Cambridge, MA – The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science has released the first-year findings of the Global Flourishing Study, a five-year project that poses more than 100 questions to more than 200,000 people across 22 countries on six continents. The Global Flourishing Study is a multi-dimensional examination of global well-bring, offering a more nuanced perspective than the largely GDP-focused World Happiness Report.
The Human Flourishing Project, a FEHE grantee, proposes that happiness — or flourishing — goes beyond economic success. Rather, it is a state of affairs in which all aspects of life are relatively good, including social environments: relationships with family members and friends, community and political participation, health, prevailing emotions, a sense of life’s purpose, feelings of financial security and so on.
The Global Flourishing Study released represents a substantial body of research with dozens of academic papers, including a high-level overview of the results in the journal Nature Mental Health. The study found that while economic health is certainly desirable, participants from developed countries reported less meaning, fewer and less satisfying relationships and communities, and fewer positive emotions than their counterparts from poorer countries. Many of the countries with high overall tended to be rich in friendships, marriages and community involvement, specifically religious.
The intention of the Global Flourishing Study is to better understand what it means to live a good life, and offer more well-rounded policy suggestions for how governments and international institutions can help make people happier.
