Why governments stepped back from positive psychology, and how behavioural-science framing reopened the door.
3 June 2015 · ACU IPPE Brown Bag · Australian Catholic University, IPPE · Approximately 58 minutes (talk and Q&A)
Coppin asks whether positive psychology is on a negative trajectory because governments stepped back after the global financial crisis, and whether the field can still reach Martin Seligman’s aim of 51% flourishing by 2051. He stacks evidence that wellbeing science matters for policy: Lucas and colleagues’ German panel data on slow recovery after redundancy, learned helplessness patterns in long-term unemployment, and Comprehensive Soldier Fitness economics where small attrition reductions imply hundreds of millions in training savings. That fiscal framing, not softer branding, is what ministers and defence accountants respond to. He describes rebranding his own work from applied positive psychology to applied behavioural science, reporting employment uplift and return on investment, and seeing doors reopen at scale. The close challenges the room: improving lives and delivering fiscal returns cannot stay mutually exclusive if flourishing is to become a national priority rather than a boutique workshop topic.
Jump to the moment in the talk.
“It takes him 5.1 years to return to his previous set point of life satisfaction even if he gets a job within six months of initially being made redundant.”
Dr Darren Coppin, citing Lucas, Clark, Diener & Georgellis · 5:20
“I changed the brand from applied positive psychology to applied behavioural science… Suddenly the doors opened.”
Dr Darren Coppin · 32:20
“Improving lives and delivering fiscal financial returns need not be mutually exclusive, but it mustn't be if we are to achieve 51% flourishing by 2051.”
Dr Darren Coppin · 35:00
Lucas, Clark, Diener and Georgellis’s German Socio-Economic Panel analyses, as Coppin summarises, suggest about 5.1 years to return to prior life-satisfaction set point after redundancy even when someone regains work quickly, longer than recovery after partner bereavement in the same dataset.
Coppin links declining investment to post-GFC austerity, programmes that sounded soft beside ministerial scorecards, and weak population-level ROI evidence. Reframing the same content as behavioural science with employment and fiscal outcomes, he argues, is what reopened policy conversations, including defence and employment portfolios that had cooled on “happiness” branding alone.
He uses US Army Comprehensive Soldier Fitness as a case where roughly US$50 million annual spend could be justified by attrition economics: cutting basic-training dropout by about 5% implies on the order of US$572 million saved each year, a ratio Treasuries understand.
Martin Seligman’s mobilising target that more than half the world should meet rigorous flourishing criteria by 2051. Coppin treats it as a policy challenge: without government adoption and measurable returns, the field cannot scale interventions to that ambition, so ministerial-term fiscal proof matters as much as laboratory wellbeing gains.
The underlying programmes stayed similar, but messaging shifted from wellbeing language to employment uplift, cost-benefit, and behavioural outcomes. Coppin reports that funders and partners who had closed doors to “positive psychology” engaged once results were framed in fiscal and workforce terms.
External references for statistics and claims cited in the talk.
Structured chapters cleaned from the published recording for readability.
Professor Felicia Huppert of the University of Cambridge introduced Dr Coppin as someone who has uniquely combined psychological research with policy engagement and large-scale delivery, having achieved the equivalent of several PhDs in his applied work before commencing his ACU PhD under her co-supervision with Professor Joseph Ciarrochi.
Coppin opened by referencing Martin Seligman's 2011 American Psychological Association keynote, where Seligman set the mobilising aim of 51% world flourishing by 2051. Four years on, Coppin argued the field was in danger of "floundering" rather than flourishing. Ground-up movements are essential and often more successful at mobilising people, but reaching 51% world flourishing requires government engagement. Without policymakers, the scale is mathematically impossible.
Coppin identified five government channels for mass behavioural intervention: (1) Education, where positive education programmes are perhaps the most publicised and well-measured large-scale application of positive psychology. (2) Healthcare, with growing opportunities through frameworks like PERMA Plus, where cognitive behavioural therapies have made significant inroads in Britain. (3) Armed Forces, exemplified by the US Army's Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, the world's largest implementation of positive psychology, drawing directly on the Penn Resiliency Program. (4) Justice, where opportunities exist to intervene with prisoners, probationers, and offenders to reduce recidivism. (5) Welfare, the largest budget item in most Western nations at roughly 30% of total government expenditure, including Coppin's own specialism: helping the unemployed return to work.
Drawing on a major longitudinal study by Lucas, Clark, Diener and Georgellis tracking 25,000 Germans, Coppin shared one of the most striking findings on unemployment and well-being: when a man is made redundant, it takes 5.1 years to return to his previous set point of life satisfaction, even if he secures another job within six months. By comparison, recovery from the death of a life partner takes 4.9 years.
Coppin and his colleagues hypothesised that improving the resilience and well-being of the unemployed might increase their likelihood of trying to find work, and ultimately of finding sustainable employment. But they also recognised that delivering psychological interventions to people already actively seeking work would alienate them. They needed a way to identify who was genuinely jobseeking, who was contemplating, and who was effectively disengaged. This led them to the Transtheoretical Model of Change, developed at the University of Rhode Island by Professor James Prochaska, originally validated for smoking cessation.
Working with Prochaska's team and refining a 96-item survey down to 12 questions, Coppin's team rolled the assessment out to almost 70,000 unemployed Australians, Britons, and Americans over three and a half years. Two findings emerged. First, the assessment accurately predicted who would find work in 6 to 9 months. Second, the assessment uncovered a previously undocumented stage Coppin termed "unauthentic action": jobseekers who score highly on both action (taking all the steps to get a job) and precontemplation (no genuine commitment or confidence). Approximately 20% of the assessed population fell into this category, with a strong bias towards men. Discussion with University of Rhode Island researchers attributed this to coercion (benefits sanctions for not appearing active) and identity attachment (men more strongly equating their job with self-worth and unwilling to admit disengagement).
