Cultural Evolution Shifts the Source of Happiness from Religion to Subjective Freedom
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Cultural Evolution Shifts the Source of Happiness from Religion to Subjective Freedom Michael Minkov1,2 · Christian Welzel3 · Michael Schachner4
© Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Numerous studies have reported a positive individual-level association between happiness and two psychologically distinct states of mind: religious faith and subjective freedom (a feeling of life control). Although the strength of these relationships varies across countries, no general pattern driving this variation has been shown so far. After surveying 40,534 randomly selected respondents from 43 nations, we find that in countries where happiness is more closely related to religious faith, it is less strongly associated with subjective freedom, and vice versa. We have also identified the driving force behind this inverse relationship. Rising individualism and emancipative values, as an outcome of modernization, diminish the importance of religious faith for people’s happiness, while increasing the importance of subjective freedom. We conclude that the dominant emancipatory direction of cultural evolution favors freedom over religion. Keywords Happiness · Subjective well-being · Religion · Subjective freedom · Individualism
1 Introduction A number of studies have found positive relationships between subjective well-being (SWB) and religiousness in various populations, regardless of the type of their religion: US Americans (Witter et al. 1985), Kuwaitis (Abdel-Khalek 2006), Iranians (Joshanloo 2011), Israeli Jews (Levin 2014), Israeli Palestinians (Abu-Raya 2016), and Greek Cypriots (Furnham and Christoforou 2007) among others. How exactly religiousness affects SWB is a controversial issue. Nevertheless, some studies have yielded plausible insights. For instance Lim and Putnam (2010) argue that religiousness enhances SWB through the support networks in which religious individuals participate. * Michael Minkov [email protected] 1
Varna University of Management, Sofia, Bulgaria
2
University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
3
Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Germany
4
Hofstede Insights Inc., Helsinki, Finland
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However, using World Values Survey data, Snoep (2008) found that the strength of the correlation between SWB (and particularly the “happiness” item) and religiousness is not consistent across nations: it is stronger, for instance, in the United States than in the Netherlands and Denmark. Moreover, Witter et al. (1985) reported that the magnitude of this relationship had fallen over time. These findings warrant a re-examination of the correlation between SWB and religiousness across contemporary nations. A particularly interesting question is whether the strength of this correlation varies randomly across societies or follows a logical pattern, for instance one associated with known cultural differences. Interestingly, SWB yields another widely-documented positive correlation across individuals. People tend to be happier when they believe they have more control over their lives—a
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