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.
Figure SUP WB.3. Happiness. (a) Surveys of residents in over 150 countries indicate that Denmark has the happiest citizens in the world. (b) Americans ranked the United States as the 17th happiest country in which to live.

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

definition

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Introduction to Psychology: Supplemental Readings and Resources Copyright © 2024 by Jessica Motherwell McFarlane is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book