Coppin highlighted a striking statistical pattern: two-thirds of long-term unemployed Australians sat in stages indicating disengagement (precontemplation, contemplation, or unauthentic action), while one-third remained in proactive stages (action and preparation). This two-thirds to one-third split mirrors the original 1968 learned helplessness studies of Martin Seligman, where two-thirds of test subjects exposed to repeated uncontrollable adversity stopped trying to escape it, while one-third remained psychologically resilient. The pattern held across animal species, from goldfish and cockroaches to dogs and human babies, and now apparently to long-term unemployment. The implication was profound: long-term unemployed people may not be "dole bludgers" by character but exhibiting a textbook learned helplessness response, for which 40 years of behavioural science has developed evidence-based interventions.
Drawing on the Penn Resiliency Program, Robert Biswas-Diener's coaching work, Barbara Frederickson's positivity research, Carol Dweck's mindset work, and the VIA Institute's character strengths research, Coppin built a five-half-day workshop intervention covering Strengths, Positivity, Mental Toughness, Mindset, and Character & Goals. The first pilot of 100 generationally unemployed Bundaberg families produced employment outcomes 50% better than five comparable government family-centred programmes in half the time.
Funding scaled the programme from 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 participants. Julia Gillard's administration engaged enthusiastically with the work; Marty Seligman and Karen Reivich trained 200-300 government department staff at Geelong Grammar. By early 2013, results across 5,000 participants showed continued strong outcomes.
Despite continued positive results, Coppin observed government interest in WAP decreasing in 2013. He attributes this to several factors. First, a Google image search for "positive psychology" returns childlike, flowery, and informal imagery; a search for "policy makers" returns suited people in serious meetings. The branding mismatch is profound. Second, the etymology of "flourish" (Latin for "to bloom, to flower") connotes fragility and impermanence; "thrive" (Old Norse for "to grasp", same root as "thrift") connotes seriousness and value, language policymakers respond to. Third, Michael Gove, then UK Secretary of State for Education, reportedly told Marty Seligman "Why would we waste money building character, happiness and meaning when what we want is numeracy and literacy?" Senior ministers serve roughly two-year terms and are judged on measurable, defensible results.
Coppin observed a correlation between the Global Financial Crisis and government openness to positive psychology. As US unemployment spiked and GDP fell sharply in 2008-2009, Marty Seligman was being invited into cabinet office meetings; Ed Diener was advising the Obama administration. Once the economy recovered post-2010, intense ministerial interest waned. Coppin's hypothesis is that well-being became a "voting fallback plan" when economic indicators failed, and was set aside when GDP recovered.
The US Army's Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program is the world's largest applied positive psychology implementation, with 1.1 million soldiers trained at an annual cost of approximately US$50 million (with first-year costs reportedly closer to US$178 million). Academic studies on its effectiveness have been mixed. Yet the Department of Defense continues to invest. Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum, in a conversation with Coppin in October 2014 (and after some of her own Woodford Reserve bourbon), explained the economics: with 13,000 recruits per year and an US$88,000 recruitment cost per soldier, total annual recruitment investment is roughly US$1.15 billion. A 5% reduction in attrition saves US$572 million annually, an 11-fold return on the US$50 million CSF investment. The programme is funded not because it reduces PTSD (where evidence is mixed) but because it pays for itself in retention savings.
Coppin contrasted the trajectory of positive psychology with the rise of the UK Cabinet Office's Behavioural Insights Team. The BIT used interventions with roots in positive psychology but branded them in terms of cost-per-outcome. They became so popular within government that Coppin began studying their language and approach. Reading Thaler and Sunstein's "Nudge", he absorbed three core insights about human behaviour that drive policy effectiveness: people do whatever is easiest, people act to impress others (or at least avoid embarrassment), and people have terrible self-control. The 3-million-person VIA character strength survey confirms self-control is the lowest-ranked character strength globally, exactly as Aristotle predicted 2,500 years ago.
Coppin changed the programme's branding from "applied positive psychology" to "applied behavioural science". He stopped marketing in terms of well-being, anxiety, and depression. He started marketing in terms of percentage employment uplift and ROI. The same content, repositioned. The results in this language: 19% increase in employment outcomes at six months (against the 12% benchmark considered "world-leading"), 54% increase at nine months for the long-term unemployed, and a clearly demonstrable 15-fold government return on investment. Queensland's Chief Scientist called the programme "profound". Department staff called it "unprecedented". Employment service operators called it "game-changing". The reach grew to a projected 100,000 to 250,000 jobseekers across four countries.
Coppin closed by returning to Seligman's 51% flourishing target and his own concern that without engaging governments through their own language (cost, outcomes, ROI, behavioural science framing), the field will not reach mass scale. Improving lives and delivering financial returns need not be mutually exclusive, but they must not remain mutually exclusive.
The Q&A covered language and branding (with audience members debating "thrive" versus "excel" versus "achieve"), the political economy of positive psychology (whether government interest tracks the party in power or specific ministers), the difference between business and government adoption of well-being approaches (business is roughly a decade ahead), how to ensure intervention quality at scale, what the "active ingredients" of the workshops actually are, and the origin story of Seligman's "51% flourishing" aim itself (set in conversation with Felicia Huppert in Philadelphia at a board meeting before the first IPPA conference).