Personal Life Satisfaction as a Measure of Societal Happiness is an Individualistic Presumption: Evidence from Fifty Countries
Journal
Journal of Happiness Studies
ISSN
1389-4978
1573-7780
Date Issued
2020
Author(s)
Kuba Krys
Joonha Park
Agata Kocimska-Zych
Aleksandra Kosiarczyk
Heyla A. Selim
Agnieszka Wojtczuk-Turek
Brian W. Haas
Yukiko Uchida
Claudio Torres
Colin A. Capaldi
Michael Harris Bond
John M. Zelenski
Vivian Miu-Chi Lun
Fridanna Maricchiolo
Christin-Melanie Vauclair
Iva Poláčková Šolcová
David Sirlopú
Cai Xing
Vivian L. Vignoles
Wijnand A. P. van Tilburg
Julien Teyssier
Chien-Ru Sun
Stanislava Stoyanova
Ursula Serdarevich
Beate Schwarz
Ruta Sargautyte
Espen Røysamb
Vladyslav Romashov
Muhammad Rizwan
Zoran Pavlović
Vassilis Pavlopoulos
Yvette van Osch
Ayu Okvitawanli
Azar Nadi
Martin Nader
Mustaffa Nur Fariza
Oriana Mosca
Tamara Mohorić
Pablo Eduardo Barrientos
Arina Malyonova
Xinhui Liu
J. Hannah Lee
Anna Kwiatkowska
Nicole Kronberger
Lucie Klůzová Kračmárová
Natalia Kascakova
İdil Işık
Eric R. Igou
David O. Igbokwe
Diana Hanke-Boer
Alin Gavreliuc
Ragna B. Garðarsdóttir
Márta Fülöp
Vladimer Gamsakhurdia
Carla Sofia Esteves
Alejandra Domínguez-Espinosa
Patrick Denoux
Salome Charkviani
Arno Baltin
Arévalo D. M. Mira
Lily Appoh
Isabelle Albert
Charity S. Akotia
Mladen Adamovic
Type
Resource Types::text::journal::journal article
URL Institutional Repository
Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>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 fifty countries, we compare associations of four types of happiness (out of which three are more collectivism-themed than personal life satisfaction) with two different measures of individualism. We replicated previous findings 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 significantly correlated with individualism. Implications for happiness studies and for policy makers are signaled.
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Subjects
collectivism
;
culture
;
family happiness
;
individualism
;
interdependent happiness
;
life satisfaction
;
self-construals
;
well-being
;
adult
;
article
;
controlled study
;
female
;
happiness
;
human
;
human experiment
;
individuality
;
life satisfaction
;
major clinical study
;
male
;
reasoning
;
wellbeing