Speaking of Psychology: Which countries are happiest and why? With Lara Aknin, PhD

The 2024 World Happiness Report, which ranks the happiness levels of countries around the world, found that young Americans are less happy than their peers in many other countries. Psychology professor Lara Aknin, PhD, an editor of the report, talks about how the report defines happiness, why young people’s happiness levels may have dropped in the U.S, what drives happiness, and why being generous makes people happy—even when they don’t have much to spare.

Lara Aknin, PhD, is a distinguished professor of social psychology at Simon Fraser University and a coeditor of the World Happiness Report. Her research interests lie at the intersection of social psychology, positive psychology, economics, and judgement and decision making. Her research questions often include the study of what makes people happy, the emotional consequences of kind or generous behavior, and the well-being outcomes of specific spending choices.

Kim Mills: The 2024 World Happiness Report, released in March, had some sobering news for North Americans. The report, which ranks the happiness levels of countries around the world, found that young people in the United States and Canada are less happy than ever before. In fact, Americans under age 30 are so unhappy that they pulled the overall ranking of the United States out of the top 20 for the first time since the report began more than a decade ago.

Today we're going to talk with one of the report's editors about its findings and about global trends in happiness. We'll also dig into what psychological research has to say about what really makes people happy. So why have young people's happiness levels dropped in North America compared with the rest of the world? How does happiness change over the lifespan? And what are some of the key drivers of happiness at any age? 

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Lara Aknin, a distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Helping and Happiness Lab at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Dr. Aknin was a coeditor of the 2024 World Happiness Report and has been involved in the report for the last 5 years. She studies the psychology of happiness, including what makes people happy and the emotional consequences of kind or generous behavior. Dr. Aknin was also chair of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Task Force of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission.

Dr. Aknin, thank you for joining me today.

Lara Aknin, PhD: Thank you for having me.

Mills: So why don't you start by telling us more about the World Happiness Report. Where did the data in the report come from? How many countries are included?

Aknin: So the World Happiness Report is an annual report issued every year. It's a collaborative effort put together by the Gallup Organization, the Oxford Wellbeing Research Center, the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions, and the editorial board of the World Happiness Report, where we really try to summarize the emerging, some of the best quality evidence on the science of wellbeing and share updated reports about how people evaluate their lives as a whole. So each issue has one key central chapter year by year that analyzes data, the most recent data from the Gallup World Poll that provides some of the best snapshots of planet Earth and how people are evaluating their lives these days.

And usually each report has kind of a central focus or theme—this year's report being on age, which I imagine we'll get into—and kind of delves into some of the most recent evidence on the topic. And so each chapter might incorporate some of its own unique evidence, but the central theme and the workhorse, if you will, the data that is really influential and allows us to of evaluate the evidence from a global stance is that from the Gallup World Poll, because it is an incredible data source providing nationally representative samples of people from over 136 countries around the globe.

Mills: So how is happiness measured and defined in this report?

Aknin: Happiness is defined in the World Happiness Report through several different measures, but kind of the key guiding central measure that we prioritize and investigate very deeply in Chapter 2 of the report is people's satisfaction with life or life evaluations. And this is drawn primarily from one central question called the Cantril Ladder in which people are asked to imagine their best possible life or their life, excuse me, on a ladder with 11 rungs. Down at the very bottom is a zero, which is where people would say this is the worst possible life they can imagine. And up at the very top is the 10th rung, basically people imagining their best possible life. And so each person is asked to imagine where they put themselves right now on this hypothetical 11-rung ladder.

Mills: How are the samples put together? I mean, it has to be pretty challenging to get nationally representative samples for over a hundred countries.

Aknin: It is a large endeavor and one that Gallup I think has been committed to for decades now. It is not an easy or cheap endeavor too. I think every year the Gallup organization sets out to investigate and reach large fractions of the population that meet national compositions along various dimensions. Now in some countries like Canada and the United States in wealthier regions of the world, this is perhaps a little less time and effort intensive in that many people can be reached by phone and by email through online surveys. But in some parts of the world and in rural communities and hard to reach places, this becomes a much more challenging endeavor because we don't just want representative samples of wealthy urban regions. We want representative samples of the world at large. And so the Gallup organization takes great efforts to go to these hard to reach places. So Gallup sends their researchers out door to door to speak to individuals to really capture the views, the perspectives, the insights of people around the world, not just in easy-to-reach locations, but in the difficult areas to reach as well.

Mills: So for those of us in North America, the big news was the drop in happiness among young adults. Can you talk about that? How are the different levels of happiness between younger and older adults in the U.S., how do they compare with the rest of the world now?

Aknin: Certainly, yes. One of this year's headline findings that received a lot of attention in North America was this difference in happiness across the lifespan and particularly low levels of life satisfaction reported among youth. So usually when we start analyzing the data of previous years of reports, we don't section by age, and so we just kind of see these overall averages. But this year, as a result of the theme of age differences in happiness, we split by older adults, middle adulthood and younger adults. And when we do so, we found that the typical trend in happiness is quite divergent in North America. So specifically in most places around the world, young adults report some of the highest levels of happiness. And then as people kind of reach their middle adulthood, their 30s, 40s, happiness tends to decline over the lifespan kind of reaching this nadir, this bottom of the U-shaped curve, if you will, as people are in their 40s, people often having many people having children at home, dealing with stresses of that. Sometimes aging parents, sometimes stress at work as people are usually at some of their highest performing years at work. And then as people kind of increase in age through their 50s, 60s and so on, happiness tends to increase. And so typically the pattern around the world is a U-shaped curve in happiness.

