This Morning
Dr Michael Plant, the founder and director of the Happier Lives Institute and research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, appeared on ITV’s This Morning to offer research-backed advice on how to be happier.
Viewing archives for Dr. Michael Plant
Top tips from a happiness expert
How to be happy in 2025
The Telegraph
“Spend more time doing things you enjoy, and less doing what you won’t,” recommends Dr Michael Plant, the founder and director of the Happier Lives Institute and research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre.
It may sound obvious but many people are engaging in activities because they think they should enjoy them, when they, in fact, don’t, he says. “The trick is to pay attention to your experiences. Do you actually enjoy the opera?”
Apply the same principle to your work, where we spend around a third of our life, he says. “Find a job with tasks you enjoy, supportive colleagues and that does something you think is useful,” he says. “If you can’t find one with all three, look for one with two.”
Is January really the most miserable month?
The Times
In a nutshell, events — outside global pandemics — tend not to have much of an impact on our happiness for long, unless they directly affect us.
Human moods are surprisingly resilient to external factors. Or, more likely, says Michael Plant, Oxford philosopher and founder of the Happier Lives Institute, we tend to focus on our own lives and what we can control. In his words, “We register the global events, then go back to the problems in front of us.”
What is the ‘hedonic treadmill’ and why is it the foe of Christmas cheer?
The National
Dr Michael Plant, founder and director of the Happier Lives Institute, a non-profit research institute, and a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, said that objects tend not to make people happier because we have adapted to them, something termed the hedonic treadmill.
“Think of some item you’d really like to buy and you think will make you happier,” he said. “Say it’s a new car or phone. Now, think about the car/phone you already have, and ask how much happiness it gives you now. Probably, you don’t think about it any more. It’s faded into the background.
“For what it’s worth, there’s a good evolutionary reason for adaptation. Mother Nature doesn’t want us to be happy – she wants us to survive and reproduce. Getting used to things – but not realising that we get used to things – is her trick to motivate us to acquire resources.”
Moral Uncertainty, Proportionality and Bargaining
Patrick Kaczmarek, Harry R. Lloyd and Michael Plant
Abstract
As well as disagreeing about how much one should donate to charity, moral theories also disagree about where one should donate. In light of this disagreement, how should the morally uncertain philanthropist allocate her donations? In many cases, one intuitively attractive option is for the philanthropist to split her donations across all of the charities that are recommended by moral views in which she has positive credence, with each charity’s share being proportional to her credence in the moral theories that recommend that particular charity. Despite the fact that something like this approach is already being used by real-world philanthropists to distribute billions of dollars of donations, it is not supported by any of the approaches to moral uncertainty that have been proposed thus-far in the philosophical literature. In this paper, we will develop a bargaining-based approach to moral uncertainty that honors the proportionality intuition in favor of splitting one’s donations. We also show how this bargaining-based approach has several further advantages over the best alternative proposals.
Make people happier – not just wealthier and healthier
Vox
“Basically, economists wanted to be more scientific,” explained Michael Plant, who leads the Happier Lives Institute. “They thought something only counts as science if it’s objectively measurable. Feelings aren’t objectively measurable, therefore they are not science.”
So economists turned away from squishy concepts like happiness and toward objective proxies for well-being, like GDP. In the postwar period, GDP became the go-to way for measuring well-being, even though the concept’s inventor, Simon Kuznets, warned that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.”
Can tracking happiness improve your wellbeing?
Prospect
Plant (“an old-fashioned utilitarian”) is pragmatic in his approach. He argues that improving lives can be as important as saving them. Research by the Institute has concluded that spending $1,000 on group therapy in low-income countries—the Institute advocates for a charity called StrongMinds—is a more cost-effective way to improve wellbeing than investing in mosquito nets.
William MacAskill, What We Owe The Future: A Million-Year View
Michael Plant
Abstract
In “What We Owe The Future (WWOTF)”, William MacAskill makes the case for longtermism, the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time. By ‘longterm’, MacAskill means the really longterm: the book is subtitled ‘A million-year view’. MacAskill says his case is based on three premises:
- Future people count.
- There could be lots of them.
- We can make their lives go better.
He remarks ‘these premises are simple, and I don’t think they are particularly controversial. Yet taking them seriously amounts to a moral revolution’ (p. 9). His main proposals are to focus on reducing the chance of premature extinction, allowing continued moral development by strengthening liberal institutions, and growing longtermism as a research field.
The book certainly marks an evolution in MacAskill’s own thinking: he is a leading light in effective altruism, the research field and social movement that aims to find the best ways to help others. MacAskill recounts that he used to believe that this meant focusing on the global poor, but others eventually persuaded him of longtermism. Although MacAskill states his aim was to ‘write the case for longtermism that would have convinced me a decade ago’ (p. 6), the book is clearly aimed at the general public, not academic philosophers. Instead of dense, technical text and a creeping barrage of thought experiments, we are treated to flowing prose and a whistlestop tour of history; it was joyful, even moving, to read.
Given the objective of persuading others, the book must count as a runaway success. For its launch, MacAskill pulled off a media blitzkrieg, with either a profile of himself, or a review of the book – in either case usually glowing – seeming to materialise in every outlet this author had ever heard of. He even featured on a US late-night talk show, not the normal domain of philosophers.
However – and although I wanted to share MacAskill’s enthusiasm for longtermism – I found the case unpersuasive. Further, it seems too bold to claim that the premises are simple or uncontroversial or, if taken seriously, would amount to a moral revolution.
To be clear, my concern is not that MacAskill does not treat his topic with the painstaking rigour he is clearly capable of – that would be unreasonable, given he is writing for a general audience. Rather, it is simply that MacAskill does not do enough to identify or anticipate, then address, the weaknesses in his argument. At times, I found the book uncomfortably polemical, as if MacAskill had set out to convince the reader, as effectively as possible, to share his conclusion, even if they would not fully understand the reasons for it and the challenges to them. Before I elaborate on my concerns, I will summarise the book.
Improving wellbeing scales
Dr Caspar Kaiser and Dr Michael Plant sparked lively discussion at the latest of the Wellbeing Research Centre’s Seminar Series after sharing results of their latest pilot study assessing how subjective wellbeing measurement might be improved.
Their work, supported by the Happier Lives Institute, examines the neutrality, comparability and linearity of individual wellbeing scales: three issues that need to be met in successfully implementing wellbeing policy.
Watch the full presentation on the Centre’s YouTube channel.
