Positive Safety

Positive Safety Ilona Suojanen and Neil Thin "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself " (Franklin D. Roosevelt 1933). Abstract Safety is normally understood as an ‘avoidance’ goal, the objective being to reduce risks and harms. Can it also be understood more positively, as an ‘approach’ goal? If so, what would that positive motivation entail, and what benefits might it bring? The world has never been safer, yet levels of stress and worry are increasing. Governments are spending heavily fighting crimes and hazards but in addition to that, we should focus on promoting aspects that make people feel safe. If the focus is on threats and crime, then the focus is on the absence of safety, not on the presence of feeling safe. And feeling unsafe is intrinsically bad even if that fear sometimes leads to sensible preventive action. Feeling safe, on the other hand, is intrinsically good. Sometimes it is instrumentally harmful to feel unrealistically safe. But, there is also some plausible evidence in support of the idea that we can make places safer by making people feel safer in them. We propose here a ‘Positive Safety Lens’ (PSL) as a complement to traditional ‘avoidance’ approaches to safety. We identify seven attributes of the PSL and discuss their potential benefits for safety research and safety promotion. Keywords Positive safety · Positive safety lens (PSL) · Perceptions of safety · Safety research I. Suojanen (B) Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] N. Thin School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 29 G. Jacobs et al. (eds.), International Security Management, Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42523-4_3 30 I. Suojanen and N. Thin 1 Introduction Why is it that the world has never been safer (Pinker 2018; Cohen and Zenko 2019), yet fear seems to be on the rise everywhere? (Gardner 2008; Glassner 1999). What can we do about those fears, and are they an unwanted by-product of the safety culture? (Füredi 1997/2002; Smith and Linke 2009). Roosevelt’s call for national courage in response to the Great Depression is one of the most iconic political quotes of all time. It is also an example of hyperbole, which worked in that context but is more questionable as an all-purpose maxim. Fear has its uses, and lives can be enhanced through judicious deployment of realistic fears in the pursuit of adequate protection. Still, a softer version of Roosevelt’s warning remains valid. We should be brave within reason and reject safety cultures in which precautionary pursuit of ‘total safety’ not only inhibits efficiency and freedom but adds new risks that make people feel unsafe. We must complement the “precautionary principle” (avoiding dangerous risks; Goklany 2001) with the “proactionary principle” (taking reasonable risks in pursuit of better lives; Fuller and Lipinska 2014). Safety is intrinsically a negative concept, which highlights retreat and precaution, focusing the mind on things that might go wrong, rather than on things that actu- ally go right. It is strongly associated with the psychology of “avoidance goals”— that require preventive action and instil fear—as opposed to “approach goals” that inspire positive motivation and confidence (Moskowitz and Grant 2009). A moment’s thought should tell us that precautionary perfectionist rhetoric such as ‘total safety’ or ‘do no harm’ are not just utopian but potentially harmful kinds of ‘fundamen- talism’ (Long 2012) if they lead to over cautiousness, wasteful preventive measures, or exaggerated fears. Just as perfectionism in the pursuit of excellence can turn toxic, the same is true of risk aversion in the pursuit of safety (Sirois and Molnar 2016). But, can we salvage something more positive from the promotion of safety by using a Positive Safety Lens? Safety is often listed as a key element for a sustainable community and an impor- tant contributor to people’s wellbeing. Perceived safety is assumed to be good for wellbeing, and perceived unsafety bad for us (Allik and Kearns 2017). Improving individual lives requires societal improvements, and the safety of citizens is a legiti- mate goal for public policy (Ben-Arieh and Shimon 2014). Safety concerns are high among citizens’ priorities in all European countries, and levels of stress and worry have recently reached a new high (Gallup 2017). They are triggered by worrying developments around climate change and refugee flows but also social reactions like polarisation and radicalisation (Europeans’ attitudes towards security 2017). While recent studies have shown that life in Western countries has never been safer (OECD 2017), people’s perceived safety hasn’t necessarily increased (Lee and McGovern 2014). This is called the reassurance gap (Millie and Herrington 2005), and closing it is an important societal challenge. Therefore, alternative and innovative ways to tackle insecurities and fears are needed. Current research on safety in public spaces is largely characterised by a negative view, namely the absence of safety and a nearly exclusive focus on threats and risks. Positive Safety 31 Safety is often defined as an antonym of risk (Aven 2009) or the absence of accidents and incidents (Hollnagel 2014a). This makes safety indirect, as it is “defined by what happens when it is absent or missing”, or in other words, by a lack of safety (Hollnagel 2014a, p. 22). All this means that safety is defined as a ‘double negative’— the absence of feeling unsafe and does not include the positive sensations of safety itself (Brands and Schwanen 2014). This perspective risks a biased analysis of the important concept of safety by limiting the scope of potentially relevant approaches to safety. In particular, this focus on a lack of safety often leads to the development of ‘objective’ solutions insufficiently incorporating subjective experiences, like risk mitigation through the development of smart devices such as sensor-based alarms, which subtract from users the feeling of being responsible and in control. A focus on threats and risks also reduces the network of potential safety providers to those who are experts in threat mitigation (e.g. police, fire brigade) and might underestimate the relevance of contextual and social influence factors on safety perceptions. Human safety should not be limited to the “negative dimension of the absence of violent conflict in social organisations” (Webb and Wills-Herrera 2012, p. 4). Studies on safety focus on or measure things that go wrong, in order to give reliable information for safety management. The traditional approach to safety and studying safety has been to find a cause, in order to explain an incident and provide suggestions regarding how to fix procedures or outcomes. Therefore, when studying safety, the focus has mainly been on looking into situations when something has gone wrong and what has caused it, in order to eliminate it and prevent future accidents (Schröder- Hinrichs et al. 2012). Not only should the underlying assumption of causality be questioned (Hollnagel 2014a) but if risks and the absence of accidents are the sole focus of study, then the positive experience of safety is pushed to the background. Also, as Hollnagel (2014a, p. 22) questions, isn’t it more scientific to study something that exists, rather than something that doesn’t? Is workplace safety really only a matter of avoiding accidents, or can it more positively be conceived as a social climate in which everyone feels co-responsible for safety, and enjoys the freedoms and relaxation that optimal safety provides? These considerations also lead to another factor in safety philosophy: is it better to think of people primarily as actual or potential victims, or as responsible agents who collaborate to achieve a good balance between safety and freedom? For example, safety theorist Hans Boutellier (2004) argued in his book The Safety Utopia that while modern society has made safety a central concern, it has also struggled to balance this with other values, most notably ‘vitality’ or ‘freedom’. Recognising that freedom requires personal agency, the Netherlands for example, saw an important cultural shift in the late twentieth century from a ‘victimhood’ criminological lens to a ‘responsibilisation’ lens recognising people as individual and collective agents of crime and safety. 32 I. Suojanen and N. Thin 2 Proposing a New Theoretical Approach: The Positive Safety Lens The ‘Positive Safety Lens’, PSL, is a new theoretical approach to safety that combines seven different attributes, which all aim to understand safety as a positive experience. These attributes are; (1) Subjective; (2) Present; (3) Holistic; (4) Optimal; (5) Posi- tive; (6) Supportive; (7) Sustainable. These attributes are explained in Table 1 and compared with the traditional approach to safety. Further discussion of them is avail- able in Suojanen (2018). The remainder of this paper elaborates on the three aspects, which we see as most crucial and most distinctive to the PSL approach, namely: positivity, subjectivity and optimising. What kind of research approach is needed in order for the PSL to be effective? We believe this will require multi-disciplinary and mixed-method approaches. Safety, like any emotion and human experience, is a complex system and a combination of not only e.g. attention, language processing, memory, hormones and arousal (Blanchette 2013) but also factors on the level of the individual, group, community and country. A multidisciplinary approach, combining several different fields, such as safety studies, management studies, psychology, sociology, neuroscience and philosophy, seems essential to ensure an integrated appreciation of these multiple interacting factors and levels. For example, our understanding of public space has been clarified by the combined efforts of disciplines such as urban design, anthropology, sociology, environmental psychology, political science and urban economics (Haas and Mehaffy 2018). Why should safety in public space differ from that? This topic has implications for technology, engineering, the environment, health, security and finance. The PSL also requires methodological creativity, combining a variety of qual- itative and quantitative methods. The best way to obtain rich results is when studies are driven by collectively agreed research questions rather than by specific methods (Blanchette 2013). Studying safety might also require looking into other psychological reactions, as perceptions are always connected to situations and other emotions. 