Nations: It's a Glad, Sad, Mad World

Where you live, as much as how you live, is a key influence on the feel-good factor

By Walter Kirn, Nadia Mustafa and Elizabeth Coady Sunday, Jan. 09, 2005

    • (2 of 3)

    That's the weight of cultural expectation, says Shigehiro Oishi, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, who does research on the connection between culture and well-being. "In America and in West European culture there is a general tendency to value happiness. People feel like they have to be happy, whereas in Japan when people ask how you are, you can say, 'I'm dying,' but here you have to say, 'I'm fine.'" And even if you are thriving in Asia, lifting yourself above others by proclaiming your O.K.-ness may clash with broader goals, especially within a family, says Oishi. So you don't.

    If the Third World Colombians are happy mostly because they really like to be and the First World Japanese are not so happy because, for them, happiness isn't part of the plan, it would seem to follow that SWB has little do with material well-being and a lot do with attitude. Which leads you, of course, to the French. Oishi notes that a "happy-go-lucky attitude" is not so valued there, and thus France ranks lower than Denmark or Sweden on happiness surveys. From this we might conclude that the Danes are happier than the French. Yet the French report themselves to be healthier than the Danes do. And happy or not, the French live longer than the Danes. "This is a sort of paradox," says Oishi. Well, not if you have traveled to France.

    Biswas-Diener too feels that attitude counts but also notes that highly developed nations in the individualistic West do, as a group, score consistently high, suggesting that it doesn't hurt a country to pave its highways and disinfect its water supply. Happiness-wise, it gets people over the hump--but it doesn't get them to the mountain.

    Consider the U.S. In the study of international college students, America ranked a respectable, contented eighth, statistically tied with ... Slovenia. (See chart above for a different kind of measurement.) The U.S.'s leaders were slightly pained by this, no doubt, whereas Slovenia's leaders were overjoyed. (The leaders of Lithuania, which came in last, were as suicidal as always, presumably.) It would appear from these results that merely living as if you are No. 1, and running around the world shouting you are No. 1, doesn't mean that you feel like No. 1 inside.

    Biswas-Diener dug deeper into America's mood by comparing the SWB scores of the impoverished Calcuttans with those of some homeless Californians in Fresno. Although the Californians had the advantage of decidedly better social services, they lagged behind the Indians in happiness. One factor may be the lofty expectations Americans have for themselves and the despair they feel when they fall short of them. Or, as Biswas-Diener has suggested, the difference may come down to simple loneliness. Poor Calcuttans, he observes, tend to live surrounded by their families, while the poor Californians are very often out there on their own.

    3. 1
    4. 2
    5. 3