What is life improvement science?
Life Improvement Science (LIS) is an emerging transdisciplinary research field that investigates how we can help people do more good in better ways (well-doing).
We seek to understand the psychological and socio-cultural mechanisms of well-doing in tandem with developing tools and interventions that help people grow, live a meaningful life, and make valuable contributions.
Our ultimate goal is to promote the long-term well-doing of humanity. If you would like to learn more about LIS, we recommend this encyclopedia article and this position paper.
The first Life Improvement Science conference will be held online between June 9 to June 13, 2021. The goals of this conference are:
Build a supportive community of researchers and practitioners interested in life improvement science and its applications.
Work towards a shared understanding of the most important open questions of the field and how they can be answered.
Provide an overview of some of the most important research that has been done in different areas of life improvement science.
Foster intellectual exchange and collaboration across different fields.
The conference events will include invited big-picture talks about promising approaches to life improvement science and its future directions, interactive discussions, the collaborative curation of our field's most important open questions, contributed presentations of recent work, opportunities to collaborate on developing new ideas and establishing life improvement science, structured networking sessions, the founding meeting of the life improvement science society, and plenty of opportunities to get to know each other and have a good time. We invite you to shape the LIS conference by submitting proposals for any talk you would like to give and any kind of event you would like to organize.
If you would like to receive the call for submissions and other updates about the LIS conference, just send an email to LIS-on@tuebingen.mpg.de and we will keep you posted.
What should Life Improvement Science focus on?
What are the most important open questions and problems that research in Life Improvement Science should address? We propose a tentative list of 20 grand challenges. We would love to hear your thoughts on this proposal. Each grand challenge has its own page for comments and discussion, linked on the left. You can also propose additional challenges and discuss others' proposals here.
Nominate research gols or questions
Please click here to nominate one or more research goals or questions that you deem most important for the long-term flourishing of humanity. One or two sentences may be sufficient to express your idea. If you would like to get a better sense of what kinds of things we are looking for, you can take a look at what others have already proposed.
GRAND CHALLENGE
Develop a set of tools or interventions that can collectively increase the intentional well-doing of people from a given population by at least two-thirds of a standard deviation.