Personal Life Satisfaction as a Measure of Societal Happiness is an Individualistic Presumption: Evidence from Fifty Cou
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Personal Life Satisfaction as a Measure of Societal Happiness is an Individualistic Presumption: Evidence from Fifty Countries Kuba Krys, et al. [full author details at the end of the article] Accepted: 4 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Numerous studies document that societal happiness is correlated with individualism, but the nature of this phenomenon remains understudied. In the current paper, we address this gap and test the reasoning that individualism correlates with societal happiness because the most common measure of societal happiness (i.e., country-level aggregates of personal life satisfaction) is individualism-themed. With the data collected from 13,009 participants across fifty countries, we compare associations of four types of happiness (out of which three are more collectivism-themed than personal life satisfaction) with two different measures of individualism. We replicated previous findings by demonstrating that societal happiness measured as country-level aggregate of personal life satisfaction is correlated with individualism. Importantly though, we also found that the country-level aggregates of the collectivism-themed measures of happiness do not tend to be significantly correlated with individualism. Implications for happiness studies and for policy makers are signaled. Keywords Family happiness · Interdependent happiness · Life satisfaction · Selfconstruals · Individualism · Collectivism · Well-being · Culture
1 Introduction Many studies have demonstrated that societal happiness, measured as country-level average of personal life satisfaction, correlates with national levels of individualism (Diener et al. 1995; Hofstede 2001; Krys et al. 2019b; Steel et al. 2018). However, the nature of this association remains understudied. The purpose of this study is to explore details of this association as proposed by Krys et al. (2019c), viz., that the reason why individualism is associated with societal happiness is that the most common measure of societal happiness (i.e., personal life satisfaction) is individualism-themed. To do so, we measured more collectivism-themed types of happiness (e.g., family interdependent happiness) across fifty countries, and demonstrate that some of these more collectivism-themed types of societal happiness are not predicted by individualism, but by other features of national culture. In Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1090 2-020-00311-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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doing so, this study extends the current discussion on potential antecedents of societal happiness by showing that individualism is a pathway to one type of happiness only; there are other cultural pathways to other types of happiness.
2 Societal Happiness and Individualism Numerous large cross-country studies have documented that societal happiness is predicted by individualism—above and beyond other social, economic and cultural factor
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