Chelsea Follett: Joining me today is Tim Lomas, a Psychology research scientist at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University with a particular interest in cross-cultural perspectives on well-being. In a previous life, he was a singer in a ska band, a psychiatric nursing assistant, and an English teacher in China. And he joins the podcast today to discuss the Global Flourishing Study. How are you, Tim?
Tim Lomas: I’m good, thank you. It’s great to be with you.
Chelsea Follett: Thank you for joining me. So this is a really interesting study. Could you start us off by just telling us a little bit about how you and the rest of your team got the idea for this study and what questions it contains, or what is it?
Tim Lomas: Oh, sure. Well, it’s the Global Flourishing Study. The two masterminds behind it is the director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, Tyler VanderWeele, where I work, and Byron Johnson at Baylor Institute for the Studies of Religion. And it was around six years ago that they hatched this plan, incredibly ambitious to do a global study of flourishing. What makes it particularly unique is its longitudinal nature. As I’m sure your listeners will be aware, there’s lots of international studies of well being and flourishing. We’ll get on to defining those and differentiating those shortly because that’s an interesting conversation in itself. But Gallup, for example, has excelled in that. They’ve had the Gallup World Poll for around 20 years, covering some 150 countries in an annual survey. So there is good measurement of well-being globally, which is really important because as another tangent, there’s a critique of it feels like psychologists being Western-centric, focus mainly on populations like the US and there’s efforts to address that like the Gallup World Poll, which is very valuable. One issue with that though, is it’s cross-sectional, so it’s a snapshot of people each year.
Tim Lomas: It doesn’t track people over time. So it can’t really tell us that much about causal trends or patterns over time other than international level, let’s say. So the real differentiating factor about this is it does take a set of people and seeks to follow them over time. So they created this plan about six years ago and then had several years really of essentially looking for funding because it’s hugely ambitious and would cost a fair amount of money. And then developing the plans, developing the questionnaire at the heart of the study. And then in 2023, essentially it got off the ground, we did the first wave of data collection over 200,000 people. 2024 was wave two, so we now have two waves of data in our hands, as it were. Wave three has just gone into the field and the plan has been for it to be at least five years, but ideally it would be longer if we can sustain it because it’s such a valuable exercise. But we just… We’ve done a first batch of papers focused on the wave one data which have just been published as part of a Nature special collection early in May.
Tim Lomas: But now we’re getting into the longitudinal analysis which is really… I’d like to say what really sets it apart from other types of studies. And we’ll talk about flourishing and well being. But the heart of it is this questionnaire featuring some just over 100 items covering all different aspects of flourishing. It’s really centered around a framework of flourishing developed by Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard. So he has a framework with five main domains of flourishing plus an additional sixth one. So the five main domains are happiness and life satisfaction, health, both physical and mental, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships. There’s an additional sixth dimension of financial and material stability. That’s not exactly an end in itself as the others are, but it’s pretty important for securing those other domains. So that’s kind of an additional sixth domain. But then, the questionnaire expands beyond that. So there’s questions on religion, spirituality, different aspects of the systems in which people live in the context, questions around society, the government, relationship to nature, and also some kind of just slightly more… Ones that are hard to categorize but are interesting, like experiences of beauty connected to nature. So things that are sort of on the fringes of those other domains but are still worth asking about. But the core of it is those six domains developed by VanderWeele. So that’s maybe enough for now. I’m sure you’ve got lots of questions.
Chelsea Follett: Oh no, I do. So yeah, the questionnaire, it’s fascinating. It has all sorts of questions like I understand my purpose in life. People rate on a scale of 0 to 10 how strongly they disagree or agree with that, whether you’re content with your friendships and relationships. Like you said, it has all these different aspects of well-being and it asks people to self-report how they’re doing on these different metrics. Now, obviously there are some issues with self-reported data that are well known. There are the issues of subjectivity, individual interpretation, cultural bias or norms because we’re doing this cross nationally. It’s very difficult to make those comparisons sometimes and some cultures might, for example, encourage humility. They might look at giving a positive response as boastful. Other cultures might have pressures in the opposite direction. So without any objective anchors, it can be difficult to interpret some of this data. Sometimes it’s of limited predictive value. For example, I noticed that Nigeria seems to report a self-assessment of physical health that is more positive than in the United States, even though life expectancy in the US is obviously significantly longer than in Nigeria.
Chelsea Follett: So we need to interpret this data very cautiously and ideally alongside some more objective metrics that are easier to do cross-national comparisons on. But it’s still really interesting. Some of the insights here are counterintuitive. There is so much here that I want to talk about. But let’s start with examining more of these different domains. Can you tell me about the different main domains and why they were selected?
