Different Definitions of Flourishing Disagree on Who's Flourishing (Hone et al., 2014)

The Question

Positive psychology has at least four competing definitions of flourishing. When you apply them to the same people, do they agree?

What They Found

• Across the same New Zealand sample, the four definitions tagged 24% to 47% of adults as flourishing, an almost two-fold spread driven entirely by how flourishing was operationalized
• Agreement between any two definitions on which individuals counted as flourishing was moderate at best, meaning the same person could be flourishing under one model and not under another
• Definitions that required scoring high on every pillar (like Seligman's PERMA) were stricter; definitions that allowed an aggregate score (closer to the Brief Inventory of Thriving style) were more inclusive
• Across all four definitions, flourishing predicted better self-rated health, lower depression, and stronger life satisfaction, so the construct is real even when the cutoffs disagree

How They Tested It

• Drew on a representative survey of 10,009 New Zealand adults who completed measures relevant to all four flourishing frameworks
• Applied each of four published operational definitions (Huppert and So, Diener et al., Keyes, and Seligman's PERMA-style criteria) to the same dataset
• Calculated prevalence under each definition and the overlap between classifications person by person
• Tested how each flourishing classification related to health, depression, and life satisfaction outcomes

Caveats

• The sample is a single national cohort, so prevalence figures shouldn't be read as global rates of flourishing
• The study compares cutoffs and category boundaries, not the underlying validity of any one scale; later validation work like Su, Tay and Diener's BIT paper took on the construct question more directly
• Findings are cross-sectional, so they describe how definitions disagree at one moment, not whether one definition tracks change better over time