Believing in an Enticing World: Testing a Positive Psychological Intervention Aimed at Increasing Character Strengths and Well-Being via World Beliefs

Abstract

AbstractThe Enticing world belief factor—encompassing beliefs that the world is interesting, beautiful, abundant, and worth exploring—has been hypothesized to promote subjective well-being and several character strengths (e.g., curiosity). The present pre-registered longitudinal-experimental study tests a 9-day intervention aiming to increase Enticing world belief in 247 high school and university students (aged 14–35). Results show that the intervention increased Enticing world belief from pre to post. However, these changes did not persist at a 2-week follow-up. Although we did not find the predicted positive total effects of the intervention on optimism, life satisfaction, well-being, curiosity or love of learning from pre to post, we did find positive indirect effects on all of these variables via changes in Enticing world belief. We discuss inferential limitations regarding the observed effects as well as possible reasons for the lack of positive total effects on well-being measures and character strengths.