Insights From the Global Flourishing Study

The Quest for Global Flourishing

We all desire to flourish. The flourishing of all people should be made a national and international priority across the globe. To promote flourishing, we need to understand its determinants and its distribution: Who is flourishing and who is not? Who needs help, and in what ways? How are things changing over time? What works to promote flourishing? What is nearly universal… and what is culturally specific? It was precisely these questions that motivated the development of the Global Flourishing Study (GFS).

The Global Flourishing Study, with principal investigators Byron Johnson (Baylor) and myself (Harvard) and data collection by Gallup, is a longitudinal panel study of more than 200,000 participants in 22 geographically and culturally diverse countries, spanning all six populated continents, with nationally representative sampling, and intended five years of annual data collection to assess numerous aspects of flourishing and their possible determinants.

The first wave of data was released in February 2024 and the second wave in April 2025. From its release last year, the data have been open-access and freely available to all through the Center for Open Science after submitting a pre-registration. We’ve also been hard at work for more than a year analyzing the data and are happy to report a special collection, published April 30th by Nature-Springer-BMC with numerous papers reporting on the study’s initial results concerning a host of topics ranging from balance in life and inner peace to forgiveness, relationships, smoking, character, educational attainment, optimism, trust, physical health, spiritual practice, and many others. The special collection also includes our Global Flourishing Study flagship paper in Nature Mental Health, summarizing much of what we have learned, which we also reported at our launch event, now available also on video.

Source: Map created using ggplot2.

Global Variation in Flourishing

Perhaps one of the most striking results of the study is how different countries are flourishing in different ways. While richer developed countries tend to report higher overall life evaluation and subjective financial security, the same is not true for other aspects of flourishing. GDP per capita, for instance, appears to be negatively correlated with meaning and purpose in life. If one aggregates across numerous domains of flourishing, including happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships, and financial security (as with our flourishing measure), the ordering of the self-report mean scores looks somewhat different than one might expect…

Source: Tyler VanderWeele

Much of what we see here is because many middle-income countries report higher levels of meaning in life, of pro-social character, and of relationship quality than those high-income countries. We’ve noted, as a particularly dramatic example, that of the 22 GFS countries, Sweden reports the second-highest life evaluation, but is 19th for meaning. Much of the well-being literature including, for example, the important World Happiness Report, has focused on a single life evaluation question. However, it seems much is missed when this is the sole focus.

As we’ve argued in a commentary in Nature Human Behavior, if we are going to have more adequate efforts to promote flourishing, we need to take into account its multidimensional nature. Indeed, other recent work has indicated that when people respond to the ladder-based life evaluation question, they often think about money and status, rather than other aspects of well-being, such as relationships. While economic development is critical, such development needs to be carried out in ways that do not compromise relationships, meaning, and character. It may be the case that in the West we have sacrificed too much in pursuit of maximal economic gain… and this may not be the right path toward sustainable flourishing.

Distributions and Determinants of Flourishing

With regard to the demographic distribution of flourishing, many of the initial results from the Global Flourishing Study confirm what has emerged from prior work on well-being, but with interesting variations, and also extend this to a more global context, and not just the West. For example, confirming prior work, married respondents in many countries tend to report higher flourishing than those who are single, but in India and Tanzania, it was the reverse. Likewise, those with higher education tend to report higher flourishing than those with lower levels, but in Hong Kong, the gradient is the opposite. When aggregated over the 22 countries, men and women tend to report relatively similar flourishing, but there are exceptions: In Japan, women report notably higher than men, and in Brazil, men report notably higher than women.

One important and very consistent result across countries was that those who attend religious services regularly report considerably higher flourishing. While such demographic analyses are purely descriptive, not causal, other analyses of GFS data, and also other data, do suggest a causal link. For example, it was the case that when assessing childhood religious service attendance retrospectively, and controlling for a host of other retrospective childhood exposures, childhood attendance was likewise a strong predictor of subsequent adult flourishing. Such analyses again replicate what we and others have reported in the past, but now extend this to a more global context. Religious community may be an important pathway to flourishing.

While these countries are only particular examples, it is striking that Israel (with relatively high rates of religious service attendance) is one of the few high-income countries also reporting among the highest levels of flourishing, and Japan (with the lowest levels of attendance of the 22 GFS countries) reports the lowest levels of flourishing. While there may be many possible pathways to jointly pursuing economic development along with meaning and relationships, the sustaining of religious community may prove to be a particularly important approach.

Happiness Essential Reads

Why Are Religious People Happier?

Having More Children Than Desired Makes Parents Unhappy

One especially unsettling aspect of the results was that, in many countries, though certainly not all, flourishing was steadily increasing with age, with the youngest group (age 18-24 years) often being the worst off. We had reported this previously in the United States but have now found closely related patterns, for example, in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, with several other countries also suggesting struggles among young adults. As we note, this is in striking contrast to earlier work—focused mostly on life evaluation/satisfaction—which suggested more U-shaped patterns, with younger people and older people doing better and those in mid-life (perhaps struggling with young children, aging parents, and career challenges) reporting lowest. While the pattern is not universal (in Poland and Tanzania, flourishing decreases with age), it seems that in many places, young people are not doing well. The reasons for this may be numerous, but more needs to be done at a societal and policy level to care for the well-being of youth and of generations ahead.

The Future of Flourishing

Source: Grey Matter Group

While we have learned a great deal, much still needs to be done. Many of the results and patterns that we have documented, we also now need to better understand and explain, and then use to better foster flourishing. We discuss in a commentary in Nature how countries around the world need to start their own efforts at flourishing data collection and tracking, focused upon each specific culture and context, and their own priorities. Further reflection is also needed on the limitations of the data, as one must always treat these self-report responses with a grain of salt, since questions and response scales can be interpreted in different ways in different languages and contexts. Integrating the results of the GFS with more objective and societal level measures will be an important step forward.

But the results also raise numerous issues and questions of critical importance, with discussion of these matters now already covered in The New York Times (here and here), The Atlantic, National Geographic, CNN, The Harvard Gazette, and Christianity Today. We need to think about priorities and about translating those priorities into policy and practice. Wealthier nations seem not to be doing as well on relationships, meaning, and character. These are important aspects of flourishing. Flourishing is not just reducible to health, life satisfaction, and financial security. The other, more humanistic aspects of flourishing are important individually… and they are also important for societal flourishing. We have seen, for example, increasing political polarization in the United States. Might our relative failure to prioritize relationships, meaning, and character have, in part, contributed to this? Will we be able to find a way out without committing to relationships, to a prosocial orientation to all, to a love of neighbor, or perhaps even a love of enemy? If we are to take flourishing seriously—if we are to become truly capable of promoting it—we must acknowledge its multi-faceted nature and we must pursue together those things that lie at the deepest core of our human nature.