The Largest Study of Human Flourishing Ever Conducted Just Put Play at the Top of the Chart
Harvard asked 200,000 people across 22 countries what makes a life go well. The answer, it turns out, looks a lot like recess.
The following post is by Lauren Sundstrom, COO of the National Institute for Play.
The Global Flourishing Study co-directed by Harvard University and Baylor University in partnership with Gallup is among the most ambitious empirical investigations of human flourishing ever conducted.
It tracks 200,000 participants across 22 countries asking what conditions allow people to truly thrive.
Not just report adequate life satisfaction.
Not just survive.
Flourish.
A longitudinal sub-study drilled down to adolescents specifically, measuring which school-based practices most reliably moved the needle on their flourishing scores.
The researchers tested dozens of interventions and activities including character programs, gratitude practices, physical activity, mentoring, nature time, anti-bullying lessons, career discussions, and the arts.
The results were unambiguous, and for those of us in play science, not entirely surprising.
What Topped the Chart
Laughing with other students produced a 22% increase in flourishing scores — the single highest-impact practice of everything measured.
That finding held across 22 countries, spanning vastly different cultures, economies, and educational systems. Of everything researchers tested, the one thing that moved the needle most reliably everywhere was laughter.
As Victor Hugo wrote,
“Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.”
Summing the top of the list:
A sense of playfulness came in second, at a 17% increase.
Activities that strengthen social relationships registered an 11% increase.
Teachers incorporating humor in class made a significant impact.
Unstructured free time with peers also moved the needle.
Play. Connection. Levity. Joy.
At the top of a rigorous, peer-reviewed dataset measuring human flourishing in young people.
Play Is Hiding Further Down the Chart, Too
Here is what we want you to notice when you look at that graphic: play does not only show up at the top.
It is implicit almost everywhere:
Physical activity: play in its most embodied form.
Active learning where students move around: play’s kinesthetic cousin.
Free time with students at school: unstructured play by another name.
Group work: when it is genuinely collaborative rather than anxious and competitive, it carries the relational texture of play.
Spending time in nature: the open, exploratory setting play was built for.
Outdoor learning: play’s natural habitat, where curiosity leads.
Social interactions with teachers and staff: the attuned, trusting relationships that let play thrive.
Even class projects that feel meaningful to students tap the same motivational circuitry that drives play: autonomy, curiosity, the sense that what you are doing is genuinely yours.
When you add up all the practices in this chart that carry the hallmarks of play-- including intrinsic motivation, social connection, physical engagement, and agency-- you are not looking at a list of discrete interventions. You are looking at a portrait of what a play-rich environment actually produces.
The researchers measured them separately. The science of play recognizes them as expressions of the same underlying reality.
Two Other Consequential Findings
The broader Global Flourishing Study surfaced two findings that deserve to be read alongside it.
The first is a historical reversal.
For the first time in documented data, young adults are reporting lower wellbeing than older populations. This is not a small or ambiguous shift. The expected pattern that wellbeing rises with age and experience has inverted for the current generation of young people. They are starting lower and, in many cases, not catching up.
The second finding is quieter, but also unsettling.
Findings show a negative relationship between national wealth and citizens’ sense of meaning and purpose. Wealthier nations, on average, report less of a felt sense that their lives matter. More comfort, less meaning. More resources, less flourishing.
This is not an argument against resources.
Access to play, safe spaces to play, and the conditions that make play possible remain deeply unequal — and closing that gap is essential work.
What the data invites us to examine is what we prioritize alongside resources: whether the systems we build, even well-resourced ones, are making room for the connection, agency, and joy that allow people to truly flourish.
Taken together, these findings point toward something the science of play has been documenting for decades: that the things most reliably associated with a life well-lived — connection, agency, joy, purpose, the freedom to engage on one’s own terms — are precisely what modern life, in its most optimized and pressured forms, is tending to crowd out first.
What This Means
When we saw laughter at the top of that chart, we didn’t feel vindicated.
We felt something closer to relief, and a little grief.
Relief that the data finally said, at scale, what we have watched play do in individual lives for decades.
Grief that it took a study of 200,000 people across 22 countries to make the case that children need to laugh together.
We are not short on interventions. Schools are full of programs and lessons. Many of them appear in this chart. Most of them, the data suggest, do produce results.
What produces the largest results is a culture with:
A classroom where humor is welcome.
A school day that includes genuine free time.
A faculty of adults who take their work seriously but not themselves.
Together, a community of young people who feel playful together, who laugh together, who are allowed to be a little unserious in a world that presses them to be very serious very early.
This is not a soft finding.
At NIFPlay, we have spent decades making the scientific case for play as a biological necessity — not a reward, not a break from the real work, but the mechanism through which human beings, at every age, build the internal resources that allow them to flourish.
The Global Flourishing Study, in its scale and rigor, has now added compelling evidence that this is true for young people in schools, measured across tens of thousands of lives.
The highest-leverage thing a school can do for student wellbeing is not another program.
It is to make room for play.
Onward in play,
-Lauren
At the National Institute for Play, we champion play as a public health necessity across the lifespan.
The Global Flourishing Study made the case at scale. Now we want to help you make it in your own life.
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Curious, what is the definition of play? Is it actually anything that brings one joy?
This is such an important reminder that play is not simply an activity; instead, it is the condition that allows so many aspects of humanity to flourish and emerge. What especially struck me is that the findings highlight outcomes like laughter, connection, agency, and meaningful relationships. These are also the very conditions in which children's thinking becomes visible.
After more than 35 years observing children, I have come to believe that play does more than support wellbeing. It gives children the time and freedom to develop theories, revisit ideas, negotiate meaning with others, and construct understanding that cannot be rushed. If we truly want schools to cultivate humanity, perhaps we need to stop asking how play supports learning and start asking how learning can better protect play.