Abstract
In our 1996 article, “Most People are Happy,” we presented evidence showing that the majority of humans are above neutral in happiness. The article was popular perhaps for several reasons. First, we shed light on the ubiquity of positive or pleasant emotions, whereas previously many scholars had focused on negative or unpleasant ones. Second, our article may have received attention because, as we showed, most people believe that humans are much less happy than they actually are. Thus, our article provided an impetus for understanding the role of positive emotions as well as illuminating an important aspect of human happiness—the fact that happiness is not unusual but may be the default condition. In the current article, we review evidence from the first representative sample of humanity, the Gallup World Poll, and include many more nations that are very poor and troubled. We find that the majority of people are above neutral in affect balance but not life satisfaction. Furthermore, there are extremely bad life circumstances in which most people are below neutral in affect balance as well. This suggests that one explanation for most people’s happiness is that most societies, but not all, can meet enough human needs that they provide the conditions for human happiness. Finally, our findings suggest that human happiness is not just in our heads or genes but is also influenced by personal and societal circumstances.
Keywords
In a 1996 article in Psychological Science (Diener and Diener, 1996), we claimed that most people around the world are happy, above the neutral point on measures of subjective well-being (SWB). Because we explored a number of diverse samples (e.g., 43 countries for which nationally representative samples were available, as well as disabled adults) and used a variety of measures of SWB, including alternatives to self-report surveys, the findings were compelling.
One inspiration for our article was The Pollyanna Principle by Matlin and Stang (1978) in which the authors reviewed the many types of evidence pointing to a positivity bias in humans. In our own work, we noticed that in the samples we collected from around the world, the happiness scores were virtually always negatively skewed, with most people above neutral and only a few people in the very negative zone. As samples from around the world accumulated, we repeatedly observed this pattern. The view of most people in the world that they are primarily happy flew in the face of the common-sense view that most of the world is dominated by misery. Indeed, in our original article, working adults and psychology majors estimated that 56% to 61% of Americans would report positive life satisfaction (above the neutral point). In reality, 82% to 84% of Americans were above neutral in life satisfaction.
There were several reasons that our article received wide scientific attention. First, it ran counter to the prevailing emphasis on negative emotions; positive emotions had been largely ignored except by a few intrepid researchers such as Alice Isen (1987). By showing that positive emotions predominate most of the time for most people, our article called for a refocus of research on emotions. Second, our article countered the bleak picture that humans live perpetually in a state of unhappiness and that it takes great effort or luck to achieve positive levels of happiness.
If most people are happy, we must ask why that would be so. The predominant view was that people experience affect only when bad or good things happen to them, not all the time. In our research, we showed that people feel affect virtually all of the time (e.g., Diener & Iran-Nejad, 1986) and that it is mostly positive. Theories of what positive emotions do emerged (e.g., the broaden-and-build model of Fredrickson, 2001). In a more recent work, we reviewed evidence that positive affect is generally beneficial to social relationships, health, energy, sexual reproductive success, and work performance (Diener, Kanazawa, Suh, & Oishi, 2015). We suggested that the “positivity offset” (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994, p. 413; for a review, see Cacioppo & Berntson, 1999)—feeling positive when there are no negative events affecting someone—provided evolutionary advantages, especially to a species that is both hypersocial and hyperintelligent.
After the publication of the 1996 article, more studies appeared that were relevant to the question of whether most people around the world are happy. Biswas-Diener, Vittersø, and Diener (2005) found that among the Inuit (indigenous people of Greenland), the Maasai (the traditional pastoralist-hunter tribe in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania), and the Amish, the vast majority of respondents scored above neutral in both satisfaction and affect balance. The self-report survey results were replicated with several other measures of SWB—informant reports, experience sampling, and a memory measure—reducing the plausibility that the positive responses are due only to self-report biases. In addition, all three groups were above neutral on satisfaction with each of 14 different life domains. Thus, the finding that most people are happy generalized to cultures that differ significantly from mainstream Western culture.
The results reported by Biswas-Diener and Diener (2006) on homeless individuals in three locations showed lower SWB scores than those found in most previous studies. These were individuals in Calcutta, India; Portland, Oregon; and Fresno, California. In these three locations, individuals who had no homes and for the most part lived outdoors were surveyed. In this case, the life satisfaction of the two homeless groups in the United States was negative, and the affect balance was slightly positive in the U.S. samples and negative in the Calcutta homeless sample. In all three of the homeless samples, the experience of worry exceeded that of joy. Furthermore, in all three samples, participants scored below neutral on four domains: satisfaction with material resources, privacy, income, and housing. The groups were mostly in the positive-satisfaction zone for the other 10 domains. Thus, in the homeless samples, we saw much less positivity than had been reported in most samples in past studies. Other findings—for example, on the life satisfaction of sex workers in Detroit (Baker, Wilson, & Winebarger, 2004) and of people hospitalized for psychiatric disorders (Frisch, Cornell, Villanueva, & Retzlaff, 1992)—lent further support to the conclusion that not everyone is happy.