3 ‘Positivity’ in Safety Research and Safety Promotion It has been argued that positive discussions of safety and security have ‘gone out of fashion’, and that there has been an authoritarian shift towards “enforcement and punishment-oriented solutions for crime and disorder” (Schuilenburg et al. 2014, p. 10) and populist views on the unsafety and insecurity of people. For example, as Yuval Noah Harari (2018) asks in his book, 21 lessons for the 21st Century, why, if e.g. air pollution kills around seven million people yearly and terrorists less than 30,000, are elections lost because of terrorist attacks and not because of poor air quality? Public governance focused on crime and danger fuels fear (Schuilenburg et al. 2014). Further research is required to fully understand the consequences and importance Positive Safety 33 Table 1 Traditional and positive approaches to safety Traditional approach in safety research Innovative positive safety lens approach Objective Subjective Focuses on threats and risks, especially in Focuses on the human approach and perceived militarism, state defence and sovereignty, and safety, looking into a range of emotional and on the negative dimension of the absence of embodied sensations of people violent conflict in social organisations Absent Present Emphasises the double negative: the absence Emphasises the double positive: the presence of unsafety of feeling safe One-dimensional, Paternalistic Holistic Looks into safety from a one-dimensional Looks into safety from a multidisciplinary perspective, heavily focusing on technology. perspective and uses rich sources of Dictates requirements and actions as an information to fully understand the concept. authority. Largely neglects social and cultural Emphasises the importance of co-creation, factors creating together with people. Takes into consideration social and cultural (contextual) influences Deficient Optimal Strikes the balance between the rights of the Interested in finding out what optimal safety is individual and the safety of the group for all, acknowledging that people have different needs for safety Negative Positive Looks into unsafety and fear Looks into safety as a positive experience, and as an important factor in the quality of life and people’s wellbeing. Aims to understand how wellbeing and safety are intertwined Protective Supportive Focuses on threats, reducing crimes and how Aims at increasing, prolonging and supporting to avoid incidents from happening—and safety, by looking into opportunities and safety securing places from people signals, and providing suggestions for safety promoters, boosters and advocates. It focuses on safety of , for and by people, and helps them to find their strengths and aspirations, aiming for human fulfilment N/A Sustainable Highlights safety as a crucial domain of good and happy lives. Looks into long-term safety and safety for all in this interconnected world. Highlights freedom as the core purpose of human safety of safety for people’s wellbeing, as well as the multifaceted phenomenon of feeling safe. This calls for a more positive approach (Schuilenburg et al. 2014). Several fields have begun to adopt more positive stances. For instance, there has been “a change in the focus of psychology from preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building upon positive qualities” (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000, p. 5). 34 I. Suojanen and N. Thin A positive approach incorporates a holistic and humane perspective and encour- ages looking into what is possible. It aims to provide alternatives to more traditional approaches, which have neglected the positive sides of safety. More focus is needed on interventions prolonging and nurturing personal safety (Brands and Schwanen 2014). Recent studies in neuroscience have argued that unlike the common thinking of stressors creating unsafety, fear is not necessarily due to the presence of a threat but to the lack of positive safety signals (Brosschot et al. 2017), indicating that “there is no danger” (Vroling and De Jong 2013, p. 26). This would mean that the threat response is only turned off when signs of safety are recognised, since: “for living organisms the absence of threat does not equal the presence of safety” (Brosschot et al. 2017, p. 294). Removing threats does not automatically lead to safety. What we need to understand better is how to enhance safety, not just how to reduce unsafety. Instead of exclusively examining the threats to safety, we should look for opportuni- ties for safety, and understand the (positive) safety signals for people. When familiar with the safety signals, the aspects that promote and boost the feelings of safety can be acknowledged and used. Therefore, focusing on signs, aspects and perceptions of safety, instead of focusing on stressors causing unsafety, is crucial. Good examples of this come from CESAM’s study on public safety perceptions in Rotterdam, the Netherlands (Suojanen et al. 2019). This study suggested a different approach, looking at safety as a positive experience (excluding risks and threats), and aiming to create novel insights into citizens’ safety perceptions in public spaces. Thirty citizens from different backgrounds, neighbourhoods, gender and age groups shared their thoughts on safety outside their private homes. One of the findings of the study was that building barriers or blocks in public spaces might well increase actual safety but it had the exact opposite impact on people’s feelings of safety. Seeing