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Dec 17, 2019,9:31 am
The 10 Happiest Countries In The World, And How They Got There
Mark TraversContributor
I write about human potential and the science of reaching it.
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If you need any more validation that money doesn’t buy happiness, look no further than a recent study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology.
A team of researchers led by Lucia Macchia of City, University of London examined data from the World Values Survey (WVS) to identify the happiest countries in the world. Interestingly, not one of the economic powerhouses made it into the top ten.
“We explored data from the WVS, which is a cross-sectional data set that includes data from nearly 100 countries,” state Macchia and her team. “The WVS uses stratified random sampling to obtain nationally representative samples. [...] All WVS respondents complete a 30 or 60 minute questionnaire with a variety of psychosocial measures including happiness, self-reported health, financial and life satisfaction, religion and gender norms.”
To examine international differences in happiness, the researchers focused on the question, “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?” Participants responded on a scale of 1 (Dissatisfied) to 10 (Satisfied).
According to their results, the countries with the highest levels of life satisfaction were:
- Columbia
- Puerto Rico (U.S. territory)
- Switzerland
- Mexico
- Qatar
- Guatemala
- Ecuador
- Uzbekistan
- Finland
- Norway
The question, naturally, is why these countries ranked so high on life satisfaction? Past research, for instance, has found only a weak relationship between national wealth and happiness.
The researchers hypothesized that cultures that prioritized leisure over money and work would exhibit higher levels of national happiness. To test this, they isolated two additional questions from the WVS. One question asked participants to rate the importance of work on a scale of 1 (very important) to 4 (not at all important) and the other question asked participants to rate the importance of leisure (on the same scale).
Comparing the difference, the researchers found that countries that exhibited a “leisure-first” mentality generally expressed higher levels of life satisfaction than countries exhibiting a “work-first” mentality. The graph below depicts the relationship between work/leisure values and satisfaction by country. (The upward-sloping trend line indicates that countries that place a greater emphasis on leisure experience higher levels of life satisfaction.)
What might countries and organizations learn from this research? For one, increasing the amount of leisure time citizens are able to enjoy — as well as encouraging a more balanced view of leisure and work — might be a good place to start. In fact, some forward-thinking countries are already adopting measures along these lines. For instance, Sweden has experimented with switching employees from an eight-hour to a six-hour working day. Not surprisingly, citizens who took part in the experiment reported more happiness, higher productivity, and less stress.
In organizational settings, companies are beginning to experiment with protocols that reward employees with time. For instance, a pilot study at Stanford University School of Medicine found that a reward system that motivated employees with time-saving services such as housecleaning increased employee well-being. Furthermore, in an effort to reduce workplace burnout, the French government has enacted legislation that restricts the amount of time employees are allowed to spend on email.
The authors write, “Time is the most precious resource that people have, yet citizens and policy makers often believe money will result in greater happiness. The current research is the first to show that prioritizing work over leisure comes at a cost to national happiness.”
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