Introducing Flourishability: Towards a Systemic Positive Psychology - Powerpoint presentation

Introducing Flourishability: Towards a Systemic Positive Psychology Abstract Positive psychology has significantly advanced the scientific understanding of human flourishing, yet its dominant emphasis on individual psychological characteristics, capacities, and interventions leaves a fundamental question insufficiently examined: under what conditions does flourishing become possible? This paper introduces flourishability as a conceptual framework for understanding the conditions that enable, constrain, or foreclose human flourishing across persons, relationships, institutions, societies, and time. It proposes a shift in analytical attention from flourishing as an individual outcome towards the systemic conditions through which possibilities for flourishing are constituted and sustained. Flourishability foregrounds the interaction between human agency and the relational, structural, material, and temporal environments within which lives unfold. The framework distinguishes the possession of psychological resources from the conditions that permit those resources to be meaningfully exercised. In doing so, it challenges explanations that locate responsibility for flourishing primarily within individuals while overlooking the systems that shape their available possibilities. The paper advances a systemic orientation for positive psychology in which flourishing becomes a shared ethical, institutional, and societal concern. Its central proposition is that the possibility of flourishing depends upon conditions that extend beyond the individual. Flourishability therefore invites a broader scientific and practical agenda concerned with creating, protecting, and expanding those conditions across persons, worlds, and time.