barriers or security personnel on the streets does not necessarily make people feel safer, as they can also remind them of threats and earlier events. Actual safety is important but perceptions of safety in everyday life may have more influence on people’s wellbeing (Van der Giessen et al. 2017). Another finding from the Rotterdam study was that although safety is often divided into physical and mental aspects, participants often refer to these aspects interchangeably. Public safety should not only focus on reducing crime but also on increasing the perception of safety (Brenig and Proeger 2016). So instead of only looking into crime rates and statistics (objective safety), how about changing the focus to consider the range of emotional and embodied sensations that individuals’ experience? (Subjective safety; Hubbard 2005). Accordingly, a better understanding of the relationship between these objective and subjective dimensions of safety, and a new conceptualisation of safety, is needed. 4 Subjectivity: Psychological Safety Using the PSL can lead to a better understanding of how feeling safe matters for the pursuit of a good life. It is not created to replace the traditional approach but to provide a complementary and more balanced approach to safety. Psychologi- cally, safety-positivity is both an individual and a collective mindset, which sees Positive Safety 35 safety as “something that happens, rather than something that does not happen” (Hollnagel 2014b, p. 136). The PSL therefore acknowledges individuals as impor- tant knowledge-producers (Morrell 2008) and enhances the co-creation of knowledge with individuals (Tinkler 2013) rather than paternalistically dictating requirements, orders and actions on citizens regarding safety (Kappeler and Gaines 2015). Similar to what Hollnagel (2014b, p. 140) calls “Safety II”, the PSL tries to explain and understand how things work and looks less at things that have gone wrong (causes). The PSL considers positive causation too: what has gone right and what has caused this positive perception of safety? It also aims to look at how everyday events and public spaces can play a role in increasing safety. When the focus is on preventing crimes and threats, or in a more extreme way on “securing public space from the public, not for it” (Vale 2005, p. 41), the security of the place takes precedence over the safety of the people. The PSL focuses on safety of, for and by people (Sen 1999), and helps them to find their strengths and aspirations (Anand and Gasper 2007). Alkhadim et al. (2018, p. 37) state that a “venue cannot be considered fully safe when subjective safety is overlooked”. Hence, when building safety management systems and safe public spaces, a focus on objective safety is not sufficient. Using the PSL approach, careful consideration of subjective safety can lead to better under- standing of people’s behaviour, which in turn can enhance safety (Zhuang and Wu 2012). Of course, default negative safety approaches don’t necessarily ignore subjec- tivity but the PSL enriches this by explicitly recognising that safety can be a positive feeling. In recognition and validation of this potential, research on ‘psychological safety’1 has flourished throughout the early years of this century (Edmondson 1999; Frazier et al. 2017; Newman et al. 2017; Wanless 2016). This is a significant depar- ture from traditional research on the ‘psychology of safety’ (Geller 2016). Although occasionally the unrealistic rhetoric of ‘fearlessness’ pops into this literature (e.g. Edmondson’s Fearless Organization 2018), the gist of this research is not to pretend that fearlessness or risk-free environments are possible or desirable but rather to show that enhanced awareness of risks and fears as well as protections boost confidence and inspire freedom and creativity, empowering individuals and organisations to live better with risk. Understanding the concept of safety as something that is present and is the primary aim/goal, can lead to very different approaches, results and practices than when viewing safety as the absence of fear, crime and negative experiences. Different actions and strategies to enhance the public perception of safety are most likely needed (Brenig and Proeger 2016) compared to the typical procedures for preventing crimes. In addition, there is a need to look into making public places in cities safer for people without restricting or destroying the liveliness and positive aspects of city living, such as diversity and freedom (Brands and Schwanen 2014). Indeed, what is the use of safe cities, if we cannot enjoy them freely? This is where looking through the PSL can be beneficial. 1 Psychologicalsafety can be defined as “being able to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences of self-image, status or career” (Kahn 1990, p. 708). 