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It is often said that money can’t buy happiness, and there might be some truth in those words. Even though it is generally believed that wealthier nations are among the happiest on Earth, a recent survey found that low income individuals living in small-scale communities often report feeling just as happy, if not more so, than their high-income counterparts.
The scientists leading the global survey gathered their information by researching nearly 3,000 individuals from 19 sites spread across five continents. While the study was initially intended to examine the impacts of climate change on small-scale communities, many of which were Indigenous, the researchers also included the question, “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life on a scale from 0 to 10?” as a metric for understanding happiness.
The information gathering stage was far from easy. All of the communities that the researchers visited were remote and sometimes required them to traverse South American jungles, South Asian mountains, and African grasslands and deserts. The team also translated the surveys into local languages and conducted interviews with randomly selected individuals from over 100 small villages. As many of the people interviewed did not have a daily set income and often relied on their local ecosystems to survive and eat, researchers ended up estimating income by adding up the value of household possessions that the person had purchased. For many communities, this metric resulted in the average daily earnings of a few U.S. dollars per person.
The researchers found that, despite only making a few dollars per day, many of the people surveyed reported feeling just as satisfied as people in more industrialized parts of the world. Some of the communities in the survey even reported “very high levels of satisfaction (above 8 out of 10) that exceeded the national average in many wealthy countries,” according to Eric Galbraith, one of the lead researchers who worked on the study.
Notably, these findings go against the belief that it is often the richest countries on Earth that are the happiest. This could be explained partially by the Easterlin paradox, which explains that an increase in societal wealth does not always correspond to an increase in societal happiness over time. It is also possible that, historically, researchers have placed too much emphasis on the correlation between wealth and happiness, which has caused the two factors to appear more closely linked than they actually are.
Additionally, studies such as the World Happiness Report tend to ask questions in the form of the Cantril ladder method, which is described by the World Happiness Report as a method that “asks respondents to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10 and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale.” But recent findings have shown that the Cantril ladder method tends to encourage individuals to focus on their income relative to others, which could cause respondents to answer the questions in regard to their income rather than quality of life. This could explain why wealthier nations tend to place higher on global happiness rankings, even if that isn’t necessarily the case.
In the end, there may be something even more valuable than money when it comes to gauging happiness, and that is the vital role that social relationships play in many people’s lives.
“As deeply social animals, humans are tightly attuned to the security of their position within society, including the support they can count on from others,” writes Galbraith. “This primarily comes from the strength of interpersonal relationships and an assessment of one’s social standing. But social relations do not necessarily go together with wealth. What’s more, although the communities we studied have little money, they are not poor in the sense of lacking basic necessities, and many of the people in these societies spend their days in close contact with natural surroundings, something many studies suggest benefits well-being.”
You can read the full report on PNAS.
h/t: [Scientific American]
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