Tim Lomas: So they were selected really by Tyler VanderWeele on the basis of probably being the most prominent ones in the literature, as well as just intuitively making sense to people like him when you’re writing about it and thinking about it. I would say most of the attention in the literature has been on those first two domains. So happiness and life satisfaction and health. So obviously health makes sense. You can imagine there’s so much interest around that data on that topic, both subjective and objective. I’m glad you raised that point because that’s really important. So there’s objective metrics around health and there’s also subjective. And often they’re aligned and then sometimes they’re not aligned. And that’s also interesting and significant in its own way. And then when it comes to happiness and life satisfaction, it’s obviously hard to find objective metrics for them. But you can find proxies, but they’re much more on the subjective self-report side. But they’re very prominent. So I’m sure your readers and listeners are familiar with the World Happiness Report, which it’s based on a measure of life evaluation in the Gallup World Poll, Cantril’s Ladder, where people are asked where they stand on a 10-run ladder representing the best and worst possible life.
Tim Lomas: So they’re very common. There’s lots of nuances to get into. I mean, one of the papers I’ve been leading is comparing life evaluation with life satisfaction and with happiness. And they’re all very close and sometimes even used synonymously and interchangeably. But there’s actually quite considerable and intriguing differences between them. So we can come back to that because that’s an interesting conversation. But I would say those two domains have been very well covered. After that, I would say close social relationships obviously has a big… It’s a huge focus of attention. The constructs like social capital, bonds within society, both objectively and subjectively. Then when it comes to the other two main domains, character and virtue and meaning and purpose, they’ve had much, much less attention. I mean, they’ve had attention within fields like psychology, but rarely on this big international scale. But I think it would make sense to everyone that they are important and relevant to flourishing. And I think we would make the case that they’re integral, as in if you scored highly in the other domains but didn’t have a sense of character and virtue, let’s say, or meaning and purpose, then are they doing one of the other domains relatively hollow or superficial?
Tim Lomas: There’s something important missing if you’re not living a kind of ethical life, one might say. So those dimensions, I think, are very important and understudied. And then the sixth dimension, financial material stability, again, fairly well studied, both subjectively and objectively. So I think you’re right in terms of self-report data is very valuable, but it has its issues. And then I think that’s why we are also doing, in a lot of our analyses, we seek to combine these self-report data with objective metrics. And that can be interesting, too. For example, some of the analysis I’ve done would incorporate something like GDP per capita. But then you find some very strange patterns in as much as that can often be negatively correlated with, well, all of the domains of flourishing subjectively, which is a fascinating and perplexing kind of outcome and leads to a lot of questions and something we’re trying to work through and think about because, well, we can come back to that. But I’ll let you jump in there if you have any questions.
Chelsea Follett: No, absolutely. That was one of the interesting points to me. Looking at the overall rankings and where countries end up in relation to each other was fascinating because the countries that are scoring the highest are not necessarily the ones that you would suspect based purely on the material standard of living. One thing that struck me was that many of the countries that are scoring very high, countries like Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines, these are countries that tend to be sort of middle income. They’re not very rich, but they are experiencing a high growth rate. In Indonesia, it’s something like 5% per year. So maybe people see that growth and that decrease in poverty. And it’s that trajectory more than the overall level of income that is anchoring some of their responses here. So I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on that. But in one of the papers on the report, it has this interesting line where it says, zooming back out to the composite flourishing index, researchers differ on whether the sixth domain measuring financial and material stability is an integral component of the flourishing concept or an important contributor to flourishing, yet there is a broad consensus that a positive relationship between flourishing and material well-being should exist. So tell me, what does your data show about that relationship between material prospering and this self-reported flourishing across various dimensions?
Tim Lomas: Yes, that’s such great questions. And I really love your insight about the trajectory, which I really want to touch upon. But I guess first I’d start just with a caveat relating to something you actually mentioned about the issues in comparing countries, because it can be difficult. Because part of my background has been to do analysis of linguistic differences between different words and different concepts. And one can’t be certain one is assessing the very same thing, identical thing, identical construct across two cultures, across two languages. And that kind of caveat, that caution is really baked into the study in its very design. So the way it’s been conceived actually is essentially separate studies in each of the countries, which we then do a meta-analysis of. So the meta-analysis does allow some degree of comparison, but it doesn’t assume that everything is identical. The same way if you did a meta-analysis of different interventions, they might differ in their dose or length or duration, but you’re still having some meaningful comparison, but you’re not presuming they’re identical. So we always take the rankings with a pinch of salt.