36 I. Suojanen and N. Thin So effectively, the core purpose of a ‘Positive Safety Lens’ is to redirect the atten- tion of safety researchers and safety planners towards what really matters—living well, including enjoyment or happiness. Remarkably, in most areas of practical plan- ning and even philosophical debate, happiness is commonly neglected. This can induce people to make suboptimal choices as individuals or as collectives. This warning is especially apposite for the consideration of safety and danger. Incredibly few policies, guidance documents and analytical texts on safety or security pay any explicit heed to happiness, or even to wellbeing. The other problem with risk texts is that they tend to pay attention to things that would matter a great deal if they were to occur but which are pretty much irrelevant to most people’s everyday lives. In short, safety discourse has little to say about the many everyday factors that cumulatively, over time, make people’s lives go well or badly. For example, to avoid boredom and to stay alert and interested, most people need an optimal amount of minor challenges and surprises in their everyday lives—minor events to tell friends about, questions to answer, obstacles to step over (Abuhamdeh and Csikszentmihalyi 2012). Another way of describing the problem with safety professions is that they focus far too much on things and too little on people. Since we are a highly social species, our main risks as well as our main opportunities take human form. This is becoming increasingly true in the modern era, now that technologies and intelligent organisation provide such effective protection against most physical risks. Once we’ve effectively protected ourselves against tigers, smallpox and weather fluctuations, we remain open to an endless variety of human hazards. When individuals and organisations trot out the mantra ‘safety first’, they rarely pause to consider what this might mean in ethical or pragmatic terms, let alone whether it has any validity. Safety is a matter of not only sequencing but also prioritising and making trade-offs. When you apply a happiness lens to safety practices, it quickly becomes clear that although many safety issues are recognised as important, people and cultures vary greatly in which they are most concerned about. And in general, safety doesn’t necessarily trump other practices and values—either in terms of sequencing, or in terms of overall ranking of the value of life outcomes. The World Safety Organization says its core theme is “making safety a way of life... worldwide” (2019). This has the merit of recognising that safety can be a positive cultural value, a presence rather than just an absence. Nonetheless, although this carefully avoids making any unviable claims for safety as a top priority, it does still seem to exaggerate the ethical salience of safety. A ‘way of life’ implies moral concerns that pervade most of our everyday values and concerns, and it is not clear that safety is so interesting or so highly valued as to count as a way of life. Any ‘way of life’, or socio-cultural system, must clearly embed safety considerations within its overall sense of responsibilities and concerns but safety is a contributing factor or at best a component in ways of living. It certainly isn’t a ‘way of life’—not even for the most dedicated of safety professionals, let alone for whole organisations or populations. If anyone were to take the ‘safety-first’ motto seriously, the appropriate question would not be: ‘what could possibly go wrong?’ but ‘what could possibly go right?’. Positive Safety 37 5 Optimising Safety There are two senses in which safety must be optimised. First, as a general principle, goals for policies and practices should be to achieve an optimal balance between reducing and accepting risks. Since ‘zero risk’ and ‘total safety’ are clearly unviable, people need to consider what levels of risk they find acceptable, by weighing up the benefits of safety against its costs. This includes the possible psychological costs of living in an excessively anodyne, ultra-safe environment. Humans vary enormously, both between individuals and through the life course, in how safe they want to be. But most people crave some degree of excitement in their lives, even if they only get it through fake or sanitised dangers (Apter 2006). This brings us to the second sense of optimising. Since not everyone wants or requires the same level of safety, smart safety cultures build in flexibilities to cater for diverse needs and preferences. As well as asking: Do all humans prefer safety? and How much safety is good for us? (Thin 2018), we also need to ask: Who prefers a greater degree of risk? and How can those preferences be catered for without unduly compromising the safety preferences of others? Echoing and adapting Roosevelt’s advice about the dangers of fear, the popular self-help classic Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (Jeffers 1997/2007) recognised that many people allow fear to inhibit them. Since fear is contagious, this may be true at collective levels too. Fear, she argues, is inevitable and not bad in itself. We might call this problem ‘phobiphobia’—being irrationally afraid of our own fears. By embracing our fears, we can educate ourselves to live more freely even in environments we perceive as risky. This is another way of saying that part of the task of personally optimising safety in our lives is learning to live with fears without letting them control us. Perhaps we should ironically call this more positive attitude ‘phobiphilia’ (liking fear). In recent years, the major polemical public debates about ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings’, particularly on US campuses, are another striking example of the need for calm and rational discussions about trade-offs between psychological safety and psychological risks. For