Purpose—a cognitive process that defines life goals and provides personal meaning—may help explain disparate empirical social science findings. Devoting effort and making progress toward life goals provides a significant, renewable source of engagement and meaning. Purpose offers a testable, causal system that synthesizes outcomes including life expectancy, satisfaction, and mental and physical health. These outcomes may be explained best by considering the motivation of the individual—a motivation that comes from having a purpose. We provide a detailed definition with specific hypotheses derived from a synthesis of relevant findings from social, behavioral, biological, and cognitive literatures. To illustrate the uniqueness of the purpose model, we compared purpose with competing contemporary models that offer similar predictions. Addressing the structural features unique to purpose opens opportunities to build upon existing causal models of “how and why ” health and well-being develop and change over time. What do volunteer services, social support, pet care, and religious attendance have in common? Recent studies indicate that people participating in these activities live longer than those who do not. Volunteers had a 60 % lower mortality rate compared with

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Purpose can be characterized as a central, self-organizing life aim. Central in that when present, purpose is a predominant theme of a person’s identity. Selforganizing in that it provides a framework for systematic behavior patterns in everyday life. As a life aim, a purpose generates continual goals and targets for efforts to be devoted. A purpose provides a bedrock foundation that allows a person to be more resilient to obstacles, stress, and strain. In this paper, we outline a theoretical model of purpose development. Besides outlining various essential ingredients to creating a purpose in life, we describe three broad pathways. The first process is proactive involving effort over time and only resulting in a purpose after gradual refinement and clarification. The second process is reactive involving a transformative life event where a purpose arises and adds clarity to the person's life. The third process is social learning- involving the formation of purpose through observation, imitation, and modeling. Our aim is to stimulate more research on this higher-level construct in the architecture of personality.

The partition of ethnically-diverse regions into homogeneous ‘homelands ’ has been often mooted as a solution to civil war and ethnic conflict. However, the Partition of India in 1947, in which an estimated 3.4 million people went missing, looms large as a cautionary example. Yet, despite its iconic importance, systematic evidence assessing the political and economic determinants of ethnic cleansing during the Partition has hitherto been lacking. Using novel data, this paper assesses the determinants of minority outflows from Indian districts between 1931 and 1951 and documents that districts that raised army units that were arbitrarily assigned to experience longer combat experience in the Second World War also experienced greater “ethnic cleansing” – greater religious homogenisation both through outflows of the minority population and inflows of co-religionist refugees. The effect of combat experience increases in areas that were initially more mixed. The paper interprets these results as reflecting the role of war-time military experiences in providing human capital – enhanced skills at both organisation and at perpetrating violence – that become particularly important in polarised societies in transition.

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