Personal Life Satisfaction as a Measure of Societal Happiness is an Individualistic Presumption: Evidence from Fifty Countries
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Date
2021
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer
Abstract
Numerous studies document that societal happiness is correlated with individualism, but
the nature of this phenomenon remains understudied. In the current paper, we address this
gap and test the reasoning that individualism correlates with societal happiness because
the most common measure of societal happiness (i.e., country-level aggregates of personal
life satisfaction) is individualism-themed. With the data collected from 13,009 participants
across ffty countries, we compare associations of four types of happiness (out of which
three are more collectivism-themed than personal life satisfaction) with two diferent meas ures of individualism. We replicated previous fndings by demonstrating that societal happiness measured as country-level aggregate of personal life satisfaction is correlated with
individualism. Importantly though, we also found that the country-level aggregates of the
collectivism-themed measures of happiness do not tend to be signifcantly correlated with
individualism. Implications for happiness studies and for policy makers are signaled
Description
Research Article
Keywords
Family happiness, Interdependent happiness, Life satisfaction, self-construals, Individualism, Collectivism, Well-being, Culture