Turns Out We Don’t Really Know How To Measure Happiness

Each year you’ve probably read about which countries are the happiest in the world but, according to a new study, the tests previously used to measure said happiness are flawed and how happiness is measured has a lot to do with where you live.

Take the most simplistic measure of happiness – a smile. When looking at what type of smile are viewed more positively past research has shown a big difference between East and West. In Western cultures big, toothy smiles are perceived better whereas in the East more calm, closed mouth smiles are preferred.

And of the countless more complex ways to measure the fuzzy and often hard to pin down emotion called happiness, most have been developed in Western countries.

The problem with that is they’re individualistic in their leanings. But when you look to Eastern countries there’s a stronger emphasis on happiness in terms of connectedness with others.

“The way researchers currently assess happiness is typically using a Western-biased measure that assumes one’s own happiness is largely independent of others, but we find that this viewpoint is by no means universal,” lead author Gwen Gardiner wrote in her paper.

“The East Asian world view has been described as one in which the self is more entwined with others, such that personal happiness depends on position connections in social relationships,” she added. “The Eastern ideologies of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism emphasize the interconnectedness of everyone and everything, prioritizing harmony and balance over individual achievement.” 

The study published today in the journal PLOS ONE used two tests two measure people’s happiness – one developed in Japan and one developed in the U.S.

The researchers had more than 15,000 university students from 63 countries across six continents volunteer to take both happiness tests.

What they found was that the test which emphasized interdependence was more reliable in countries that are more culturally similar to Japan, such as other East Asian countries, while the independence-focused test was more reliable in countries more similar to the U.S., such as Western European countries.

And while the Japanese-designed test was slightly less reliable than the U.S.-designed test, it was more consistently reliable across countries.

“For us, this result was particularly interesting and surprising because, typically, the U.S. and Japan are the prototypical countries used to highlight cross-cultural differences in cultural psychology,” said Gardiner. “But in this case, they were much more similar to each other.”

But even still both tests weren’t reliable in African or Middle Eastern countries. Future studies should consider new measures for those world regions, the authors wrote.

And it’s not just cultural differences that cause happiness measures to be flawed.

As Timothy Bond and Kevin Lang point out in their study published in the Journal of Political Economy last year, the way people feel happiness is inherently subjective, so surveys that ask people to rate their own happiness will be always be flawed.

“Happiness research usually asks subjects to rank their happiness on a scale, sometimes with as little as three points: ‘not too happy,’ ‘pretty happy’ and ‘very happy.’ But not everyone who says they’re pretty happy feels the same,” explained Bond from the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, in an interview.

And while that is frustrating from a scientific point of view, the problem is deeper.

For nearly a decade countries have been shifting to use happiness data to make decisions and guide policy. But as many experts point out, using something as vague and complex as an imprecise human emotion to make decisions is a recipe for disaster.

One can only imagine what decisions will be made if countries are using happiness data from this year… if there is any.