Built on the newest research
The science of a good life changed recently. Most tests haven't caught up.
For decades, psychology treated a good life as two things: happiness and meaning. In 2022, Shigehiro Oishi and Erin Westgate showed there is a third, independent dimension — a psychologically rich life, built from variety, interest and perspective-changing experiences. The Three Lives measures all three.
The personality layer rests on Jeromy Anglim's 2020 meta-analysis of more than 330,000 people, and the relationship sections on Arthur Aron's self-expansion research and the Michelangelo phenomenon work of Drigotas, Rusbult and colleagues.
Citation, not endorsement
The researchers named on this page are independent scientists with no connection to The Three Lives. They did not create, advise on, review or endorse this test, and they are not affiliated with it in any way. We cite their published, peer-reviewed work and link to every paper so you can read the source yourself. Where the evidence is thin, we say so, in the sentence that uses it.
The research this is built on
Independent published work by scientists with no involvement in this test.
Shigehiro Oishi
Marshall Field IV Professor of Psychology, University of Chicago
The three-dimension framework: Happiness, Meaning and Psychological Richness.
The work and 3 papers →
Erin Westgate
Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Florida
The Richness dimension and the perspective-changing experiences section.
The work and 3 papers →
Arthur Aron
Professor of Psychology, Stony Brook University
The self-expansion items in the relationship section.
The work and 3 papers →
Jeromy Anglim
Associate Professor of Psychology, Deakin University
The personality layer (Big Five plus HEXACO Honesty-Humility).
The work and 1 paper →
Also used
Drigotas, S. M., Rusbult, C. E., Wieselquist, J., & Whitton, S. W. (1999)
Close partner as sculptor of the ideal self: Behavioral affirmation and the Michelangelo phenomenon ↗Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(2), 293–323
The Michelangelo affirmation items in the relationship section.
How this instrument was built
The Three Lives is an original instrument. No published, peer-reviewed study has tested the three-dimension model in couples using both partners' data — and no study has tested this test. So nothing was borrowed wholesale: each module was built directly on primary research, with every claim verified against the source paper before use, and corrected where verification showed the claim was wrong.
Module 01
The three-dimension core
Happiness, meaning and psychological richness, after Oishi & Westgate (2022). Five items per dimension on a 7-point scale, with no reverse-coded items — reverse wording is a documented source of spurious method factors. Meaning is further split into coherence, purpose and significance (Martela & Steger, 2016); happiness into day-to-day emotional well-being and overall life evaluation (Kahneman & Deaton, 2010). For richness, no validated sub-facet structure exists, so none is claimed.
Module 02
The personality layer
A deliberate hybrid: Big Five-style Openness, Neuroticism, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness, plus HEXACO's Honesty-Humility — the factor the standard Big Five does not have, and the one the couples literature actually measures. The evidence is reported three ways because it is three different things: openness similarity rests on one direct, unreplicated study (Zhou et al., 2017); Honesty-Humility similarity is descriptive only (Lee, Ashton & de Vries, 2026); and for the remaining three traits, it is each partner's own level — not similarity — that connects to satisfaction (Weidmann et al., 2016).
Module 03
The values module
Built on Schwartz's theory of basic values (2012), with each person's ratings centered on their own mean before comparison, because raw ratings partly measure response style. It leads with the load-bearing null: couples really do resemble each other on values (Luo & Klohnen, 2005), but value similarity is not what predicts satisfaction. Across the wider literature the effects are small, mixed and method-dependent (Watson et al., 2004; Arránz Becker, 2013; From et al., 2025), and each partner's own characteristics predict better than the pair's resemblance.
Module 04
The relationship-practices layer
The strongest evidence in the instrument, and the part a couple can act on. Shared novel activity correlates with relationship quality and has been tested experimentally (Aron et al., 2000 — r = .51 in one survey sample, with three randomized experiments; all from one research group). Partner affirmation of who you are becoming is tied to both individual and relationship well-being — the Michelangelo phenomenon (Drigotas et al., 1999). A 2026 diary study shows that "do something new together" is not a uniform prescription (Schrage et al., 2026; not yet replicated).
Module 05
The experiences inventory
No life-events checklist for psychological richness exists in the published literature (searched as of September 2026), so none was copied. The format's lineage is Holmes & Rahe's (1967) life-event checklist and the PTSD field's LEC-5, adapted rather than adopted: the unit is the experience plus the person's reported change in perspective, because the source theory is explicit that the event alone is not the point (Oishi & Westgate, 2022). Self-rated change is labelled perceived change, not measured change (Frazier et al., 2009).
How claims were verified
Every quantitative claim on this site was checked against the primary source before use — PubMed, Crossref, Europe PMC, or a copy hosted by the study's own authors — never reconstructed from memory. Where checking changed what a source actually says, the instrument was corrected to match the evidence. Two examples: the personality model originally assumed that similar partners are more satisfied; the paper cited for that claim (Weidmann et al., 2016) reports the opposite — a blanket null on similarity — and the model was rebuilt around each partner's own trait levels. The values module was originally premised on value similarity predicting marital quality; the paper named for that premise (Luo & Klohnen, 2005) found no such association for values, and the module now leads with that null. Corrections were applied explicitly at each stage, never silently.
