Viewing archives for Cause And Effect

2504 | Mapping adolescent wellbeing: developmental network shifts from early to middle adolescence in 24 countries

Wanying Zhou, Jose Marquez, Leoni Boyle and Laura Taylor

This study applied psychometric network analysis to examine the structure of adolescent wellbeing across 49 indicators of subjective and psychological wellbeing in a large international sample (N = 6,445; ages 11-18) from 38 schools across 24 countries. We estimated networks separately for early (11-14) and middle (15-18) adolescents to assess developmental change. The overall network was moderately dense and highly stable. Overall life satisfaction, satisfaction with student life, and optimism about the future emerged as central nodes. While the global network structure was similar across age groups, older adolescents showed increased centrality for negative affect (“bad”), relaxed mood, and future optimism, and decreased centrality for current life evaluation. These findings underscore the integrated and developmentally shifting nature of adolescent wellbeing, and offer practical insights for monitoring, intervention, and policy. Results highlight the value of developmentally sensitive strategies that support both present experience and future-oriented resilience across diverse youth populations.

Moral Uncertainty, Proportionality and Bargaining

Patrick Kaczmarek, Harry R. Lloyd, and Michael Plant

Abstract

Besides disagreeing about how much one should donate to charity, moral theories also disagree about where one should donate. In many cases, one intuitively attractive option is to split your donations across all of the charities that are recommended by theories in which you have positive credence, with each charity’s share being proportional to your credence in the theories that recommend it. Despite the fact that something like this approach is already widely used by real-world philanthropists to distribute billions of dollars, it is not supported by any account of handling decisions under moral uncertainty that has been proposed thus far in the literature. This paper develops a new bargaining-based approach that honors the proportionality intuition. We also show how this approach has several advantages over the best alternative proposals.

The Happiest Place on Earth

Slate

Shortly after I got home, I took a cramped and overpriced train up to Oxford, where the data scientists behind the World Happiness Report work. There, I met Jan-Emmanuel de Neve, a professor at Oxford University’s Harris Manchester College and expert in what makes life worth living. I felt I had got to the bottom of why Finnish people were happy, but now I wanted to, bluntly, know whether we were all doomed never to be as happy as our friends in the Nordics.

Work and Wellbeing: Maximising the wellbeing of tomorrow’s workforce

Alexandra Kirienko, Kate Laffan, and Laura M. Giurge

Abstract

People spend between 21% and 40% of their waking hours at work, making it an important domain of life to consider when trying to improve wellbeing (Kantak et al., 1992; Thompson, 2016). In addition to its inherent value to workers themselves, wellbeing is key to organisational success (Nielsen et al., 2017), with research showing that happier employees are more productive (Oswald et al., 2015) and less likely to quit (Pelly, 2023). Employee wellbeing is also positively associated with company profitability and stock market performance (De Neve et al., 2023).

No one has office friends anymore. Why that’s bad news for employers

Fast Company

The impact of lost workplace friendships is often underestimated—especially in discussions about employee turnover. While it’s commonly believed that people mostly quit jobs in response to poor managers, Oxford professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve has found that workers quit not because of leadership alone, but because they lack a sense of belonging with their teams. This reframes the issue: workplace friendships aren’t just about socializing—they’re critical for retention and sustainable business success.

2502 | Scaling the Easterlin Paradox: measuring life events on stretching happiness measures

Charlie Harrison

Are people any happier than in the past? Despite rapid rises to GDP, average life satisfaction in various countries has not changed. Yet, richer people are happier than poorer people, and richer countries are happier than poorer countries. This is the Easterlin Paradox. Researchers typically explain the paradox by suggesting that these higher levels of wealth raise our expectations, preventing us from getting any happier (the hedonic treadmill). The alternative explanation is that our wellbeing is increasing, but any improvements are being hidden by stricter reporting (the rescaling hypothesis). This second explanation has received little attention and researchers typically assume that no rescaling occurs. This paper proposes a new method to quantify rescaling effects. It analyses the short-run effects of five life major events on self-reported happiness, and how these effects have changed over time: a stretched reporting scale would result in falling absolute effect sizes. I test this idea using German panel data with ~650,000 observations (1991–2022). As the rescaling hypothesis predicts, the average effect of life events has fallen by ~35%. Due to scale expansion, self-reported happiness may be underreported by up to 50%. In other words, people may be living happier lives than in the past.

Why are young adults in the English-speaking world so unhappy?

Financial Times

One of the most striking but under-discussed insights from this year’s World Happiness Report was that the marked worsening in young adult mental health over the past decade is primarily, if not exclusively, an Anglosphere phenomenon.

The share of young adults regularly experiencing stress and anger has risen sharply over the past 15 years in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. But it has been largely stable elsewhere in the west, according to detailed data from the Gallup World Poll used in the report.

25% of young Americans aged 18 to 24 eat every meal alone—‘a virtual doubling of what it was two decades ago,’ expert says

CNBC

They found that in 2023, 25% of 18-to 24-year-olds ate all three meals alone the previous day.

“That’s a virtual doubling of what it was two decades ago,” De Neve says, and it’s to the detriment of their mental health. The number of meals shared with others is “as predictive of their life satisfaction, essentially their overall well-being” as their employment status or relative income, he adds.

Health lifestyles at work: availability, barriers and participation in workplace wellness

William Fleming

Abstract

The workplace is an ever more popular site for health promotion, but remains an underexplored factor in health lifestyles theory; whereas, sociological accounts of workplace wellness typically view it critically as managerial control. These perspectives both miss that participation in workplace wellness may constitute socially structured health lifestyles. Addressing this gap, I extend a theoretical model to bring together health lifestyles theory and critical wellbeing studies. To support the model, I provide an empirical account of the availability of, participation in, and barriers to workplace wellness. I analyse a multi-organisation sample of British workers (N = 27,919 individuals; 143 organisations) to reveal that engagement with wellness has distinct associations with multiple social factors (class, race and gender), job factors (level, contract, working hours and commute), and organisational context. Theories of health lifestyles ought to include work characteristics and managerial regimes, and critiques of wellness must analyse how social position affects workers’ experiences of wellness.

The growth and collapse of autonomy at work

Redzo Mujcic and Andrew Oswald

Abstract

Humans hate being monitored. Autonomy is prized—including by research scientists. Yet little is known about a fundamental issue in the modern world: What is happening to job autonomy in today’s workplaces as people move from youth on to middle age and then on to older ages? It would be natural to believe that individuals in the second half of their careers would be the senior ones with high autonomy. We provide evidence that such a belief is wrong. This study uses longitudinal data on hundreds of thousands of randomly sampled individuals, in three rich countries, who are followed through their working lives (n > 400,000). Workers’ feelings of job autonomy trace out a smooth concave parabola, increasing up to midlife, until approximately the surprisingly early age of 40, and then collapsing over the ensuing twenty to 30 y of a person’s working life. This is apparently not an illusion. We show that objective measures of autonomy—signified by managerial and supervisory job titles, for example—behave in a matching, hump-shaped way. As a further check, consistent qualitative evidence is given: a survey we ran asking managers about their experiences. We believe this paper’s results represent a foundational, essentially unknown, and intrinsically cross-disciplinary puzzle.