in a “replication and extension” effort, in which you can further test what we thought we knew previously and then build upon that work to take that particular area of research in new directions. The beauty of psychological science is that each study can help offer answers, of course, but those answers also often raise additional questions so there’s always room for further research.
ISSEP: Can you tell us a little about yourself outside the research context?
Stylianos Syropoulos: I’m really into sports and grew up playing basketball. It might not look like it now, because of graduate school, but I used to play on the Greek national basketball team. I had a pretty bad series of injuries—including dislocating a disc in my spine and a hernia that tore my lower abs—which basically ended my basketball career. But I still really enjoy sports.
Aside from that, one of my favorite things to do is to see movies. One of my roommates and I go to the theatre every Tuesday, no matter what. We know that some of the weeks, the movies at the theatre will be awful, but even still we’ll get to see something new.
I also have a fun relationship with music. My partner is one of the most musically talented people I’ve ever met. She went to Northwestern and double-majored in psychology and music, and she can play about a dozen different instruments. I’m the complete opposite. Even in Greece, when we studied choir in school the instructor told me to not sing and just silently move my mouth instead. I’m a good rapper though, because there’s no musical talent required for that; you just talk with rhythm and attitude. I can rap a lot of Eminem songs!
ISSEP: A lot of us like to listen to music in the lab; what are you listening to lately?
Stylianos Syropoulos: I have a very weird taste in music. When I work, I love to listen to medieval music. It’s melodic and usually there’s no talking or singing, which is great because when I’m reading or writing or thinking any sort of human speech distracts and disrupts me. Occasionally, when I’m writing, I’ll put on some cheesy pop music to help get pumped up and get into it. Between the medieval music and the cheesy pop songs, I’m very thankful that I have very tolerant office mates because otherwise they would just kick me out!
One of my favorite songs is Billy Joel’s The Piano Man (1973). I often turn to that one after a long day after I come home and sit down to have a beer on my own; sometimes my roommate will play it on the keys. It’s upbeat yet sad at the same time, and it makes me think.
I’m also a huge fan of Ed Sheeran. I really enjoy the Tolkien films done by Peter Jackson—Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit series—and Ed Sheeran did a great song, called I See Fire (2013), for Desolation of Smaug. Another one, which is a little less nerdy, is his Dive (2017) which is my favorite song.