Tim Lomas: We can’t lean too heavily on them. To give you an example, also something you mentioned, do some cultures have a presumption or an ethos of perhaps being more self-effacing? And one wonders this with Japan, because it’s really striking that Japan was at the bottom of the rankings. And that’s puzzling for various reasons. The fact it’s obviously such a strong economically developed nation. But also for me, speaking personally, I’ve been there a few times. I love the place. And you walk around thinking, this is an amazing society. And so my perception as an outsider, it’s a great place. And you see these data and you think, am I missing something as an outsider? Or perhaps behind the scenes, is there issues that I’m not picking up on? And there is a suggestion in the literature that in Japan and other cultures in that region, there might be more of a presumption or a pressure to be a bit more self-effacing. So the question arises, does that account for their relatively low scores? My sense would be that would account for some of it, but perhaps not all.
Tim Lomas: And perhaps there are issues that I’m not seeing. So that is just a general caveat about this task of comparing cultures and not wanting to make too much of the rankings. But that said, you can look at them and still see some meaningful patterns, I think. And I think you’re right. The countries that seem to do very well in terms of flourishing are not the most economically developed countries. And then one might wonder whether there could be a tendency in more economically developed countries that that development comes at a cost, at the expense of other aspects of flourishing that are also important. I’m thinking, for example, societal cohesion, community structure, traditions, religion and spirituality, close social connections. I could see ways in which economic development, not necessarily or always, but could often come at the expense of those types of dynamics, whereas countries that have not developed economically as much, those things are still preserved. But then I also want to touch upon your point about the trajectory, which I think is really interesting, because one’s sense of how well one’s life is or how well one’s society is doing is not static. It’s based on a picture of where it’s been and where it’s going.
Tim Lomas: And I can imagine two countries, and a person could perceive them being almost identical in terms of their current state. But one is on a downward trajectory. It’s been much better in the past, and then it seems to be getting worse, whereas another country is getting better. My sense of which society is better might be the one that’s improving. You’d say that was fairly much more strongly, even if the two were identical. So the trajectory matters, how we think of things over time. So if those countries may not be as developed economically, but the people in those countries sense they’re on this upward curve, upward trajectory, I could see how that could be quite powerful in terms of we’re going places, we’re on the right track, those types of sentiments. So there’s lots of reflections there, but I do think the temporal aspect is something that we need to really pay strong attention to when we try and think about these nuances and these seeming paradoxes of development not necessarily bringing flourishing along with it. And obviously the lesson though isn’t, if there’s this kind of decoupling or even sometimes a negative association between this economic development and flourishing, the lesson obviously isn’t well, societies shouldn’t develop economically because obviously they should. Because that’s still a vital component of flourishing. The question then is like how to develop economically that doesn’t come at the expense of those other domains. So I think that’s really the key question we’re trying to think through at the moment as we see these data.
Chelsea Follett: I think there’s a lot that you’ve said there that’s really interesting. If you think about a country like Japan that is very prosperous from a global perspective, it’s very high income, but it also has gone through a lot of economic stagnation. Maybe the trajectory is not as clear to people there. And there’s also the question of parameters of social comparison, the point of comparison, right? So if you are in a very prosperous, wealthy country, you also probably have access through technology to seeing the lives of the rich and famous in your country and elsewhere. Your point of comparison is going to be quite high, whereas if you are in a poor or middle income but rapidly developing country, you’re going to have a very different perspective on things and on how you’re doing, which gets to one of the really interesting insights that I want to talk about because I’ve seen completely unrelated studies that show something similar. So I think it is a real trend, and that is that in most countries, almost all of them actually, older people had more positive reports across many domains than younger people. And I’m wondering if that might have to do in part with the greater perspective that older people have, especially if they’ve seen their country go through a lot of change, a lot of positive economic change in their lifetime. What do you think about that?
Tim Lomas: Yeah, I think that’s a really key point because there is this striking trend where it’s sometimes been observed that satisfaction, happiness, and even flourishing generally is somewhat U-shaped, where relatively high in the young, it kind of falls to its lowest level around middle age as people are kind of struggling with kind of careers and aging parents and just life generally, but then seeming to rise as people get older, that it tends to then tail off as people get into the very old health and social issues and so on. But this U-shaped pattern has been quite well corroborated, although what we’re seeing is actually the left-hand side of the U is starting to come down to the point where it’s maybe even sort of a J-shaped, where older people are doing better even than the younger people with still kind of lowest level in middle age, which is really striking, and then you wonder why that is. And I think a lot of it must come down to perspective, I think, because you can even see this, for example, in certain countries with self-reported health, where an older person might report better self-reported health than a younger person.
