Scientists identify five key factors linked to happiness across 66 countries

A new study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology suggests that collective well-being depends more on building supportive communities than on individuals simply pursuing their own personal joy. The research provides evidence that a communitarian approach, where societies foster environments that care for others, is highly effective at boosting a nation’s overall happiness.

Understanding the factors linked to improved well-being is a primary goal in social science and public policy. Ewa Palikot, a postdoctoral researcher in the Macropsychology Lab at the Institute of Psychology at the Polish Academy of Sciences, noted that personal and collective well-being can diverge. “Most previous research has focused on what makes individual people happy and satisfied,” Palikot said. “Much less is known about what makes entire societies happy.”

Sometimes, what brings satisfaction to an individual does not necessarily contribute to the happiness of their wider society. “Moreover, factors that increase an individual’s well-being do not necessarily contribute to the happiness of society as a whole, and vice versa,” she explained.

For instance, expressing negative emotions can be healthy for an individual, helping to release stress and frustration. Yet, living in a society where everyone frequently expresses negativity can lower the nation’s overall mood. Being a highly tolerant person does not always boost one’s own happiness compared to being prejudiced, but living among tolerant people tends to increase the happiness of everyone in that society.

These differences highlight that pathways to personal joy can diverge from pathways to collective joy. To make sense of these complex dynamics, the authors proposed two distinct routes to national well-being. The individualistic pathway assumes that if people take care of their own personal happiness, the whole society will naturally become happier.

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The communitarian pathway proposes an alternative route. It suggests that society must create a supportive context in which individuals lift up the people around them. “We wanted to bring these findings together and provide a comprehensive picture, based on a one global dataset, of the mechanisms that contribute to societal happiness and identify which of them matter the most,” Palikot told PsyPost.

To evaluate these theories, the researchers analyzed data from the World Values Survey, a large international research project. The sample included exactly 97,220 citizens across 66 different countries, providing a vast and diverse pool of information. The scientists looked at two main outcomes, which were happiness and life satisfaction.

Happiness was measured as an emotional state, involving positive feelings like joy and contentment. Life satisfaction was measured as a cognitive evaluation. This means the researchers evaluated how people think about their life circumstances and whether their long-term goals are being met in reality.

The researchers examined more than 200 different social and psychological variables to see which ones predicted higher well-being. The authors used complex statistical models to observe effects at both the individual level and the country level. This layered method allowed them to see if a specific trait directly helped the person who held it, or if it benefited the broader society.

They also controlled for factors like age, gender, education, social status, and national economic wealth to ensure their findings were accurate. By factoring in these outside variables, they could isolate the true drivers of well-being. The scientists identified 56 specific mechanisms that were significantly associated with happiness or life satisfaction.

They synthesized these 56 mechanisms into five broad categories, or drivers, of societal happiness. The first driver is a society that allows for individual emancipation. This involves empowering people to make autonomous choices, such as advocating for equal rights, gender equality, and the acceptance of minority groups like immigrants.

The emancipation driver was found to operate almost entirely through the communitarian pathway. Fighting for equality did not necessarily make the advocates themselves happier. However, living in an inclusive society raised the average happiness of the entire population.

The second driver is fostering Enlightenment ideas and institutions. This category includes valuing science, human rights, and democratic participation. It involves a culture that relies on reason and critical thinking rather than strict traditional dogma. The authors found that embracing these ideals operates through both pathways, directly benefiting the individual and shaping a better societal context.

The third driver involves satisfying basic human needs, such as access to food, shelter, and healthcare. When individuals feel secure in these basic resources, they report much higher levels of personal happiness. This driver operates mostly through the individualistic route, meaning that fulfilling personal financial and physical needs boosts one’s own well-being but does not inherently create a happier social context for others.

The fourth driver, providing effective governing and security institutions, behaves similarly. Trusting institutions like the police, banks, and the justice system strongly improves an individual’s personal happiness. When people believe their system functions well, they feel protected, but this driver operates primarily through the individualistic pathway.

The fifth driver, favoring close in-group ties, revealed a complex relationship. “One of the most surprising findings was that some mechanisms operate in opposite directions at the individual and societal levels,” Palikot said. “For example, feeling closely connected to one’s neighborhood is associated with greater individual happiness.”

“However, societies that place a stronger overall emphasis on close local ties tend to be less happy,” she continued. “This suggests that mechanisms promoting individual happiness do not always translate into greater societal satisfaction.”

The researchers suggest that overly strong local ties might create a fractured society. When people only trust their immediate family or neighborhood, they may develop prejudice against outsiders. This lack of broad social trust can harm the nation’s collective well-being, showing that local bonding can sometimes backfire on a national scale.

By comparing all these drivers, the researchers determined which broad pathway is most effective. “The main message is that no single factor determines how happy a society is,” Palikot explained. “Instead, we identified five broad drivers of happiness that can operate simultaneously at both the individual and the societal level.”

“We found that mechanisms creating a social environment that benefits other people explain differences in happiness between societies better than mechanisms focused only on individual happiness and life satisfaction,” she added. “This suggests that public policies aimed at building open, fair, and supportive societies may have a greater impact on societal happiness than policies focused exclusively on improving the lives of individual citizens.”

“Our findings show that a happy society is more than just a collection of happy individuals,” Palikot said. “Meeting basic needs and having the freedom to work on personal goals are important, but so is the social environment in which we live. Societies are happier when they create conditions that benefit everyone, for example, by promoting equality, freedom of choice, trust, human rights, and institutions that work for the common good.”

These findings come with certain limitations, particularly regarding cause-and-effect relationships. “It is also important to remember that our study is correlational, so it cannot establish causal relationships,” Palikot noted. Future studies would need to track changes over many years to confirm if shifting cultural values directly cause long-term changes in a nation’s mood.

Palikot also warned against dismissing the value of personal fulfillment. “One important point is that our findings should not be interpreted as suggesting that individual happiness is unimportant,” she cautioned. “On the contrary, meeting basic needs, being healthy, and feeling in control of one’s own life remain essential for one’s well-being.”

The research conceptualized societal happiness simply as the average level of individual happiness within a given country. Other cultural models might view collective happiness differently, and subjective well-being extends beyond just happiness.

“This study is part of a broader research program on cultural differences in subjective well-being,” Palikot said. “In our current work we want to move beyond the traditional view of well-being as happiness and life satisfaction and examine what people in different cultures consider to be the essential components of a good life.”

“Our goal is to develop a more comprehensive and culturally sensitive model of well-being that captures not only how people evaluate their lives, but also what they believe a good life should look like,” she explained.

Experts plan to further investigate the exact tipping point where close local ties stop being beneficial and start causing societal divisions. “Another line of research will focus on mechanisms that seem to have opposite effects at different levels of analysis,” Palikot said.

“For example, trust toward close others appears to increase individual life satisfaction while being associated with lower societal happiness,” she added. “We would like to better understand why such mechanisms emerge and under what conditions they help or hinder well-being at different levels.”

The study, “Global mapping of happiness: mechanisms, drivers, and pathways to societal happiness,” was authored by Ewa Palikot, Brian W. Haas, Kosuke Takemura, and Kuba Kryś.