New research published in positive psychology journal It suggests that collective well-being depends more on building supportive communities than simply on individuals pursuing personal pleasure. This research provides evidence that a communitarian approach that fosters an environment in which societies care for others can be highly effective in increasing national well-being.
Understanding the factors associated with improved well-being is a major goal of social science and public policy. Ewa Parikot, a postdoctoral researcher at the Macropsychology Laboratory at the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, pointed out that there can be a disconnect between individual happiness and collective happiness. “Most previous research has focused on what makes individuals happy and satisfied,” Palikot says. “We know very little about what makes society as a whole happy.”
In some cases, what brings satisfaction to an individual does not necessarily contribute to the well-being of society as a whole. “Furthermore, factors that enhance individual well-being do not necessarily contribute to the well-being of society as a whole, and vice versa,” she explained.
For example, expressing negative emotions is healthy for individuals and can help relieve stress and frustration. However, living in a society where everyone expresses negative opinions frequently can lower the mood of the entire country. Although being a highly tolerant person does not necessarily make oneself happier than being prejudiced, living among tolerant people tends to make everyone in the society happier.
These differences highlight how the path to individual joy can diverge from the path to collective joy. To understand these complex power relations, the authors proposed two different routes to national well-being. The individualistic pathway assumes that if people take care of their own personal well-being, society as a whole will naturally become happier.
The Communitarian Path suggests alternative routes. This suggests that society needs to create supportive situations in which individuals lift up those around them. “We wanted to bring these findings together and provide a comprehensive picture of the mechanisms that contribute to societal well-being, based on a single global dataset, and identify which of them are most important,” Palikot told PsyPost.
To evaluate these theories, researchers analyzed data from the World Values Survey, a large-scale international research project. The sample included exactly 97,220 citizens from 66 countries, providing a large and diverse pool of information. Scientists focused on two main outcomes: happiness and life satisfaction.
Happiness was measured as an emotional state involving positive emotions such as joy and satisfaction. Life satisfaction was measured as a cognitive assessment. This means the researchers assessed how people think about their life situations and whether their long-term goals are actually being achieved.
Researchers looked at more than 200 different social and psychological variables to see which predicted higher levels of happiness. The authors used complex statistical models to look at effects at both the individual and country levels. This multi-layered approach now allows us to see whether a particular trait directly benefits the person who possesses it, or whether it benefits society as a whole.
We also controlled for factors such as age, gender, education, social status, and national economic wealth to ensure our findings were accurate. By taking these external variables into account, we can identify the true drivers of happiness. Scientists have identified 56 specific mechanisms that are significantly associated with happiness and life satisfaction.
They integrated these 56 mechanisms into five broad categories, or drivers, of social well-being. The first driving force is a society that enables the liberation of the individual. This includes empowering people to make their own choices, such as advocating for equal rights, gender equality, and inclusion of minority groups such as immigrants.
It turns out that the forces of liberation operate almost entirely through communitarian channels. Fighting for equality did not necessarily make the advocates themselves happy. However, living in an inclusive society has increased the average happiness of the population as a whole.
The second thrust was to promote Enlightenment ideas and institutions. This category includes evaluations of science, human rights, and democratic participation. It involves a culture that relies on reason and critical thinking rather than rigid traditional dogma. The authors found that embracing these ideals works through both channels, directly benefiting individuals and shaping better social conditions.
The third driver involves meeting basic human needs, such as access to food, shelter, and health care. When individuals feel secure in these basic resources, they report much higher levels of personal well-being. This drive operates primarily through an individualistic route. That is, meeting one’s economic and physical needs increases one’s own well-being, but does not inherently create a happier social situation for others.
The fourth driver, providing effective governance and security institutions, operates similarly. Trusting institutions such as the police, banks, and the justice system greatly improves an individual’s personal well-being. When people believe that their systems are working well, they feel protected, and this dynamic operates primarily through individualistic channels.
The fifth driver preferred close ties within the group and revealed complex relationships. “One of the most surprising findings is that some mechanisms operate in opposite directions at the individual and societal levels,” Palikot said. “For example, feeling more connected to one’s neighborhood can lead to an increased sense of personal well-being.”
“But societies that place more value overall on close community connections tend to be less happy,” she continued. “This suggests that mechanisms that promote individual well-being do not necessarily lead to increased social satisfaction.”
Researchers suggest that too strong regional ties can lead to social rifts. When people trust only their own family and neighbors, they can become prejudiced against outsiders. This widespread lack of social trust can undermine the well-being of the population as a whole, showing how local ties can backfire on a national scale.
By comparing all of these drivers, researchers determined which broad pathways were most effective. “The main message is that there is no single factor that determines a society’s happiness,” Palikot explained. “Instead, we identified five broad drivers of well-being that can act simultaneously at both the individual and societal levels.”
“We found that mechanisms that create social environments that benefit others are better at explaining differences in well-being between societies than mechanisms that focus solely on individual happiness and life satisfaction,” she added. “This suggests that public policies aimed at creating open, fair, and cooperative societies can have a greater impact on societal well-being than policies that focus solely 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. “Having the freedom to meet our basic needs and pursue our personal goals is 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 have certain limitations, especially regarding causality. “It is also important to remember that our study is correlational and therefore cannot establish causation,” Palikot said. Future research will need to track changes over many years to see whether changes in cultural values directly cause long-term changes in national mood.
Palikot also cautioned against underestimating the value of personal fulfillment. “One important point is that our findings should not be interpreted as suggesting that individual well-being is not important,” she cautioned. “On the contrary, meeting basic needs, being healthy, and feeling in control of one’s life remain essential to well-being.”
In this study, we conceptualized societal well-being simply as the average level of individual well-being in a particular country. Other cultural models may view group well-being differently, with subjective well-being being more than just happiness.
“This study is part of a broader research program on cultural differences in subjective well-being,” Palikot said. “In our current research, we want to go beyond the traditional view of happiness as happiness or life satisfaction and investigate what people in different cultures consider to be essential elements 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 value their lives, but also what they believe a good life should look like,” she explained.
Experts will further investigate the precise tipping point at which close regional ties cease to be beneficial and begin to cause social divisions. “Another area of research will focus on mechanisms that appear to have opposite effects at different levels of analysis,” Palikot said.
“For example, trust in close others appears to be associated with lower levels of social well-being, while increasing individual life satisfaction,” she added. “We want to better understand why such mechanisms emerge and under what conditions they help or hinder different levels of well-being.”
The study, “World Map of Happiness: Mechanisms, Drivers, and Pathways to Social Well-Being,” was authored by Ewa Palikot, Brian W. Haas, Kosuke Takemura, and Kuba Chris.
