Our Grants

(Consortium of Funders)

The Global Flourishing Study is a longitudinal research study being carried out in collaboration between scholars at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard and Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, and in partnership with Gallup and the Center for Open Science. The study will involve data collection for approximately 240,000 participants, from 22 geographically and culturally diverse countries, with nationally representative samples within each country, and with annual data collection on the same panel of individuals, with a rich set of survey items, for five waves of data. This $43.4 million initiative is being supported by a consortium of funders including the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton Religion Trust, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the Fetzer Institute, the Paul Foster Family Foundation, the Wellbeing for Planet Earth Foundation, the Well Being Trust, and the David & Carol Myers Foundation. The study will have the potential to transform and dramatically expand our knowledge concerning human flourishing.

• Founding body: John Templeton Foundation
• Grant ID 62731
• Project Leaders: Tyler VanderWeele & Matthew Lee 
• Grant Amount $ 1,942,594
• Funding Area: Character Virtue Development
• Department: Character Virtue Development

The proliferation of conceptualizations and measures of love has limited progress toward assessing the effects of love on a multiplicity of well-being outcomes and on the ability to assess the determinants of love across settings. We propose to employ long-standing philosophical and theological traditions on love, including non-Western traditions, to synthesize current knowledge, advance the interdisciplinary field, and develop a new set of conceptually grounded measures.

Aided by this synthesis, a lexical analysis of love across cultures, and a comprehensive review of existing survey instruments on love, our measures for the assessment of different forms of love across contexts will help initiate a formal epidemiology of love. The specific construct that will be examined related to love is the “disposition toward desiring the good of the other” where the intentionally ambiguous phrase “the good of the other” may itself be understood either as “good for the other” or as the “good constituted by the other.” We will refer to the former as “contributory love” (desiring the good of the other) and the latter as “unitive love” (desiring union with the other) (cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II.26.4).

Guided by our interdisciplinary Advisory Board, we will collect data on responses to the proposed items in a variety of settings in order to assess their psychometric properties. Our interpersonal love items will be classified according to (i) unitive and contributory, (ii) giving and receiving, and (iii) parent-child, spouse, friend, God, neighbor, stranger, and enemy. We will assess the effects of love on outcomes and the determinants of love across settings. Our measures will cover a broader array of understandings of love found in the philosophical, theological, and social science literatures than previous measures. As a result, we expect enhanced ability to predict well-being outcomes, which would help move the interdisciplinary field beyond the current impasse.

(John Templeton Foundation)

We have received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to study the role of religious communities in promoting human flourishing. The research supported by the grant will extend the current knowledge base to a broader range of well-being and flourishing outcomes beyond health, and to countries outside of the United States, by using rigorous methodological approaches arising out of causal inference and large longitudinal data sets.

(Aetna Inc.)

Together with the SHINE program at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, our well-being research is supported by a research agreement with Aetna Inc. to implement a well-being assessment and promotion program for Aetna employees and to develop data resources for the study of well-being in the workplace.

(Templeton World Charity Foundation)

Together with Man Yee Ho (City University of Hong Kong) and Everett Worthington (Program affiliate and emeritus faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University), we have received a grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to study and promote forgiveness around the world and evaluate the effects of a forgiveness workbook intervention in a randomized trial. The funded work is global in scope and includes promotion and research efforts in Columbia, South Africa, Ukraine, China, and Indonesia, ranging from forgiveness measurement, to forgiveness awareness, to intervention evaluation.