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).

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