Thanks to our chat with happiness expert Gretchen Rubin, we know that the experience looks different for everyone — what helps one person feel joy may not have the same effect on someone else. Now, a team of happiness and methodology experts is about to launch the largest study of its kind digging into precisely that.
To conduct the Global Happiness Megastudy, the team plans to partner with over 100 other researchers and recruit 30,000 volunteers from around the globe in the hopes of revealing the secret to living a joyful life. Specifically, the experts aim to identify “which happiness strategies have the strongest impact on mood worldwide, and which strategies work best for which people,” per the project website.
As of Oct. 2024, highlighted countries have at least one research partner.
“Our goal is for this to be the largest, most comprehensive, most diverse experiment on happiness ever conducted,” Elizabeth Dunn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, told The Guardian. “It’s like the Avengers: Many of the top happiness researchers from around the world have come together to join forces.”
This isn’t exactly a novel topic to dive into. Prior studies have suggested that several factors hold true: we generally feel happiest in the morning, when we earn a high income, and (to no one’s surprise) when we have our furry friends by our side — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to research on contentment.
But the idea for the new megastudy was sparked after members of the team identified ways in which the current literature falls short, and created a plan to overcome those obstacles. For one, the researchers saw a lack of scientific evidence for many commonly recommended happiness interventions.
They also noticed that most of these studies only surveyed “WEIRD” people — those who are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. That leaves a gaping hole in the existing research, and ignores potentially effective strategies practiced by individuals who don’t fall under this category.
“And one other limitation is that studies involving different populations often use different ways to measure happiness at any given time,” Harry Clelland, team member and postdoctoral research fellow at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, told PositiveNews. “We want to bundle all of this together in a grandiose study, testing loads and loads of different interventions on a universal happiness measure.”
So far, the researchers are on the right track. As of December 2024, they’d received proposals from over 1,000 scientists in more than 70 countries across six continents (missing only Antarctica), and have narrowed them down to seven intervention categories. The 24 strategies include yoga, social interactions, and even chats with AI companions.
The team was intentional about selecting strategies that take under 25 minutes and are affordable, scalable, and easy for participants to do. “All of the interventions can be done at home, people don’t need anyone watching them or helping them,” Barnabás Szászi, a principal investigator on the project, emphasized to The Guardian. “That was a very conscious decision on our part.”
Now comes the meat of the task: partnering with researchers to recruit the tens of thousands of volunteers. Each participant will be assigned to either an intervention or a control group, and the team plans to begin pilot testing this month. If all goes well, they’ll submit their first registered report to a prestigious journal in April 2025.
“It’s definitely daunting, but I’m really, really excited about it,” Clelland told PositiveNews.
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