Tim Lomas: And you have to think objectively the younger person usually is going to be in better health than an older person, but it’s a question of what are you judging that relative to? Do you feel like you’re doing okay relative to where you expect to be, or your peers and people of a similar age, or like you say, people in the past, maybe they have recollections of how it used to be for people of their age when they were growing up, and they think actually life is better now than they thought it would be when they were that age. So there’s so many interesting questions of what’s people’s reference point? What do they judge them… Who or what are they judging themselves relative to? So there is this striking point, this U-shaped or even now perhaps J-shaped pattern, which is also kind of worrying in terms of what it shows about the well-being of young people, which is obviously a real concern. And then you wonder if there was a U-shaped pattern that’s becoming a J-shaped pattern, then it’s not simply the kind of natural curve of aging, but perhaps younger people today are facing significant challenges that weren’t faced by people of a similar age in earlier kind of cohorts, earlier generations.
Tim Lomas: Obviously, you think about things around the planet or the climate or the economics coming AI, the future of work. You can imagine there’s so many issues on young people’s minds that would be weighing them down that perhaps weren’t there. If I think about myself growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, were these concerns there? Probably not to the same degree, I could imagine. So you’ve got to think about the plight of young people, which is also something that makes the older people do even better by comparison, given the struggles that younger people might be facing. So there’s so many issues to think through.
Chelsea Follett: Absolutely. Every generation has its challenges. If you think back to what my parents’ generation experienced hiding under their desks in drills out of fear that a nuclear weapon could fall on them. I mean, there were fears, existential fears in previous generations as well. But I think something that has changed, like you said, might be the perspective that people have. And maybe that’s my bias because at humanprogress.org, obviously, we believe that many people do lack historical perspective. And it’s important to try to show people longitudinal data to show them how things have changed in many cases. They may not realize that they are better off than their ancestors in various ways, which brings me to one of the areas of well-being that I want to ask you about specifically and zoom in on, which is mental health, because the findings here were really fascinating to me. If you look at a country like the United States, it seems like it is not scoring as well on self-reported mental health as a lot of countries that are economically worse off. For example, I noticed that Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, they all seem to have what you call a surplus in this domain of mental health.
Chelsea Follett: They’re all seemingly doing fine. When you ask them, how is their mental health? And I wonder if part of that is that in wealthy countries today, with their very different standards and points of comparison, if we’ve become much more fragile or sensitive in this domain, if you have a very different standard, if you perhaps even get, with growing acceptance of mental health struggles, you might even get a social reward for saying that you have anxiety or for ranking your mental health poorly. I wonder how much we can really make of some of these comparisons. It might be a real thing, too, obviously. If you think about a more objective metric like suicide rates, it is true that Japan, for example, which is the country that ranks the worst on your flourishing study, does have a high suicide rate, higher than many countries that are far poorer than it. What do we make of that? Is mental health worse in some rich countries perhaps because we are now much more sensitive? Is part of it that the stigma has been removed, so we’re more open to saying that we have mental health challenges? Or is some of this very real and very worrying, as some of the suicide rate data might suggest? What are your thoughts on some of these differences that we’re seeing in mental health self-reported between countries?
Tim Lomas: That’s such an important and good question. It’s so difficult to answer. Partly, it’s difficult to answer in terms of comparing countries, but it’s even difficult to answer just thinking about one country alone, what to make of any given trend or set of statistics with regard to mental health, because there’s consideration of potential levels of actual mental health, and then there’s issues around people’s… Trends around people’s willingness to report it. But then, like you said, perhaps there’s even trends around people being encouraged to, I wouldn’t say to exacerbate it, but to see themselves through a particular lens. You could imagine in certain cultures, and maybe the US is an example of this, where certain states of mind or experiences are more likely to be medicalized, and in other countries, perhaps less so. There’s been so much work around the therapization, the medicalization of ordinary life, not just in the United States, but just globally, the tendency to take ordinary struggles and see them through a mental health illness lens. And then in certain quarters for that to almost be rewarded.
Tim Lomas: There’s a certain… I’m struggling for the words to know how to label it, but there’s a certain… I can see certain incentives, you could imagine certain incentives for having that as a badge of identity, let’s say. And this isn’t my area of expertise, but you think about the work of people like Jonathan Haidt, who’s done such great work on trends in how people see themselves, and in some instances have been encouraged to adopt labels in this kind of area. But then there’s also things like patterns around technology, obviously, with smartphone, and that’s again, work around Jonathan Haidt. You could imagine they don’t play out equally in all countries. So if we’re getting back to country comparisons, what are the factors? So aside from the issues around whether people are incentivized or different patterns of reporting mental health, in terms of “actual mental health”, whether people are actually struggling, whatever label we give to it or whatever lens they see it through, what are the factors that are associated with that? And there’s a lot of evidence, say for it with young people, that it’s around the use of technology.
