Explanipedia

“Sleeping with the enemy”: partisanship and tolerance in online dating Open

Yara Sleiman, Georgios Melios, Paul Dolan · 2025

Political polarization has transcended political arenas, influencing personal decisions. While such biases are often ascribed to out-group animosity, a person’s “party tag” may act as a proxy for other characteristics, overstating partisan…

Affective paternalism Open

Paul Dolan, Christian Krekel, Sarah Swanke · 2024

Many decisions are curated, incentivised or nudged by a third party. Despite this, only a handful of studies have looked at paternalistic decision-makers and the psychological processes by which they arrive at their decisions. The role of …

Patients’ subjective well-being: Determinants and its usage as a metric of healthcare service quality Open

Henry A Lee, Neo Poon, Paul Dolan, Ara Darzi, Ivo Vlaev · 2024

It is commonly suggested that patients’ subjective well-being (SWB) can be affected by pre-treatment conditions and treatment experiences, and hence SWB can be used to measure and improve healthcare quality. With data collected in a hospit…

Me, my thoughts and I – Personality as a moderator of the effect of thoughts on subjective well-being Open

Luc Schneider, Aleksandar Matić, Teodora Sandra Buda, Paul Dolan · 2024

We study how personality impacts people's experiences of their thoughts in terms of experienced happiness and worthwhileness. Over two weeks, 483 participants completed over 20,000 experience sampling questionnaires including reports of he…

All we want is a healthy baby – well, and one that is the opposite sex to what we have already1 Open

Paul Dolan, Cahal Moran, Ingo Outes · 2023

We all know families with three boys or three girls. Did they go on to have three children in the hope that the third child would be the opposite sex to the first two? Are they disappointed when they have another child of the same sex? In …

Les Misérables: An analysis of low SWB across the world Open

Georgios Melios, Kate Laffan, Laura Kudrna, Paul Dolan · 2023

Global trends indicate that the prevalence of low subjective wellbeing is on the rise, though not all regions are equal in terms of both absolute levels and their trajectories. In this paper, we explore the relative importance of individua…

Feeling licensed after COVID-19 Rapid Test? Moderated Mediation of Social Expectations on MSI and Behavioural Spillovers Open

Fatima Koaik, Paul Dolan, Dario Krpan · 2023

“I took the rapid test and did my part!” Behavioural spillovers (Dolan and Galizzi, 2015) and spillunders (Krpan et al., 2019) try to look at all the ripples’ effects of behavioural change interventions. We examine the effect of social nor…

“Expectation” or “Exception”: Examining the Effect of Norms on Moral Self-Image and Behavioural Spillovers Open

Fatima Koaik, Dario Krpan, Paul Dolan · 2023

Does breaking the line in a context where queuing is the expectation bear similar self-perception and emotions compared to breaking the line in a context where queueing is the exception? We present a theoretical framework that differentiat…

‘Sleeping With the Enemy’: The Politics of Online Dating Open

Yara Sleiman, Georgios Melios, Paul Dolan · 2023

Do Misconceptions About Health-Related Quality of Life Affect General Population Valuations of Health States? Open

Robert P. Murphy, Christopher J. Boyce, Paul Dolan, Gordon D. A. Brown, Alex M. Wood · 2022

Mental Health Reform: Design and Implementation of a System to Optimize Outcomes for Veterans and Their Families Open

Andrea Phelps, Ellie Lawrence‐Wood, Anne‐Laure Couineau, Mark Hinton, Paul Dolan , et al. · 2022

The social, health, and economic burden of mental health problems in the veteran community is heavy. Internationally, the array of services and support available to veterans and their families are extensive but vary in quality, are often d…

Accounting for Consequences and Claims in Policy Open

Paul Dolan · 2022

Fully appraising any policy requires us to capture all of its ripple effects and not simply the size of the splash when the pebble of intervention hits the water. It also requires that we weight the value of those effects according to mora…

Moving to Personalized Medicine Requires Personalized Health Plans Open

Adam C. Powell, Paul Dolan · 2022

When individuals, families, and employers select health plans in the United States, they are typically only shown the financial structure of the plans and their provider networks. This variation in financial structure can lead patients to …

Corrigendum: The Welleye: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding and Promoting Wellbeing Open

Paul Dolan, Kate Laffan, Laura Kudrna · 2022

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.716572.].

