The evidence on increased prosocial attitudes and behaviours and improvements in subjective well-being is weak. We found only one experimental study that used direct subjective well-being measures before and after taking a psychedelic, and it found no statistically significant improvement.[51] That said, two studies—a prospective[52] and an unpublished[53] one—found improvements on a composite well-being scale and multiple studies found self-reported, self-attributed improvements of subjective well-being, i.e. participants stated that they think the psychedelic experience improved their well-being and prosocial behaviour and attitudes.
specified that only one aspect of subjective well-being (affective balance) was measured. Life satisfaction isn’t measured by PANAS.
noted that community observers detected a positive change in participant behavior & attitudes (but not in control’s behavior & attitudes) two months after the session (see the bottom of Table 4). A third-party observer report of behavior & attitudinal change seems much more objective than a participant self-report of such changes.
Also interesting here – individuals may rescale their assessments of subjective well-being over time. I speculate that the particulars of the psychedelic experience may drive rescaling like this in an intense way.
I speculate that the particulars of the psychedelic experience may drive rescaling like this in an intense way.
I also think that the psychedelic experience, as well as things like meditation, affect well-being in ways that might not be captured easily. I’m not sure if it’s rescaling per se. I feel that meditation has not made me happier in the hedonistic sense, but I strongly believe it’s made optimize less for hedonistic wellbeing, and in addition given me more stability, resilience, better judgment, etc.
Hi Milan, thanks very much for your comments (here and on drafts of the report)!
On 1, we don’t intend to claim that psychedelics don’t improve subjective well-being (SWB), just that the only study (we found) that measured SWB pre- and post-intervention found no effect. This is a (non-conclusive) reason to treat the findings that participants self-report improved well-being with some suspicion.
As I mentioned to you in our correspondence, we think that experiential measures, such as affective balance (e.g. as measured by Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)), capture more of what we care about and less of what we don’t care about, compared to evaluative measures, such as life satisfaction. But I take your point that PANAS doesn’t encompass all of SWB.
On 2, behaviour change still hasn’t been studied enough for there to be more than “weak evidence” but yeah, I agree that reports from third-parties are stronger evidence than self-reported changes.
Also interesting here – individuals may rescale their assessments of subjective well-being over time. I speculate that the particulars of the psychedelic experience may drive rescaling like this in an intense way.
Yeah, I don’t think we understand this very well yet but it’s an interesting thought :)
Yeah, I don’t think we understand this very well yet but it’s an interesting thought :)
The rescaling hypothesis and the “no effect from psilocybin-assisted therapy” hypothesis both would explain the “no change in PANAS” result. It seems you’re favoring the “no effect” hypothesis.
The rescaling hypothesis seems more concordant with other results from Griffiths et al. 2006:
Participants reported an increase in subjective well-being
Community observers noted an improvement in participant attitudes
Something like the rescaling hypothesis also fits better with my experience, fwiw.
As I mentioned to you in our correspondence, we think that experiential measures, such as affective balance (e.g. as measured by Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)), capture more of what we care about and less of what we don’t care about, compared to evaluative measures, such as life satisfaction. But I take your point that PANAS doesn’t encompass all of SWB.
I wish this preference was more explicit in Founders Pledge’s writing. It seems like a substantial value judgment, almost an aesthetic preference, and one that is unintuitive to me!
e.g. favoring affective balance over life satisfaction implies that having children is a bad decision in terms of one’s subjective well-being. (If I recall correctly, on average having kids tends to make affective balance go down but life satisfaction go up; many people seem very happy to have had children.)
I wish this preference was more explicit in Founders Pledge’s writing. It seems like a substantial value judgment, almost an aesthetic preference, and one that is unintuitive to me!
We don’t say much about this because none of our conclusions depends on it but we’ll be sure to be more explicit about this if it’s decision-relevant. In the particular passage you’re interested in here, we were trying to get a sense of the broader SWB benefits of psychedelic use. We didn’t find strong evidence for positive effects on experiential or evaluative measures of SWB. As you rightly note, just using PANAS leaves open the possibility that life satisfaction could have increased (the former is an experiential measure and the latter is an evaluative one). But there wasn’t evidence for improvements in evaluative SWB either so that fact that we place more weight on experiential than evaluative measures didn’t play a role here.
The only time that we’ve used SWB measures to evaluate a funding opportunity, we looked at both happiness (an experiential measure) and life satisfaction (an evaluative measure).