Tim Lomas: I wouldn’t say technology per se, because technology can be good, but the way in which it might be used, apps people might use, and so on, that you could imagine in certain cultures, and perhaps even the more economically developed ones, those risk factors might be more prevalent. So I think it’s always with progress, there’s a certain dialectic of progress, isn’t there? Progress happens and it brings good things and bad things. And along with increased internet use and smartphone possession, there’s a lot of good with that and there’s bad that comes with that. So you can imagine countries with less economic development, less opportunity to benefit from the gains, but then less exposure to the risks. I could see how they might go hand in hand.
Chelsea Follett: No, absolutely. It is fascinating. You see a country like Tanzania, which is really quite poor. I’ve seen data suggesting that around 45% of the population even may be in extreme poverty, reporting, as you’d expect, rather low life satisfaction and happiness. They have a deficit there, but shockingly strong mental health self-reported. And when you’re in a survival situation, I can see how you might just not have any leeway to… I don’t know if this is the right term, but sort of indulge your feelings of anxiety. You really have to be very resilient in that sort of situation to survive. Whereas once you are in a prosperous situation and you’re not worried about your family’s survival, then you have time for more navel gazing to really ask, am I truly satisfied? Maybe to explore your mental health in other ways. Now, it’s fascinating. I want to get back then to that relationship between development and flourishing. I want to emphasize what you said earlier, that obviously none of this is to say that growth is bad. Economic development, especially when you’re coming from a very poor starting point, is self-evidently good. It expands choice in people’s lives. It gives them more of a sense of agency. It gives them the tools to live meaningful, self-directed lives, the resources to expand these voluntary communities that you were talking about.
Chelsea Follett: And one thing that you mentioned that you think is a factor here and that the study points out as a key finding is the importance of voluntary community life. Group activities, both secular and religious, seem to be generally associated with greater flourishing. Even after controlling for other well-known predictors, it seems like some of the best support systems for human flourishing as measured by this study are these bottom-up systems of voluntary communities, civil society, religious organizations. And that’s fascinating. So did you find that flourishing improves with a robust civil society, these voluntary communities? Walk me through some of your findings there.
Tim Lomas: Yeah, I think they’re so important. Close social connections and then also these kind of social institutions. They’re both part of flourishing. They’re dimensions of flourishing themselves and they’re also cause influences on the other dimensions of flourishing. So they’re strong predictors of things like happiness and life satisfaction, but they’re not just drivers of flourishing. They’re key aspects of flourishing themselves. And then this is what’s so useful about having a multidimensional perspective on flourishing with these different dimensions. You can appreciate how things could… Something like economic development, you can see how that could come at the expense of certain of these domains, certain of these drivers. Not necessarily or inevitably, but it does often seem to happen. There’s been quite a lot of literature around the fact this isn’t a new observation, but linking economic development to or decoupling this from outcomes like happiness and life satisfaction. This was so-called the Easterlin Paradox going back to the ’70s, noting that countries like the US and the UK were getting richer, but not necessarily happier, and then trying to work out why that is.
Tim Lomas: And I think there’s lots of aspects to that, but I think at least a part of it is that development could come at the expense of or put at risk these other aspects of flourishing. So close social communities, traditions, community groups, social relationships. So obviously not inevitably. And then this is the question really we’re wrestling with and trying to think about in terms of what would we say to policymakers, for example, because as you say, wholehearted agreement, you need economic development. Like that’s not just important for other aspects of flourishing like health but it’s part of flourishing itself, helping people lead a good material life, feeling stable and secure in their existence. But then I guess the takeaway here is that can’t be just a simplistic sense that economic development alone is sufficient as in let’s develop economically and then everything will play out fine. But it’s more recognizing that with economic development can come these downsides, can come these risks, but not inevitably. So it’s a question of how can we preserve things like community, tradition, social structures, close social relationships, and trying to learn the lessons of countries that seem to be doing that, as in they may be on an upward trajectory economically, they’re developing, they’re doing well, but they’re preserving some of these other institutions, communities, other drivers of flourishing that are also really vital. So I guess it’s a question of how to develop skillfully in a way, how to develop sensitively that isn’t just jeopardizing those other key aspects.
Chelsea Follett: Do you think then that the freedom of conscience and to associate and the freedom to practice religion without state interference, could these be sort of hidden pillars of societal well-being?