Wellbeing: Alternative Policy Perspectives Open

Paul Anand, Christopher Anderson, Michael Daly, Liam Delaney, Paul Dolan , et al. · 2022

Governments in liberal democracies pursue social welfare, but in many different ways. The wellbeing approach instead asks: Why not focus directly on increasing measured human happiness? Why not try to improve people’s overall quality of li…

The dark side of belief in Covid-19 scientists and scientific evidence Open

Maja Graso, Amanda Henwood, Karl Aquino, Paul Dolan, Fan Xuan Chen · 2022

The duration of daily activities has no impact on measures of overall wellbeing Open

Amanda Henwood, João Farias Guerreiro, Aleksandar Matić, Paul Dolan · 2022

It is widely assumed that the longer we spend in happier activities the happier we will be. In an intensive study of momentary happiness, we show that, in fact, longer time spent in happier activities does not lead to higher levels of repo…

All We Want is a Healthy Baby – Well, and One that is the Opposite Sex to What We Have Already1 Open

Paul Dolan, Cahal Moran, Ingo Outes · 2022

Correction: Accounting for Consequences and Claims in Policy Open

Paul Dolan · 2022

This article details a correction to: Dolan, P., 2021. Accounting for Consequences and Claims in Policy. LSE Public Policy Review, 2(2), p.3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.31389/lseppr.43.

Moments of Meaningfulness and Meaninglessness: A Qualitative Inquiry Into Affective Eudaimonia at Work Open

Suvi‐Jonna Martikainen, Laura Kudrna, Paul Dolan · 2021

Meaningful work (MW) is an important topic in psychological and organizational research with theoretical and practical implications. Many prior studies have focused on operationalizing MW and distinguish between the attributes of a job tha…

Affective Paternalism Open

Paul Dolan, Christian Krekel, Sarah Swanke · 2021

Many decisions are curated, incentivised, or nudged by a third party. Despite this, only a handful of studies have looked at paternalistic decision-makers and the processes by which they arrive at their decisions. The role of affect, in pa…

Facing it: assessing the immediate emotional impacts of calorie labelling using automatic facial coding Open

Kate Laffan, Cass R. Sunstein, Paul Dolan · 2021

Although there has been a proliferation of research and policy work into how nudges shape people's behaviour, most studies stop far short of consumer welfare analysis. In the current work, we critically reflect on recent efforts to provide…

Who’s miserable now? Identifying clusters of people with the lowest subjective wellbeing in the UK Open

Paul Dolan, Kate Laffan, Alina Velias · 2021

Policymakers are generally most concerned about improving the lives of the worst-off members of society. Identifying these people can be challenging. We take various measures of subjective wellbeing (SWB) as indicators of the how well peop…

The Welleye: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding and Promoting Wellbeing Open

Paul Dolan, Kate Laffan, Laura Kudrna · 2021

We present the Welleye – a novel and conceptually clear framework that shows how attention links the objective circumstances of people’s lives and selves to how they spend their time and feel day to day. While existing wellbeing frameworks…

Faster, higher, stronger… and happier? Relative achievement and marginal rank effects Open

Paul Dolan, Chloe Foy, Georgios Kavetsos, Laura Kudrna · 2021

Narrative traps: how can we avoid them in making decisions about COVID? Open

Paul Dolan, Amanda Henwood · 2021

How have we made decisions about handling COVID-19? Did they take account of trade-offs to individual welfare, or were they prone to narrative bias? Amanda Henwood (LSE) discusses a recent report written with Paul Dolan (LSE) which introdu…

Five Steps Towards Avoiding Narrative Traps in Decision-Making Open

Paul Dolan, Amanda Henwood · 2021

Narratives provide simple rules about how we ought to live and what our priorities ought to be. They are especially appealing in times of high uncertainty. Using the uncertainty surrounding Covid-19 as an illustration, we show how a narrat…

Locked-in syndrome: why this must all end on 19 July Open

Paul Dolan, Sunetra Gupta · 2021

Zero COVID is unachievable, write Paul Dolan (LSE) and Sunetra Gupta (University of Oxford). Continuing to impose restrictions inflicts disproportionate harm on the young, small businesses and creative industries.

When the Future “Spills Under”: General Self-Efficacy Moderates the Influence of Expected Exercise on Present Intellectual Performance Open

Dario Krpan, Matteo M. Galizzi, Paul Dolan · 2021

We examined whether an expected future activity (exercise vs. relaxation) impacts a present behavior (performance on an intellectual task) that occurs prior to this activity. Across two experiments ( n = 320 and n = 466), the influence of …

Happy to help: how a UK micro-volunteering programme increased people’s wellbeing Open

Paul Dolan, Christian Krekel, Ganga Shreedhar, Helen Lee, Claire Marshall , et al. · 2021

Levels of wellbeing increased significantly for individuals who participated in the NHS Volunteer Responders (NHSVR) programme, with effects lasting months after the volunteering period had ended, write Paul Dolan, Christian Krekel, Ganga …

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