I wonder which of hedonistic and preference utilitarianism you’re more sympathetic to, or which of hedonism and preference/desire theories of well-being you’re more sympathetic to. The former tend to go with experiential SWB and the latter with evaluative or eudaimonic SWB (see Michael Plant’s recent paper). I don’t think it’s a perfect mapping but my inclination towards hedonism is closely related to my earlier claim that
experiential measures, such as affective balance (e.g. as measured by Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)), capture more of what we care about and less of what we don’t care about, compared to evaluative measures, such as life satisfaction
This might explain our disagreement.
e.g. favoring affective balance over life satisfaction implies that having children is a bad decision in terms of one’s subjective well-being. (If I recall correctly, on average having kids tends to make affective balance go down but life satisfaction go up; many people seem very happy to have had children.)
This is an interesting example, thanks for bringing it up. I don’t have a strong view on whether having children increases or decreases hedonistic well-being (though it seems likely to increase well-being in desire/preference terms). So I’m not too sure what to make of it but here are a few thoughts:
1. This could well be a case in which life satisfaction captures something important that affect and happiness miss—I don’t have a strong view on that.
2. The early years of parenting intuitively seem really hard and sleep-depriving but also fulfilling and satisfying in a broad sense. So it seems very plausible that they decrease affect/happiness but increase life satisfaction. I’d expect children to be a source of positive happiness as well, later in life though, so maybe having children increases affect/happiness overall anyway.
3. If having children decreases affect/happiness, I don’t find it very surprising that lots of people want to have children and are satisfied by having children anyway. There are clearly strong evolutionary pressures to have strong preferences for having children but much less reason to think that having children would make people happier (arguably the reverse: having children results in parents having fewer resources for themselves!)
I don’t have a strong view on whether having children increases or decreases hedonistic well-being (though it seems likely to increase well-being in desire/preference terms).
Yes, I haven’t looked closely but it seems like a complicated topic.
Pollmann-Schult 2018 thinks that the having kids<>life satisfaction relationship depends a lot on the context:
There are, however, considerable cross-country variations in life satisfaction between parents and non-parents. Within Europe, parenthood is more positively associated with happiness in social democratic countries than in conservative, liberal, and Eastern European countries (Aassve et al. 2012).
Notably Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian parents are more satisfied with their lives than their childless counterparts (Kohler et al. 2005; Hansen et al. 2009; Daukantaite and Zukauskiene 2006). A positive association between parenthood and life satisfaction has also been found in Russia (Mikucka 2016).
Parents in the USA and continental European countries, in contrast, experience equal or lower levels of life satisfaction than childless individuals (Alesina et al. 2004; Umberson and Gove 1989; Keizer et al. 2010; Myrskylä and Margolis 2014; Pollmann-Schult 2014; Rizzi and Mikucka 2015).
I wonder which of hedonistic and preference utilitarianism you’re more sympathetic to, or which of hedonism and preference/desire theories of well-being you’re more sympathetic to. The former tend to go with experiential SWB and the latter with evaluative or eudaimonic SWB (see Michael Plant’s recent paper).
As far as I can tell, experiential and eudaimonic well-being converge in the limit, but it’s important to prioritize eudaimonic well-being along the way to avoid premature optimization.
e.g. Jhanic states are more hedonic than cocaine or Twitter, but also more difficult to access.
Thank you for all the work that went into this—I’m very happy that it exists!
---
A couple points from our correspondence that might be interesting to readers here as well -
From the report:
I wish this discussion of Griffiths et al. 2006 (footnote [51]):
specified that only one aspect of subjective well-being (affective balance) was measured. Life satisfaction isn’t measured by PANAS.
noted that community observers detected a positive change in participant behavior & attitudes (but not in control’s behavior & attitudes) two months after the session (see the bottom of Table 4). A third-party observer report of behavior & attitudinal change seems much more objective than a participant self-report of such changes.
Also interesting here – individuals may rescale their assessments of subjective well-being over time. I speculate that the particulars of the psychedelic experience may drive rescaling like this in an intense way.
I also think that the psychedelic experience, as well as things like meditation, affect well-being in ways that might not be captured easily. I’m not sure if it’s rescaling per se. I feel that meditation has not made me happier in the hedonistic sense, but I strongly believe it’s made optimize less for hedonistic wellbeing, and in addition given me more stability, resilience, better judgment, etc.