Tim Lomas: Certainly, certainly. So religion and spirituality, religious communities, religious traditions they’re not essential for flourishing, but the data show that they are strongly associated with it. So people who are within a religious tradition, within religious communities, do tend to have higher levels of flourishing overall. There’s obviously exceptions in both directions, but those kinds of aspects of life are really vital. And then freedom itself is vital on a personal level, on a structural systemic level. And then that would obviously apply to religion itself. So it’s broader than just religion. I think freedom is vital. It’s not… Well, it’s kind of interwoven through those other domains, but that’s a key ingredient of flourishing, both individually and societally. And that does apply to religion too. So feeling feeling coerced, the lack of agency that in itself is a real constraint on flourishing. And then that would apply in the religious domain and, or kind of any kind of traditional one would associate with having that freedom to do that.
Chelsea Follett: One of the factors that a lot of the literature has looked at is a sense of agency or an internal locus of control. People who are high agency, who feel that they do have more control over their lives, often do report higher well-being across a whole range of dimensions. Do you see that evidence from this study as well, that individuals flourish more when they have more of a sense of control over their lives, the autonomy to pursue meaning and happiness as they see fit, and to try to build lives that they find meaningful?
Tim Lomas: We do find that. I’ll mention one project that we have underway. As you can imagine, with the data set so rich, there’s so many different analyses we’re doing. But one of them is an intersection of the framework we’ve been talking about, about Tyler VanderWeele, with another framework of flourishing by an economist called Dennis Snower, called the SAGE framework. SAGE is Solidarity S, A Agency, G, Gain, Economic Gain, and E, Environment. I’ll just say about these two frameworks, they’re a really nice complement because I just realized we haven’t really defined flourishing. So I’ll quickly do that now because it’s relevant to how these intersect.
Chelsea Follett: Absolutely.
Tim Lomas: So Tyler has developed a definition of flourishing, a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good, including the context in which that person’s lives. And that clause after the comma is important because we’ve used that to differentiate it from well-being. So well-being you could define as a state in which all aspects of a person’s life are good, physical, mental, social, spiritual, as they pertain to that person. So the idea is that well-being is about a sentient agent. It’s about who they are.
Tim Lomas: But you could have well-being even in adverse circumstances. You could thrive despite being in an inhospitable environment, a challenging society, etcetera. But what we wanted to do with our definition of flourishing was to make it about the person and their context. It’s about the person doing well and their context doing well. And that both together would constitute flourishing. Whereas the person themselves alone doing well, regardless or even in spite of their environment, that we could call that well-being. I mean, there’s lots of different ways to define these terms, but that’s one nice way we found to differentiate them is about well-being is about the person and flourishing about the person and their context, such that if the context was really struggling, you couldn’t properly say the person was flourishing. If they’re in a society that’s kind of roiled by turmoil, homelessness, all these issues, we wouldn’t want to say the person is really flourishing because their context isn’t doing well. You might say that person has well-being. I mean, it’s hard to have well-being in those contexts, but we could say they do. But our way of assigning a kind of broader, more encompassing role for flourishing was to say, it’s about the person and their context.
Tim Lomas: It just kind of expands our focus to make us think, get away from that individualistic view of the person and their well-being, which you often find in the literature to make it more about the person in context. Now, having said that, when it comes to Tyler’s framework, that’s still kind of more about an assessment of the person. So even we have this expansive definition of flourishing, person and context. His framework itself is much more about asking the person how their life is going, let’s say. But then the nice thing about the SAGE framework developed by Dennis Snower, that’s much more about the context. So kind of together, they’re more like the whole picture, the person and then the context. And then so to return to your question about agency, with the SAGE framework, solidarity, agency, economic gain, so G, and environment. Now, these are about the context, so it’s more structural. So when we ask about solidarity, kind of social connection and cohesion, and when we ask about agency, it’s more as a societal level. So you’re asking people not about are your personal relationships good, but can people in your culture, in your society trust each other?
Tim Lomas: Can you trust the government? Is there corruption? So again, with agency, you can think about that individually as an individual capacity, but you can also think about it structurally and systemically. Like, do people in your country have the freedom to do X? So it’s much more about the context in which you’re in.
Chelsea Follett: Freedom from coercive institutions.
Tim Lomas: Yeah, freedom from coercive institutions, freedom to pursue one’s own agenda, one’s own ends economically, religiously, freedom of association, those sorts of things. So SAGE is about the context. Does the context in which the person lives manifest that kind of structural, systemic solidarity and agency? And so finally, we turn to your original question. Yes, we find this strong correlation between this kind of structural solidarity and agency and the domains of flourishing.
Chelsea Follett: That’s… Sorry.
Tim Lomas: But then also, to kind of return to another point we made even before that, we also found a negative association, unexpectedly, between economic gain and flourishing. So again, it’s a similar pattern that this decoupling of economic progress from domains of flourishing. And also, intriguingly, this is another thing we’re kind of wrestling with and trying to work out what to make of, a decoupling and a negative association between environmental sustainability, the actions in which a government might take to act sustainably with flourishing. So there’s basically a positive correlation between the domains of flourishing in VanderWeele’s framework and solidarity and agency in the SAGE framework, but a negative association between the flourishing framework and gain and environment. So more paradox.
