Do autonomy and inquisitiveness contribute to SDGs? Implications from the matrilineal island of Palau

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have become common missions for humanity all over the world, and there are several works that establish relations between SDGs and subjective wellbeing or generativity along with some determinants of sociodemographic and cognitive factors (see, e.g., Helne, 2021; Steckermeier, 2021; Qiu et al., 2022; Hirose and Kotani, 2022). However, little is known about what types of people or societies will likely achieve SDGs or steadily follow their paths in a single analytical framework. Building upon the previous literature, this research considers that generativity and wellbeing are necessary and salient indicators that people in societies must enhance to achieve SDGs, hypothesizing that people with high levels of autonomy (being independent and resisting social pressure) and inquisitiveness (being adaptable to new social and/or environmental changes) tend to be generative and happy. To empirically examine the hypothesis, we analyze people’s generativity and wellbeing as essential elements of SDGs and statistically characterize them in relation to autonomy and inquisitiveness with data drawn from questionnaire surveys and experiments based on 413 residents of the matrilineal island of Palau. We choose Palau as the field of study, because rapid social and environmental changes are presently ongoing as residents move from traditional to modern societies; thus a wider variation of people is expected to be observed compared to that in any field in other nation, even with a small sample size. Two main results are obtained. First, the analysis identifies the importance of inquisitiveness in that people with high levels of inquisitiveness tend to be generative. Second, people’s level of wellbeing is high when they are generative, autonomous and inquisitive, demonstrating two influential roles of inquisitiveness on happiness, namely, direct and indirect determinants through the mediator of generativity. Overall, the results suggest that autonomy and inquisitiveness contribute to people’s generativity and wellbeing even in tradition-oriented societies, such as Palau, and their enhancements are considered specific paths for materializing SDGs.