Viewing archives for Dr. Michael Plant

World Happiness Report 2025: People are much kinder than we expect, research shows

Belief in the kindness of others is much more closely tied to happiness than previously thought, according to findings published today (20 March) in World Happiness Report 2025.

Global evidence on the perceived and actual return of lost wallets shows that people are much too pessimistic about the kindness of their communities compared to reality. Actual rates of wallet return are around twice as high as people expect.

Believing that others are willing to return your lost wallet is also shown to be a strong predictor of population happiness: Nordic nations once again top the ranking of the world’s happiest countries, but they also rank among the top places for expected and actual return of lost wallets.

The findings are published today to mark the UN’s International Day of Happiness. They are powered by Gallup World Poll data and other sources, including the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll, and analysed by leading experts in wellbeing science.

Further results published in this 13^th edition of the World Happiness Report, focused on the theme of “caring and sharing”, include:

Sharing meals with others is strongly linked with wellbeing across all global regions, but the number of people dining alone in the United States has increased 53% over the past two decades.

Household size is closely linked to happiness. Four to five people living together enjoy the highest levels of happiness in Mexico and Europe, but many people in Europe are living on their own.

In 2023, 19% of young adults across the world reported having no one they could count on for social support. This is a 39% increase compared to 2006.

Deaths of despair are less frequent in countries where benevolent acts are more frequent.

Declining happiness and social trust in the US and parts of Europe combine to explain the rise and direction of political polarisation and anti-system votes.

The cost-effectiveness of charities varies dramatically. Some charities are hundreds of times better at increasing happiness per dollar than others.

World Happiness Report 2025 also contains a ranking of the world’s happiest countries. Finland leads the world in happiness for the eighth year in a row, with Finns reporting an average score of 7.736 (out of 10) when asked to evaluate their lives.

Costa Rica (6^th) and Mexico (10^th) both enter the top 10 for the first time, while continued upward trends for countries such as Lithuania (16^th), Slovenia (19^th) and Czechia (20^th) underline the convergence of happiness levels between Eastern, Central and Western Europe.

The United States (24^th) falls to its lowest-ever position, with the United Kingdom (23^rd) reporting its lowest average life evaluation since the 2017 report.

Country rankings are based on a three-year average of each population’s average assessment of their quality of life. Interdisciplinary experts from economics, psychology, sociology and beyond then seek to explain the variations across countries and over time using factors such as GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, a sense of freedom, generosity and perceptions of corruption.

These factors help to explain the differences across nations, while the rankings themselves are based solely on the answers people give when asked to rate their own lives.

Lara B. Aknin, professor of social psychology at Simon Fraser University, and an editor of the World Happiness Report, said: “Human happiness is driven by our relationships with others. Investing in positive social connections and engaging in benevolent actions are both matched by greater happiness.”

John F. Helliwell, an economist at the University of British Columbia, a founding editor of the World Happiness Report, and a long-time lost wallet researcher, said: “The wallet data are so convincing because they confirm that people are much happier living where they think people care about each other. The wallet dropping experiments confirm the reality of these perceptions, even if they are everywhere too pessimistic.”

Jon Clifton, CEO of Gallup, said: “Happiness isn’t just about wealth or growth — it’s about trust, connection and knowing people have your back. This year’s report proves we underestimate how kind the world really is. If we want stronger communities and economies, we must invest in what truly matters: each other.”

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, professor of economics at the University of Oxford, and an editor of the World Happiness Report, said: “This year’s report pushes us to look beyond traditional determinants like health and wealth. It turns out that sharing meals and trusting others are even stronger predictors of wellbeing than expected. In this era of social isolation and political polarisation we need to find ways to bring people around the table again — doing so is critical for our individual and collective wellbeing.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and a founding editor of the World Happiness Report, said: “The findings in this year’s World Happiness Report reconfirm a fundamental truth: happiness is rooted in trust, kindness, and social connection. It is up to us as virtuous individuals and citizens to translate this vital truth into positive action, thereby fostering peace, civility, and wellbeing in communities worldwide.”

The World Happiness Report is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an independent editorial board.

The editorial board consists of John F. Helliwell (University of British Columbia), Richard Layard (London School of Economics and Political Science), Jeffrey D. Sachs (Columbia University), Jan-Emmanuel De Neve (University of Oxford), Lara B. Aknin (Simon Fraser University), and Shun Wang (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University).

Read the report in full at worldhappiness.report.

Giving to others: How to convert your money into greater happiness for others

Michael Plant, Joel McGuire, Samuel Dupret, Ryan Dwyer, and Ben Stewart

Abstract

We hope that if you’re reading this, you’re not just interested in world happiness, you want to do something about it. But, what can you do? This chapter focuses on something many of us already do and nearly all of us can do: give to charity. Each year, over a billion people donate more than $500 billion to charity, driven in large part by a desire to help others.

However, there are many worthy problems in the world, our resources are limited, and we don’t want to waste our money. So, how can you get real change for your dollar? More specifically, how can you make the biggest difference to world happiness with what you have to spare?

People say “money can’t buy happiness”. At the Happier Lives Institute, we reject that claim but with a twist. We show that money can buy happiness for other people and we highlight the ‘best buys’ that have been identified so far. To do this, we compare the impact of charities using wellbeing-years (WELLBYs) per dollar, a method we will explain in due course.

Any views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation, agency, or program of the United Nations.

Top tips from a happiness expert

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.

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.