Chelsea Follett: You guys are fascinating. Wait, wait, hold on. So, yeah, I want to respond to so many different points that you made. That is really interesting. So first of all, it’s good to know that there is a positive correlation between freedom and self-reported flourishing. That’s also good because we know that economic freedom contributes to some of the main objective measures of flourishing, such as people living longer, being wealthier, their societies having less poverty. So that’s great to know that freedom also contributes to some of these self-reported domains of well-being as well, even if there is this interesting paradox of economic gain, which again, I think is probably related, at least in part, to points of comparison. Because if you are in a very wealthy society, your expectations, your standards are very different from someone who is in a society where 45% or even half of people are in extreme poverty, just barely getting by, right? So it’s difficult to make these cross-national comparisons. And again, obviously, none of this is to say you should not aim for economic growth or to raise these standards of living, such as bringing up infant survival rates, right? If you die in infancy, you are not going to flourish, regardless of how great your society’s, civil society institutions might be, regardless of whether it has these other wonderful factors. If you die in infancy, you’re not going to flourish, right?
Tim Lomas: Of course. Of course, yeah.
Chelsea Follett: So we need to also prioritize these other measures. The sustainability thing was fascinating. So countries with higher levels of… Is that measured by environmental regulation or what is it exactly?
Tim Lomas: I think we’re still thinking through how best to capture that. I believe in the calculations at the moment, it was mainly based on countries’ ratings on SDGs.
Chelsea Follett: Oh, interesting.
Tim Lomas: But they’re not all about the environment. I think we’re still trying to finesse exactly how we measure that. But then I also did… This is a separate study not involving the Global Flourishing Study, but using Gallup World Poll data with another set of environmental indicators. But we found a similar pattern in that certain efforts to act sustainably did seem to have a negative association with life satisfaction. But again, you kind of have the similar insight as with regard to economic development. It’s still good to live in harmony with the environment, to act sustainably, I believe, but just it’s got to be done in ways that are conducive to flourishing, not just regardless. And the same way we think economic development, that can be done… I would say both pursuing economic development and pursuing environmental sustainability can be done in good, skillful ways that are conducive to flourishing. So they’re not inevitably inimical to flourishing, but they can also be done in ways that come at the expense of flourishing, you could argue.
Chelsea Follett: I think related to that, if I may, I think that there are many different forms of environmental stewardship, right? There is a zero-sum mindset that some people seem to have where for the environment to do well, living standards need to come down. People need to do worse. There needs to be a degrowth of living standards. But there’s another strain of environmentalism with a very different mindset, a more sort of eco-modernist approach that says we can use innovation and technology and other tools that we have, our creativity as human beings to come up with solutions that both protect the environment and allow people to maintain their standard of living or continue to grow their standard of living, that allow people to rise out of poverty and don’t see that goal as at odds with environmental stewardship, right? So there are different approaches to environmental protection. But there’s so much in this study that we also have to get to, and we’ve talked a lot. So let me move to a different area. So again, something that you found that is really interesting to me is that so much of well-being seems to be tied to these bottom-up support systems of family, voluntary community, civil society, in some cases religious organizations.
Chelsea Follett: And so it seems like there are some limits to what policymakers can do, right? You want freedom of religion. Of course, you do not want that to be a top-down thing imposed by the state. But there are ways that policymakers can allow these different non-state institutions like families and religious organizations and voluntary associations to flourish. They can be fostered in many cases by simply allowing them the freedom to do so and having the state step back from coercive actions that can limit some of these voluntary associations. Would you agree with that?
Tim Lomas: That sounds about right to me. I mean, policy isn’t my area of expertise, but intuitively that does make sense that if there are levers that governments can pull to allow these types of institutions to flourish, whether that’s kind of proactively or kind of negatively in terms of giving them space and freedom to do what they will anyway, but recognizing the importance of these social groupings, of these institutions, of these traditions, finding ways to preserve them and allow them to support and allow them to flourish seems to be really essential for flourishing. We’re social creatures. It’s often said that particularly countries like the US or the UK might be relatively individualistic. I hesitate to use that term or to use it disparagingly because along with individualism might come agency and freedom, which is also important.
Chelsea Follett: You found that in most countries, men and women tend to report relatively similar flourishing, but there are some exceptions. Women in Japan seem to be flourishing more than men and Brazilian men report higher flourishing than women. What are your thoughts on that?