Hi Milan, thanks very much for your comments (here and on drafts of the report)!
On 1, we don’t intend to claim that psychedelics don’t improve subjective well-being (SWB), just that the only study (we found) that measured SWB pre- and post-intervention found no effect. This is a (non-conclusive) reason to treat the findings that participants self-report improved well-being with some suspicion.
As I mentioned to you in our correspondence, we think that experiential measures, such as affective balance (e.g. as measured by Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)), capture more of what we care about and less of what we don’t care about, compared to evaluative measures, such as life satisfaction. But I take your point that PANAS doesn’t encompass all of SWB.
On 2, behaviour change still hasn’t been studied enough for there to be more than “weak evidence” but yeah, I agree that reports from third-parties are stronger evidence than self-reported changes.
Yeah, I don’t think we understand this very well yet but it’s an interesting thought :)
Further elaboration of the rescaling hypothesis and Griffiths et al. 2006 here: https://enthea.net/founders-pledge-report-psychedelics-and-subjective-wellbeing.html
The rescaling hypothesis and the “no effect from psilocybin-assisted therapy” hypothesis both would explain the “no change in PANAS” result. It seems you’re favoring the “no effect” hypothesis.
The rescaling hypothesis seems more concordant with other results from Griffiths et al. 2006:
Participants reported an increase in subjective well-being
Community observers noted an improvement in participant attitudes
Something like the rescaling hypothesis also fits better with my experience, fwiw.
I wish this preference was more explicit in Founders Pledge’s writing. It seems like a substantial value judgment, almost an aesthetic preference, and one that is unintuitive to me!
e.g. favoring affective balance over life satisfaction implies that having children is a bad decision in terms of one’s subjective well-being. (If I recall correctly, on average having kids tends to make affective balance go down but life satisfaction go up; many people seem very happy to have had children.)
We don’t say much about this because none of our conclusions depends on it but we’ll be sure to be more explicit about this if it’s decision-relevant. In the particular passage you’re interested in here, we were trying to get a sense of the broader SWB benefits of psychedelic use. We didn’t find strong evidence for positive effects on experiential or evaluative measures of SWB. As you rightly note, just using PANAS leaves open the possibility that life satisfaction could have increased (the former is an experiential measure and the latter is an evaluative one). But there wasn’t evidence for improvements in evaluative SWB either so that fact that we place more weight on experiential than evaluative measures didn’t play a role here.
The only time that we’ve used SWB measures to evaluate a funding opportunity, we looked at both happiness (an experiential measure) and life satisfaction (an evaluative measure).
I wonder which of hedonistic and preference utilitarianism you’re more sympathetic to, or which of hedonism and preference/desire theories of well-being you’re more sympathetic to. The former tend to go with experiential SWB and the latter with evaluative or eudaimonic SWB (see Michael Plant’s recent paper). I don’t think it’s a perfect mapping but my inclination towards hedonism is closely related to my earlier claim that
This might explain our disagreement.
This is an interesting example, thanks for bringing it up. I don’t have a strong view on whether having children increases or decreases hedonistic well-being (though it seems likely to increase well-being in desire/preference terms). So I’m not too sure what to make of it but here are a few thoughts:
1. This could well be a case in which life satisfaction captures something important that affect and happiness miss—I don’t have a strong view on that.
2. The early years of parenting intuitively seem really hard and sleep-depriving but also fulfilling and satisfying in a broad sense. So it seems very plausible that they decrease affect/happiness but increase life satisfaction. I’d expect children to be a source of positive happiness as well, later in life though, so maybe having children increases affect/happiness overall anyway.
3. If having children decreases affect/happiness, I don’t find it very surprising that lots of people want to have children and are satisfied by having children anyway. There are clearly strong evolutionary pressures to have strong preferences for having children but much less reason to think that having children would make people happier (arguably the reverse: having children results in parents having fewer resources for themselves!)
Yes, I haven’t looked closely but it seems like a complicated topic.
Pollmann-Schult 2018 thinks that the having kids<>life satisfaction relationship depends a lot on the context:
As far as I can tell, experiential and eudaimonic well-being converge in the limit, but it’s important to prioritize eudaimonic well-being along the way to avoid premature optimization.
e.g. Jhanic states are more hedonic than cocaine or Twitter, but also more difficult to access.