What this does and does not establish
What it does
- Measures three independent dimensions of a good life — happiness, meaning and psychological richness — for each partner separately, on published definitions.
- Its relationship-practices layer rests on the most directly supported evidence in the base: randomized experiments on shared novel activity, and the Michelangelo phenomenon.
- States every claim with its evidence and its confidence, inline, where the claim appears.
What it does not
- It does not produce a compatibility score. Profile-similarity indices are confounded (Wood & Furr, 2016), and similarity effects explain under 0.5% of the variance in satisfaction across large samples (Dyrenforth et al., 2010).
- It does not predict how a relationship will fare. Across 43 longitudinal couples studies, changes in relationship quality were largely unpredictable from questionnaire answers (Joel et al., 2020).
- It has not been validated as a couples instrument — no study has tested it at all.
Before any of this: there is currently no published, peer-reviewed research that has directly tested this three-dimension model — Happiness, Meaning, and Psychological Richness — in couples, using data from both partners. Everything below about how these dimensions play out between two people is either (a) direct evidence about personality traits and relationship outcomes generally, correctly cited, or (b) reasonable extrapolation, labeled as such every time it appears. This isn't fine print. It's the single most important thing to know about how much weight to put on anything that follows.
Sources, verified from the primary paper
Psychological richness proposed as a third, independent dimension of a good life alongside happiness and meaning.
Oishi, S., & Westgate, E. C. (2022). A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning. Psychological Review, 129(4), 790–811.
Confidence: High
Across nine countries, happiness was the most-chosen single ideal everywhere; about 27.6% of Americans and 35% of Koreans said their life would have been richer in retrospect.
Oishi, Choi, Heintzelman, Westgate et al. (2020). Happiness, Meaning, and Psychological Richness. Affective Science, 1(2), 107–115.
Confidence: High (two country figures only — not a range across all nine)
Neuroticism is the strongest personality correlate of wellbeing, with conscientiousness and agreeableness also linked. (The meta-analysis also covers extraversion, which this test does not measure; Honesty-Humility comes from the HEXACO model.)
Anglim, Horwood, Smillie, Marrero, & Wood (2020). Psychological Bulletin, 146(4), 279–323 (k=462, N=334,567).
Confidence: High on the ranking; moderate on exact decimals
Personality-trait similarity is not what predicts couple satisfaction — a blanket null. What predicts satisfaction is each partner's own trait level.
Weidmann, Ledermann, & Grob (2016). The Interdependence of Personality and Satisfaction in Couples. European Psychologist, 21(4), 284–295.
Confidence: High — and it corrects this project's own original assumption
Long-married couples are genuinely similar on only two of six HEXACO factors: Honesty-Humility (r=.39) and Openness (r=.36).
Lee, Ashton, & de Vries (2026). Journal of Research in Personality, 122, Article 104718 (451 Dutch couples).
Confidence: High
Couples both high in openness reported better relationship quality than couples both low; an extreme mismatch outperformed a moderate one.
Zhou, Wang, Chen, Zhang, & Zhou (2017). Frontiers in Psychology, 8, Article 382.
Confidence: One sample of 260 Chinese university-age couples, unreplicated
Shared novel, arousing activity correlates with relationship satisfaction (r=.51, N=112), with three further randomized lab experiments showing it isn't only correlational.
Aron, Norman, Aron, McKenna, & Heyman (2000). JPSP, 78(2), 273–284.
Confidence: High — but all from one research group
Anxiously-attached partners may be buffered by familiar, comfortable shared activity rather than novelty specifically.
Schrage, Impett, Topal, Harasymchuk, & Muise (2026). Social Psychological and Personality Science (diary study of 390 couples).
Confidence: Moderate — a single, not-yet-replicated study; the avoidant mirror rests on secondary coverage only
Partner affirmation of who you are becoming predicts movement toward the ideal self, and both individual and relationship wellbeing.
Drigotas, Rusbult, Wieselquist, & Whitton (1999). JPSP, 77(2), 293–323; review: Rusbult, Finkel, & Kumashiro (2009). Current Directions, 18(6), 305–309.
Confidence: High
Honest limits
- The cut-points for openness gaps and the self-expansion bands are this project's own reasonable design choices, not evidence-derived thresholds.
- The item bank is unpiloted: no cognitive interviews, no quantitative pilot, no reliability estimate exists for it yet. That cannot be fixed without real respondents.
- Psychological richness has no South African data at all, the five-factor personality structure is contested locally, and Honesty-Humility has no local validation. Norway, by contrast, is one of the original nine study countries.
- This is not a clinical or diagnostic instrument and not a substitute for a qualified therapist.
- No attorney has reviewed the item bank. All 89 questions are original to this instrument, and the core well-being items were checked sentence-by-sentence against published scales; the personality and attachment questions have not had that same check yet.