The Effects of Satisfaction With Different Domains of Life on General Life Satisfaction Vary Between Individuals (but We Cannot Tell You Why)

People care about different domains of life (e.g., their health, social life, work) to varying degrees. It thus seems plausible that how satisfied they are with those domains matters for their general life satisfaction to varying degrees. This idea has been investigated in the importance-weighting literature with at best mixed results, but variations of it can be found across different fields of psychology and include claims that values, personality, and age moderate the extent to which different life domains affect life satisfaction. In this study, we investigated the effects of satisfaction with 14 different life domains on general life satisfaction in a study of 439 individuals who provided up to 15 diary entries, resulting in a total of 6,071 observations. All domains had positive effects on average, with the largest effects for satisfaction with leisure time usage (b = 0.19, b_std = 0.25 relative to the within-person variability) and relationship satisfaction (b = 0.16, b_std = 0.17). Beyond these averages, there was robust interindividual variability; the standard deviation of the individual-level effects was of a similar magnitude as the average effect (and sometimes even larger). But when exploring correlations between these individual-level effects with third variables (e.g., self-reported importance of the respective domain, gender and age, Big Five personality traits), no convincing overall patterns arose. This may at least in part result from the high uncertainty with which individual-level effects were estimated, with reliabilities of ~.30, and the resulting low statistical power.