Are You Flourishing? This Global Study Has Surprising Takeaways

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2025

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Are you flourishing? It’s a more understated metric than happiness, but it can provide a multidimensional assessment of our quality of life. Victor Counted, an associate professor of psychology at Regent University and a member of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, joins host Rachel Feltman to review the first wave of results from the five-year, 22-country Global Flourishing Study. Counted reflects on the difficulty of applying a universal concept to varied cultural contexts and ways that we can control our own flourishing. Recommended reading: Read the study See an article about the study co-authored by Counted Societies with Little Money Are among the Happiest on Earth Tell us what you think! Take our survey for the chance to win some SciAm swag! http://sciencequickly.com/survey E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman. Our show is edited by Alex Sugiura with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Here's the truth about AI.
0:02.0	AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into.
0:05.0	ServiceNow puts AI to work for people across your business,
0:09.0	removing friction and frustration for your employees,
0:12.0	supercharging productivity for your developers,
0:15.0	providing intelligent tools for your service agents to make customers happier.
0:19.0	All built into a single platform you can
0:21.9	use right now. That's why the world works with ServiceNow. Visit ServiceNow.com
0:27.8	slash UK slash AI for people. For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman.
0:43.3	How are you doing today, listeners? Would you say that you're flourishing? I'm guessing you probably
0:59.3	wouldn't unless you have a particularly fluid vocabulary. But researchers are increasingly focused on the
1:06.0	idea of human flourishing, a multifaceted measurement that aims to take a holistic look at our collective
1:12.2	well-being. Basically, humans who are flourishing aren't just happy. They have lives that are good
1:18.6	across the board. And scientists want to get better at measuring that so they can figure out what
1:23.6	factors contribute to this desirable state. Today's guest is Victor Counted, an associate professor of psychology at Regent University
1:31.9	in Virginia.
1:33.3	He's also a faculty affiliate at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University and
1:38.3	part of the team behind the global flourishing study, a five-year longitudinal survey of more
1:43.6	than 200,000 individuals from 22 countries.
1:48.1	Thank you so much for coming on to chat with us today.
1:50.9	Thank you. I'm really honored to, you know, be here.
1:54.0	So tell me about the concept of flourishing. What does it mean to researchers?
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Scientific American, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Scientific American and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.