University of Leicester produces the first-ever 'world map of happiness'

General Academics Religion and Philosophy
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University of Leicester
University of Leicester produces the first-ever ‘world map of happiness’
Happiness is … being healthy, wealthy and wise
Adrian White, Analytic Social Psychologist at the University of Leicester produces first ever global projection of international differences in subjective well-being; the first ever World Map of Happiness.

UK 41st out of 178 countries for happiness.

Happiness is found to be most closely associated with health, followed by wealth and then education.

A University of Leicester psychologist has produced the first ever ‘world map of happiness.’

Adrian White, an analytic social psychologist at the University’s School of Psychology, analysed data published by UNESCO, the CIA, the New Economics Foundation, the WHO, the Veenhoven Database, the Latinbarometer, the Afrobarometer, and the UNHDR, to create a global projection of subjective well-being: the first world map of happiness.

The projection, which is to be published in a psychology journal this September, will be presented at a conference later in the year. Participants in the various studies were asked questions related to happiness and satisfaction with life. The meta-analysis is based on the findings of over 100 different studies around the world, which questioned 80,000 people worldwide. For this study data has also been analysed in relation to health, wealth and access to education.

Whilst collecting data on subjective well-being is not an exact science, the measures used are very reliable in predicting health and welfare outcomes. It can be argued that whilst these measures are not perfect they are the best we have so far, and these are the measures that politicians are talking of using to measure the relative performance of each country.

The researchers have argued that regular testing as a collaboration between academics in different countries would enable us to track changes in happiness, and what events may cause that. For example what effect would a war, or famine, or national success have on a country’s members’ happiness. .

Adrian White said: "The concept of happiness, or satisfaction with life, is currently a major area of research in economics and psychology, most closely associated with new developments in positive psychology. It has also become a feature in the current political discourse in the UK.

"There is increasing political interest in using measures of happiness as a national indicator in conjunction with measures of wealth. A recent BBC survey found that 81% of the population think the Government should focus on making us happier rather than wealthier.

"It is worth remembering that the UK is doing relatively well in this area, coming 41st out of 178 nations.

"Further analysis showed that a nation’s level of happiness was most closely associated with health levels (correlation of .62), followed by wealth (.52), and then provision of education (.51).

"The three predictor variables of health, wealth and education were also very closely associated with each other, illustrating the interdependence of these factors.

"There is a belief that capitalism leads to unhappy people. However, when people are asked if they are happy with their lives, people in countries with good healthcare, a higher GDP per captia, and access to education were much more likely to report being happy.

"We were surprised to see countries in Asia scoring so low, with China 82nd, Japan 90th and India 125th. These are countries that are thought as having a strong sense of collective identity which other researchers have associated with well-being.

“It is also notable that many of the largest countries in terms of population do quite badly. With China 82nd, India 125th and Russia 167th it is interesting to note that larger populations are not associated with happy countries.”

“The frustrations of modern life, and the anxieties of the age, seem to be much less significant compared to the health, financial and educational needs in other parts of the World. The current concern with happiness levels in the UK may well be a case of the ‘worried well’.”

The 20 happiest nations in the World are:

  1. Denmark
  2. Switzerland
  3. Austria
  4. Iceland
  5. The Bahamas
  6. Finland
  7. Sweden
  8. Bhutan
  9. Brunei
  10. Canada
  11. Ireland
  12. Luxembourg
  13. Costa Rica
  14. Malta
  15. The Netherlands
  16. Antigua and Barbuda
  17. Malaysia
  18. New Zealand
  19. Norway
  20. The Seychelles

Other notable results include:

  1. USA
  2. Germany
  3. UK
  4. France
  5. China
  6. Japan
  7. India
  8. Russia

The three least happy countries were:

  1. Democratic Republic of the Congo
  2. Zimbabwe
  3. Burundi
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I just checked the first 5

Why would they all be seemingly religious and yet happy???

Sure there’s gotta be a mistake somewhere… ;D

1. Denmark “83.1% of Danes are members of the Lutheran state church, the Danish People's Church (Den Danske Folkekirke), also known as the Church of Denmark. The rest are primarily of other Christian denomination” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark

  1. Switzerland
    “The most popular religion in Switzerland is Roman Catholic Church in Switzerland (44% of the population). There are various Protestant denominations (38.5%)”
    Switzerland - Wikipedia

  2. Austria
    “As of the end of the twentieth century about 73% of Austria’s population were registered as Roman Catholic, while about 5% considered themselves Protestants. Both these numbers have been on the decline for decades, especially Roman Catholicism, which has suffered an increasing number of seceders of the church. Austrian Catholics are obliged to pay a mandatory tax (calculated by income—ca. 1%) to the Austrian Roman Catholic Church, which might act as an incentive to leave the church.”
    Austria - Wikipedia

  3. Iceland
    Icelanders enjoy freedom of religion as stated by the constitution; however, church and state are not separated and the National Church of Iceland, a Lutheran body, is the state church. The national registry keeps account of the religious affiliation of every Icelandic citizen and according to it, Icelanders in 2005 divided into religious groups as follows:
    84.1% members of the National Church of Iceland.
    4.6% members of the Free Lutheran Churches of Reykjavík and Hafnarfjörður.

