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Can happiness be reliably increased? Thousands of studies speak to this question. However, many of them were conducted during a period in which researchers commonly "p-hacked," creating uncertainty about how many discoveries might be false positives. To prevent p-hacking, happiness researchers increasingly preregister their studies, committing to analysis plans before analyzing data. We conducted a systematic literature search to identify preregistered experiments testing strategies for increasing happiness. We found surprisingly little support for many widely recommended strategies (e.g., performing random acts of kindness). However, our review suggests that other strategies—such as being more sociable—may reliably promote happiness. We also found strong evidence that governments and organizations can improve happiness by providing underprivileged individuals with financial support. We conclude that happiness research stands on the brink of an exciting new era, in which modern best practices will be applied to develop theoretically grounded strategies that can produce lasting gains in life satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly a half-century ago, two scholars north and south of the US border called attention to the role played by reciprocity networks in poor peoples' survival strategies. This article provides a synthetic picture of the qualitative research on those strategies, focusing not only on mutual aid networks but also on clientelist politics and popular protest. These are, we argue, oftentimes complementary ways of everyday problem-solving. Furthermore, most research on survival strategies has overlooked state and street violence as literal threats to poor people's daily survival. Our review systematically describes the individual and collective strategies poor residents use to navigate daily dangers. We advocate for the incorporation of personal safety into the study of poor people's survival strategies and identify as a promising research endeavor a simultaneous attention to ways of making ends meet and coping with interpersonal and state violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]