Tim Lomas: Well, it’s funny you mentioned that because I’ve just been working on a paper on these differences between males and females in the study. I would say overall it’s very equal. It is very equal. So just off the top of my head, I don’t have the data in front of me, but I think off the six domains of Tyler’s framework, I think off the top of my head, I think women did slightly better on four of them and men did better on two, but the degree to which men did better on those two was larger than the difference… Than the extent to which females did better on those four. So males overall did better on health and financial and material security and females overall, I think, did better on the other four. But they didn’t do better by that much and males tended to do better by quite a bit more on those two. So if you kind of aggregated everything together, you could say overall males do slightly better. But like I say, that’s only when you’re taking all six into account and then in fact when you’re doing it by different domains, females do slightly better on four of them.
Tim Lomas: So you could make a case that they’re doing better. But then again, as a goal of these, there’s just the fascinating country exceptions. So for example, when it comes to say happiness and life satisfaction, I think off the top of my head, I can recall that overall females did slightly better, but when you break it down by country, females did better in 11 countries and males did better in 11 countries. So it’s very even. But when it comes to health and financial and material stability, much more overwhelmingly in favor of men. And I think males did better in 18 countries and females only in four, I think on health. And when it comes to financial and material stability, I think males did better in 20 and females only did better in two. So then it’s interesting to think about what are the exceptions. So I think one of them was Japan. I believe the other three were Nigeria, Indonesia and the Philippines. So I think in those countries, they were the ones that bucked this trend of males doing much better on those last two dimensions. So health and financial and material stability. So that’s really interesting.
Tim Lomas: I just had a conversation with a colleague yesterday. We’re doing this paper focusing on gender generally and sex and gender generally, looking at male-female differences. But it’d be super interesting to do a paper looking at those four countries in particular where females seem to do better than males. But then also, they’re obviously all four very different countries. So they’re getting to perhaps a similar point in very different ways. The routes by which females might do better in Japan is going to be quite different from how they might do better in Nigeria, say. So there’s so many questions there. But when it comes to issues around sex and gender, it does make the point that a lot of this is kind of socioculturally, I won’t say determined, but influenced.
Chelsea Follett: Mediated, maybe.
Tim Lomas: Mediated, yes, there are exceptions. It’s not inevitable that women will have worse, say, financial and material security. I mean, in most places they do, but there’s some exceptions. So the question is in terms of trying to attain greater parity, because you basically want everyone to do well, don’t you? What can we learn from countries that seem to buck these trends?
Chelsea Follett: That makes perfect sense to me. There are still many countries where there are limits on women’s economic activity. They’re not allowed to do some of the same jobs as men. Sometimes they don’t even have the same property rights. Sometimes they’re not allowed to have a job without a male guardian giving them permission, right? So there are definitely things that can be done to increase their economic autonomy, which I think would have many broader effects for their flourishing as well. To be mindful of your time, I want to ask just one more question, because I do find it to be such an interesting finding. Could you give us a closing remark on, again, the importance that we seem to see of these vibrant voluntary civil society organizations and people’s flourishing?
Tim Lomas: Well, I guess as a closing remark you’re often asked with studies like this, what can people do to improve their flourishing, to improve their well-being? And some aspects of life do seem relatively out of one’s control. It’s hard to just make oneself feel happier or to be more satisfied with life. But certain things really do seem within one’s control in terms of the ability to try to find communities and engage with them and join them. And so this does seem to be not just one of the most powerful drivers of flourishing, but also I would say something that’s relatively within people’s most people’s capacity to actually make changes in that regard. Like speaking personally, I did this myself. There was a community nearby, like a meditation group, and for some reason I hadn’t… I’ve had a long interest in meditation, but I just didn’t join them for some years. And then I suddenly thought, oh, no, I should. I should take part. I should join in. I should become part of the… Join a group.
Tim Lomas: And it is really important and valuable. And it’s something that people can do. And it’s, I won’t say it doesn’t matter what it is. Some groups can be more conducive to flourishing than others. So religious communities, there’s lots there that besides the social communion itself, there’s other things like meaning and purpose and certain aspects of those institutions that make them particularly perhaps conducive to flourishing for some people. But just as a general principle, joining communities, joining organizations does seem to be a really powerful route to flourishing. And I can say something that people can hopefully have the ability to make changes in that respect. It’s something that’s within their power to do for many people, hopefully. So that’s a kind of one powerful lever people can hopefully pull to actually improve their own flourishing.
Chelsea Follett: Thank you so much for that very practical piece of advice to close on. And it’s also sort of… It’s also a great recommendation to policymakers because it again shows that it’s important to allow freedom of association, freedom of religion, to step back and really let these different voluntary associations flourish. And it can have many positive knock-on effects as well. Anyway, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much, Tim.
Tim Lomas: Thank you.