Research consortium
Our research consortium covers over sixty countries. And I wish it further grows.
"Live Better" project:
The large cross-cultural project in progress.People across cultures hold diverse notions on the ideal type of well-being and on how a societal development may help achieve it. However, empirical studies into these two topics and their interaction are scant. We currently address these research gaps.
The first wave of the "Live Better" study is over. We collected data from seventy countries. This data helps us create mappings of “ideal types of well-being” and of “folk theories of societal development”. We also investigate psychological processes behind - regulatory focus, values, psychological motives, and cultural models of selfhoods.
Please feel invited to join us in the second wave of the "Live Better" project. We launch it in September 2024.
Your involvement in our project can range from data collection in your country to all more advanced activities that researchers normally do, e.g., theoretical contributions, data analyses, manuscripts’ writing. Teams from all countries are welcome, but we are particularly interested in collaborations with countries currently underrepresented in psychological science, this is, with teams from Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe and non-Confucian Asia. Teams from large multi-cultural countries, like India or Nigeria, are particularly encouraged to join us.
For more, please contact me at kuba@krys.pl
I plan we run data collections every 12-24 months. Please feel invited to join us any moment convenient for you.
Past large-scale projects:
"Good Development" project:
The "Good Development" (GD) study was launched in the beginning of 2020 and halted soon after due to pandemics. In it, we targetted similar problems to the "Live Better" project.
We are currently describing our findings from the GD study. If you want to join our research efforts, please join the "Live Better" project.
"Happiness Meanders" project:
In the "Happiness Meanders" project we collected data across fifty countries to study family happiness and ideal levels of happiness. Additionally, we collected data on frequency of experienced and expressed emotions to study "societal emotional environments", and on cultural models of selfhoods to better understand the interaction between self-construals and well-being.
We have published almost ten papers based on this data. Further analyses are still in progress.
"Smile" project:
In the "Smile" project, we collected data from 44 cultures to study social perception of smiling individuals. We found that in some cultures, smiling individuals are perceived as less intelligent than non-smiling ones. For more, please see this paper.
Additionally, we employed this dataset to study effects of gender (in)equality on social perception of men and women. We found that the more gender egalitarian a society is, the more favourable the perception of men is. For more, please see this paper.
This project is finished.