[Not answering on behalf of HLI, but I am an HLI employee]
Hi Michal,
We are interested in exploring more systematic solutions to aligning institutions with wellbeing. This topic regularly arises during strategic conversations.
Our aim is to eventually influence policy, for many of the reasons you mention. But we’re currently focusing on research and philanthropy. This is because there’s still a lot we need to learn about how to measure and best improve wellbeing. But before we attempt to influence how large amounts of resources are spent, I think we should be confident that our advice is sound.
The institution that I’m most interested in changing is academia. I think:
Wellbeing science should be a field.
There should be academic incentives to publish papers about wellbeing priorities and cost-effectiveness analyses.
The reasoning is that: if academia produced more high quality cost-effectiveness analyses of interventions and charities, HLI would be able to spend less time doing that research, and more time figuring out what that research implies about our priorities.
This also strikes me as likely more valuable than the average project of those who tend to work on wellbeing related topics.
It doesn’t seem implausible that we need to wait (or accelerate) research towards favoring best practices before we make strong, high stakes recommendations.
Following up on that last point, Folk and Dunn (2023) reviewed the power and pre-registration status of research on the 5 most popular recommendations in media for individuals to increase their happiness. The, results, captured in the figure below, are humbling.
That said, there is an organization that attempts to popularize and disseminate finding from wellbeing literature: https://actionforhappiness.org. We haven’t evaluated them yet, but they’re on our long list. I expect they’ll be challenging to evaluate.
Thank you for your response. I definitely agree about the need and usefulness of more high-quality research in the field of well-being, including wellbeing priorities and cost-effectiveness analyses. Has HLI considered taking actions to promote such research, beyond conducting research on your own?
On a related note, I recently came across the Global Flourishing Study (GFS), a $43.4 million initiative which can be found here: https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/global-flourishing-study. While I haven’t delved into the details of this study, its existence underscores the growing interest in well-being research. Influencing the direction and quality of such research could be incredibly impactful.
[Not answering on behalf of HLI, but I am an HLI employee]
Hi Michal,
We are interested in exploring more systematic solutions to aligning institutions with wellbeing. This topic regularly arises during strategic conversations.
Our aim is to eventually influence policy, for many of the reasons you mention. But we’re currently focusing on research and philanthropy. This is because there’s still a lot we need to learn about how to measure and best improve wellbeing. But before we attempt to influence how large amounts of resources are spent, I think we should be confident that our advice is sound.
The institution that I’m most interested in changing is academia. I think:
Wellbeing science should be a field.
There should be academic incentives to publish papers about wellbeing priorities and cost-effectiveness analyses.
The reasoning is that: if academia produced more high quality cost-effectiveness analyses of interventions and charities, HLI would be able to spend less time doing that research, and more time figuring out what that research implies about our priorities.
This also strikes me as likely more valuable than the average project of those who tend to work on wellbeing related topics.
It doesn’t seem implausible that we need to wait (or accelerate) research towards favoring best practices before we make strong, high stakes recommendations.
Following up on that last point, Folk and Dunn (2023) reviewed the power and pre-registration status of research on the 5 most popular recommendations in media for individuals to increase their happiness. The, results, captured in the figure below, are humbling.
That said, there is an organization that attempts to popularize and disseminate finding from wellbeing literature: https://actionforhappiness.org. We haven’t evaluated them yet, but they’re on our long list. I expect they’ll be challenging to evaluate.
Hi Joel,
Thank you for your response. I definitely agree about the need and usefulness of more high-quality research in the field of well-being, including wellbeing priorities and cost-effectiveness analyses. Has HLI considered taking actions to promote such research, beyond conducting research on your own?
On a related note, I recently came across the Global Flourishing Study (GFS), a $43.4 million initiative which can be found here: https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/global-flourishing-study. While I haven’t delved into the details of this study, its existence underscores the growing interest in well-being research. Influencing the direction and quality of such research could be incredibly impactful.