example, some students’ unions have tried to protect nervous students by banning applause from their public meetings. Other protections include issuing warnings to students when sensitive topics are to be discussed in class, and even offering racialised ‘safe spaces’ where ‘People of Colour’ can hide away from the ‘White’ majority population. While these actions may offer some temporary comforts to anxious students, it is debatable whether they will be of benefit in the longer run, given that they soon must head out into a social world devoid of such protections (Campbell and Manning 2018; Lukianoff and Haidt 2018). So the PSL aims to recognise and elaborate on optimal safety, looking at balances and at diverse preferences, and at how these play out in different settings (Thin 2018). The PSL emphasises freedom and human fulfilment as the core purpose of human security and focuses on people’s values as an important part of their wellbeing and development. Related to optimal safety, the PSL also raises questions such as who is responsible for safety? and whose priorities should matter? It highlights the need for a multidisciplinary approach and sustainability of research, decisions and solutions. 38 I. Suojanen and N. Thin Sustainability refers also to the rights and needs of future generations (Anand and Gasper 2007). The PSL can remind researchers of the holistic, humane approach and encourage looking into what is possible. It can provide alternatives to more traditional studies and aim at more balanced results, as well as helping to develop new methodologies. PSL can also add to the understanding of the drivers of safety perceptions and safety as a phenomenon, and can help to function as a policymaking tool by showing alternative consequences and solutions, also for future needs. 6 Conclusions When speaking about positive safety at conferences, events and in (social) media, the general reaction, from both researchers as well as people outside academia, is that they have never thought of safety from the positive perspective. But, once they do start to see the other side of safety, they cannot not see it anymore. It becomes clear they want to find out more on how they can feel safer, not (only) how they can be less afraid. And they also seem rather amused at how they did not see it that way before. Coming back to the question at the beginning of the chapter on why people do not feel safe in such a safe world, perhaps one of the answers is that the traditional negative—threat/risk-oriented narrative around safety also means that people who are (objectively) safe often feel like they may not be safe. Adding the PSL approach may thus be beneficial in changing the narrative—and helping people to see things in a brighter light. The positive approach may contribute to challenging the negative public narrative, which peddles risks and claims that the world is becoming less safe. This is why we need PSL, as it allows the possibility to draw a new picture of the safety field, where safety perceptions and subjective safety are considered as important aspects and actors of safety. It is not a perfect theoretical model yet but it can already be used as an inspiration and a guide when planning for current and future safety studies. The consequences of focusing only on risks and threats in safety studies can be wider than is currently understood by scientists. According to Pinker (2019, p. 69) reporting failure “creates a market for entrepreneurs of mayhem, such as terrorists, rampage shooters, trolls and politicians, who leverage fear and outrage into satu- ration coverage.” Surely researchers do not want to be part of creating this market and feeding information for such mayhem. 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S., & de Jong, P. J. (2013). Belief bias and the extinction of induced fear. Cognition & Emotion, 27(8), 1405–1420. Wanless, S. B. (2016). The role of psychological safety in human development. Research in Human Development, 13(1), 6–14. Webb, D., & Wills-Herrera, E. (2012). Subjective well-being and security (Vol. 46). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Science & Business Media. World Safety Organization. (2019). https://worldsafety.org. Accessed 5 Nov 2019. Zhuang, X., & Wu, C. (2012). The safety margin and perceived safety of pedestrians at unmarked roadway. Transportation research part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 15(2), 119–131. Ilona Suojanen holds a Ph.D. in Management from the University of Edinburgh, UK, and MAs in journalism (Australia) and educational sciences (Finland). Following her Ph.D., Ilona worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Erasmus University. Her research interests lie in happiness, with a current focus on safety. She has written book chapters on happiness education and visualising happiness. Ilona’s passion is to find answers to relevant questions and then share them with wider audiences. She strongly believes in public dissemination of research findings and has received wide media interest in Finnish media. Neil Thin is a senior lecturer in Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He researches and lectures on happiness, social quality, sustainable development, and apprecia- tive and aspirational social planning. He has authored four books and several institutional policy guides on these themes.