In our new analyses below, we examine the first representative sample of virtually the entire world, the Gallup World Poll (Gallup Organization, 2016). A very broad sample of the world such as this can inform us about people in general as well as shed light on some of the conditions that can lead to negative levels of SWB.
New Findings
We analyzed the Gallup World Poll (Gallup Organization, 2016) data from 2005 through 2015, 1,551,362 adults who constituted a representative sample from 166 nations in the world. The only nations omitted were mostly small ones (e.g., the Vatican) and a very few larger ones (e.g., North Korea, where it is impossible to collect data). Our sample was a representative sample of virtually all of humanity for a decade. We used multiple years so that we would be more likely to capture periods when the world economy was robust and other years that included the global recession. By including many poor nations where there are such conditions as dire poverty and conflict, we can provide a stronger and more accurate test of whether most people are happy. For more details on the samples and measures, see http://www.gallup.com/178667/gallup-world-poll-work.aspx. 1
SWB represents people’s appraisals and evaluations of their own lives, both in terms of cognitive evaluations and positive versus negative affect. We examined the three major components described by Diener (1984). Life satisfaction is a reflective judgment of life, whereas positive feelings are pleasant feelings that people consider desirable, and negative feelings are unpleasant and in many situations considered to be undesirable. Whereas life satisfaction represents a judgment about one’s own well-being, affect represents the experience over time of whether things are going well or badly from moment to moment
Affect balance is the predominance of positive over negative affect. In the Gallup World Poll (Gallup Organization, 2016), both positive and negative feelings were assessed, 2 and we subtracted one from the other. In terms of affect balance, of 1,468,274 respondents, 74% of respondents in the world (n = 1,081,649) felt more positive feelings (i.e., in the positive zone) than negative feelings “yesterday”, whereas only 18% of respondents (n = 266,944) felt more negative feelings (i.e., in the negative zone) than positive feelings “yesterday.” Even in the least happy quintile of nations (n = 282,474), 60% of respondents (n = 168,992) reported more positive than negative affect, double the number who reported more negative than positive (n = 83,663).
Life satisfaction was assessed with Cantril’s Self-Anchoring Striving Scale (Cantril, 1965), which uses an 11-point scale. 3 Cheung and Lucas (2014) found that single-item life satisfaction scales are valid compared with longer multi-item scales. Average life satisfaction scores were not positive across the globe. Of 1,523,085 respondents, less than half of the people in the world (47%, n = 716,063) evaluated their life as above neutral. Even in the high-happiness quintile of nations (n = 365,771), only 67% of people (n = 246,042) indicated a number above 5, whereas in the least happy quintile of nations (n = 291,498), only 33% of people (n = 95,639) did. Whereas 86% of the 43 countries sampled in our 1996 article had mean life satisfaction scores above the neutral point, only 60% of the 166 countries had current mean life satisfaction scores above the neutral point. The difference between the original article and the current one is probably due to the fact that our latest data include many more very poor countries, as well as countries that recently experienced wars (e.g., Syria, Georgia), Ebola outbreaks (e.g., Sierra Leone), and economic and political crises (e.g., Niger).
Are there circumstances in which most people are no longer happy? To answer this question, we selected the respondents who had experienced five adverse events during the past year: (a) had been assaulted, (b) had property or money stolen, (c) had health problems, (d) did not have enough money for food, and (e) did not have enough money for shelter. In this group, only 26% of respondents (n = 796) evaluated their life as above 5, and only 51% (n = 1,567) reported more positive than negative affect. Thus, life circumstances may override the natural coping responses that most mentally healthy people possess.
Finally, we examined people who had the above five adverse life events but also two other negative social circumstances—(a) nobody they could call on for support in an emergency and (b) feeling that they were not respected. 4 Thus, this group had experienced physical and material problems during the past year as well as lack of social support. In this group of unfortunate individuals, only 20% had a positive affect-balance score (n = 72), 10% had a neutral score (i.e., they experienced the same number of positive and negative feelings, n = 37), and 70% had a negative score (n = 257). For life satisfaction, only 12% (n = 43) had a score above neutral, 14% (n = 51) were at the neutral point, and 74% (n = 271) were below the neutral point. Thus, we found that most individuals who experienced very negative life events and lacked social support were far from happy. Although most people in the globe were happy, those who experienced physical, financial, and interpersonal problems were not.