  1. The Bahamas

The islands are overwhelming Protestant Christian (over 80%). Baptists form the largest denomination (about one third), followed by the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches.

The Bahamas - Wikipedia

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Correlation implies causation :wink:

How do these countries compare?
176. Democratic Republic of the Congo
177. Zimbabwe
178. Burundi

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Re:

Correlation implies causation is a logical fallacy by which two events that occur together are prematurely claimed to have a cause-and-effect relationship. It is also known as cum hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for “with this, therefore because of this”) and false cause.

Logical fallacy is not what I claimed, but here’s the details anyway. :wink:

Burundi:
Wiki has nothing…

“Official religion:
none”
http://www.britannica.com/nations/Burundi

Zimbabwe
“There are various forms of spiritual practice in Zimbabwe. Forty to fifty percent of Zimbabweans attend Christian churches. However like most former European colonies, Christianity is often mixed with enduring traditional beliefs. Besides Christianity, the Mwari is the most practiced non-Christian religion which involves ancestor worship and spiritual intercession; the Mbira Dza Vadzimu, which means “Voice of the Ancestors”, an instrument related to many lamellaphones ubiquitous throughout Africa, is central to many ceremonial proceedings. Mwari is an unknown supreme being that communicates with humans through cave-dwelling oracles known as the Voice of Mwari”

Democratic Republic of the Congo:

About eighty percent of the Congolese population are Christian, predominantly Roman Catholic. Among the largest protestant churches are: Anglican Church of Congo, Église des Frères mennonites, Église du Christ au Congo, . Most of the non-Christians adhere to either traditional religions or syncretic sects. Traditional religions embody such concepts as monotheism, animism, vitalism, spirit and ancestor worship, witchcraft, and sorcery and vary widely among ethnic groups; none is formalized. The syncretic sects often merge Christianity with traditional beliefs and rituals. The most popular of these sects, Kimbanguism, was seen as a threat to the colonial regime and was banned by the Belgians. Kimbanguism, officially “the church of Christ on Earth by the prophet Simon Kimbangu,” now has about three million members, primarily among the Bakongo of Bas-Congo and Kinshasa.

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177. Zimbabwe

I’m sure they didn’t ask Bob! ;D

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Maybe not. This, however, gives the assessment a different spin. Japan was 90th in the happiness stakes.

(Apologies if I’ve posted the above link before.)

'Luthon64

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Hmm, interesting.
But I think it is dangerous to make connections like this. Did they take socioeconomic factors into account for instance? And how do you define social well being?

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Yes, one must indeed and again be cautious not to equate correlation with causation, as you have pointed out in an earlier post. I doubt that socioeconomic factors (or any other culturally dependent ones) were diligently corrected for in the study the report on which I linked to. However, it does use the phrase “prosperous economies,” implying that at least some criteria of similarity were applied in the selection of countries. This expectation is reinforced when one considers the countries that are mentioned: they’re all of the first world.

As for defining “social wellbeing,” the excerpt given by qrios does use the adjective “subjective,” i.e. effectively through self-assessment. It is probable that a suitable psychometric test for this already exists, but I can’t say for sure. Perhaps the investigators adapted one or designed their own. The point though is that, provided such a test measures what it is supposed to measure, one has a valid relative gauge, and comparisons can reasonably be made. A common IQ test springs to mind in this context: the assignment of a 100 score as the world population mean value is arbitrary, but one person doing better or worse on the test than another of similar age is not.

'Luthon64

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I’m with Anacoluthon64 on this one…

I think that a HUGE amount of people should be involved in a survey of this nature…

Emotional happiness and social wellbeing can be influenced by relatively small things such as local catastrophes eg. floods, bombings earthquakes and the likes… a huge increase in interest rate, or fuel price etc. will also influence a survey…

On the other hand, if a survey is done a week or days after the country has won a world championship in a a national sport - surely it will also reflect or change the sentiment.
I think the only true barometer will be one done over a an extended number of years on thousands of people from all ethnic groups and all social levels…

I wonder where South Africa ranks on the survey??

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(Sorry to bump the thread)

I remember discussing this on another board when it first came out. I can’t find the full list now - Google finds a lot of different 'happiness index’es! - but South Africa was not high. Something like 54th.

What struck me was Bhutan, one of the poorest countries in the world, ranking at #8. Could this be a genuine measure of happiness arising from something like a Buddhist detachment from material wealth? Could it be a political effect? (“Bhutan is the only country to measure happiness” according to Wikipedia.) Or could it just be a lack of knowing what they’re missing?

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In any such tests that purport to measure psychological dimensions such as happiness, it is imperative that the indices actually reflect what the test was designed to measure. This is a far bigger problem than one might at first think, because these tests don’t usuall gauge their objective directly; rather, they provide an estimate based on measurements of correlated factors. For example, an intelligence test measures such things as analytical ability, verbal skill, pattern recognition, etc. - it does not measure intelligence directly because no one yet knows exactly how to define it.

And there’s little doubt that “happiness indices” are similarly problematic, apart from suffering a further grave difficulty, namely self-assessment.

'Luthon64