Chapter 17. Well-Being
WB.3: Deep Dive – Where in the World are the Happiest People?
Approximate reading time: 2 minutes
In the last 30 years, there’s been a lot more research on happiness. One big question is: How happy are people generally? It turns out, most people around the world are pretty happy and feel more positive than negative (Diener, Ng, Harter, & Arora, 2010). When people from over 150 countries rated their lives on a scale from 0 (worst life) to 10 (best life), the average score was 5.2. People in North America, Australia, and New Zealand scored the highest average at 7.1, while those in Sub-Saharan Africa scored the lowest at 4.6 (Helliwell, Layard, & Sachs, 2013). The top five happiest countries are Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Sweden, with the United States ranked 17th (Helliwell et al., 2013).
![Photograph A shows a scenic view in Denmark. Photograph B shows a cityscape in the United States.](https://opentextbc.ca/psychologymtdisupplement/wp-content/uploads/sites/471/2024/05/ee9ecca3c7fba5e9e71463f12e61bab78436c7c7.jpeg)
A few years back, a Gallup survey found that 52% of American adults said they were “very happy” and over 80% were “very satisfied” with their lives (Carroll, 2007). But a recent poll showed only 42% of American adults feel “very happy.” Happiness has dropped mostly among people of colour, those without a college degree, and Democrats or independents (McCarthy, 2020). This might mean that tough economic conditions are linked to lower levels of happiness. This raises a question: How much does money influence happiness? What other factors play a role?
Image Attributions
Figure SUP WB.3. Figure 14.26 as found in Psychology 2e by OpenStax is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License and contains modifications of the following works:
credit a: modification of work by “JamesZ_Flickr”/Flickr;
credit b: modification of work by Ryan Swindell
To calculate this time, we used a reading speed of 150 words per minute and then added extra time to account for images and videos. This is just to give you a rough idea of the length of the chapter section. How long it will take you to engage with this chapter will vary greatly depending on all sorts of things (the complexity of the content, your ability to focus, etc).