Discussion
Our current findings extended or reversed the earlier article in two ways. First, in the 1996 article with 43 countries, we found that most people were happy; in our new analyses with 166 countries, we found that under adverse conditions in which both social and material quality of life are bad, most people were not happy. The reason for the difference between the two findings is undoubtedly that the Gallup World Poll (Gallup Organization, 2016) has a large number of poor and troubled nations that had not been previously surveyed with well-being questions. In the current study, the 43 nations analyzed in the earlier study were all above the mean in SWB. Thus, our findings of more unhappiness are due to the inclusion of many societies with much poorer life circumstances.
Second, people around the globe are more likely to score in the negative zone on judgment measures of life satisfaction than on experiential measures—life satisfaction versus affect balance. We found more negative scores for life satisfaction than for affect balance. This might be because affect balance tends to depend more on the meeting of universal needs, such as for social support, and societies on the whole have developed reasonably good methods for meeting these needs, even when poverty or even conflict are present. In contrast, life satisfaction depends on comparing one’s life to standards that change to some degree with culture and expectancies. Thus, many people in our sample might have scored low on life satisfaction because they desire the material life they perceive in wealthy nations, and conclude that they fall far short of this standard. It could be that life satisfaction is more influenced by movable standards compared with affect, and this means that even after substantial progress, people may believe that they fall short of their goals (Graham & Pettinato, 2006). The divergent patterns of the results for life satisfaction and for affect balance highlight the importance of measuring multiple aspects of SWB (Diener, 1984).
There are several viable explanations of why people are happy in most surveys. One explanation we offered (Diener & Diener, 1996) is that people who are not living in very negative circumstances tend to experience positive affect most of the time because it facilitates approach behavior, which is particularly helpful in a species with so many social and intellectual resources. The second explanation, which also seems plausible, is that most societies, even preindustrial ones that are not economically developed, such as the Maasai, have evolved over time to meet human needs (e.g., belonging, competence, security) and have largely been successful in doing so. By meeting human needs, societies have created happy populations. When people can maintain social support, it may help considerably to counter negative life circumstances.
A third possible explanation for the finding that most people are happy is that as long as people can find rewarding activities in which to be involved, they will be above neutral in SWB when extremely bad circumstances characterize their lives. This explanation might be more relevant to positive moods and emotions rather than satisfaction judgments. More research is needed to explore these possible explanations, but being able to accurately gauge whether human needs are being met will be helpful. A fourth hypothesis, involving response biases, does not seem plausible because various measures of SWB all show the same positivity in most populations, and self-reported SWB seems to be sensitive to unfavorable life circumstances. People who recently experienced physical, financial, and interpersonal problems and/or who are living without social support are not happy, but most people who are not in such adverse living conditions are generally happy.
The findings that people are unhappy in some circumstances casts doubt on a set-point theory of SWB that claims people return to their personal baselines if they are exposed to good or bad circumstances for a period of time. Clearly, many people in our unhappy sample had experienced their bad life circumstances for a very considerable period of time. Our findings that people are not happy when in very bad circumstances also have a number of important implications for policy and practice. For clinical psychologists, counselors, positive-psychology educators, and so forth, the results clearly indicate that not all happiness and unhappiness are “in your head” (see also Frisch, 2013). Although the top-down influences of personality, outlook, and other internal factors can be important, external circumstances can be important too.
People obviously do not adapt to all circumstances, and practitioners and policy makers need to understand that societal and personal circumstances can have a significant influence on people’s well-being. This means that practitioners who work with individuals need to examine whether it is possible to change unhappy people’s circumstances and not merely their outlook on life. For policy makers, it is important to understand that societal and local policies can substantially affect people’s SWB. Gratitude, optimism, and mindfulness may be very important, but so are people’s life circumstances.
Societies and their policies can have a substantial influence on human well-being, underscoring the idea of national accounts of well-being to monitor societal progress. Societal factors such as the rule of law, job programs for the unemployed, progressive taxation, a clean environment, as well as many other societal factors, influence SWB (Diener, Oishi, & Lucas, 2015; Oishi & Diener, 2014). Thus, achieving high SWB requires both individual and societal efforts.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.