This year when we split the data by age and looked at various world regions, we saw a very surprising finding or a new trend emerging in the data, a relatively new trend such that young adults—that is those under 30 in North America, driven heavily by the United States, are reporting some of the lowest levels of life satisfaction we've seen for quite some time. And so this typical U-shape that I was just describing, which is consistent when we look at global data, just becomes an upward trend in the United States such that young adults are reporting some of the lowest levels of wellbeing and wellbeing tends to increase across the lifespan.

And so this was a pretty striking finding in Chapter 2 of the World Happiness Report. It often receives a lot of attention because we rank nations by their self-reported happiness levels. The United States this year as a whole came in just shy of the top 20. And part of the reason we think that the United States’ ranking fell so precipitously this year was because the life satisfaction of young adults was really dragging it down. In fact, if we just look at the life satisfaction rankings across countries for young adults, the United States is in the 62nd position, I believe. And so it's really pulling down the weighted average of national happiness for the United States.

Mills: I mentioned in the introduction that you were the chair of the mental health and wellbeing task force of the Lancet COVID-19 commission. Do you think that we're seeing lingering effects on people's happiness from the pandemic, especially among younger people?

Aknin: I think the pandemic has something to do with it. So when I was working with The Lancet’s COVID-19 Mental Health Commission, we did investigate the data on mental health and a lot of related psychological wellbeing variables. And in fact, we did see some striking trends around the world where some of the most highly impacted individuals, especially in early days of the pandemic, but remained over time as well, were young individuals, especially those with young kids at home and precarious financial situations. And so when we step back and try to understand what is going on with young people, particularly in North America, and that's worth highlighting, Kim, because the previous conversation we were just chatting about with the precipitous drop in wellbeing in the United States driven by the young is not necessarily a global phenomenon.

This is something we're seeing primarily in North America and some western regions around the world, but in other parts of the world like central and Eastern Europe, young adults are reporting some of the highest levels of happiness. And so it's interesting to think about how this interacts with Covid and what might be a more consistent global feature and might be a more localized kind of difference in certain places and perhaps how countries handled COVID-19. What kind of supports were available through the governments and through local communities.

Mills: What might be happening in Central and Eastern Europe? I wonder particularly because I mean they're very close to a war zone for a lot of folks. So why are we seeing, and I'm talking about Ukraine, why are we seeing happiness levels higher there, do you think?

Aknin: I don't know if we have any particular singular reason. I mean the unique drop in North America and the United States might have something to do with expectations, might have something to do with social relationships. So there might be one thing happening in North American data that is driving that response and might be something uniquely different in Eastern Europe and Central Europe. And so some of these trends have been slowly emerging over time, not necessarily just recently emerged since Ukraine, but we think it might have something to do with increased new perspectives about what life might now bring.

So previous generations growing up in Eastern and Central Europe may have had limited ideas about what prosperity an individual might be able to have, what kind of promise or opportunities were available to young individuals at the time, perhaps due to government trends or perhaps due to parents or previous generational expectations. But now as the world has become more global, and I think some of these pressures from the government have been removed and people see a more prosperous future, this kind of hope, this optimism and this opportunity might be opening up a sense of optimism and bright opportunity for younger individuals as they look ahead and as they rate their current life evaluations in the moment.

Mills: You mentioned earlier that this was the first year that the report looked at age differences in such detail. Why did you all decide to make age one of the main focal points of the report this year?

Aknin: I think part of it was pragmatic as a response. So some global data on young individuals, especially young adults, only becomes available every few years. And so for instance, the child youth data available from the World Health Organization and from the OECD nations is only available every so often. And so although we have been thinking broadly about the importance of wellbeing in younger age groups over for quite some time, we wanted to wait until some of the best available data were available to kind of mine and understand. But I think it is also kind of a theoretical question of great interest for the editorial team. Many of us know that some of the best predictors of how people rate their lives as a whole as adults have to do with how they rate their lives as young adults. And it's not just, I mean, part of it is this direct effect, but part of it is that your happiness as a young adult kind of has some interesting predictive abilities on later life success.

So for instance, happier individuals tend to earn more money, they tend to have stronger relationships, they tend to be more engaged citizens. And so understanding youth wellbeing was one motivational factor to try to broaden our understanding beyond just the Gallup World Poll data, which often starts at the age of 15. And so this year's report allowed us to kind of look at a younger age through other data sets that were now available at this kind of time-locked period. But also because we were theoretically intrigued by this question as the emerging evidence starts to suggest and has been pointing us in this direction for quite some time, that youth wellbeing might be indicative and important for understanding global trends in wellbeing, but also global trends and other meaningful variables.

Mills: Did you find any differences based on gender? I mean, are men and women equally happy in the world?

Aknin: There is surprisingly little difference when we look at global data. So when we step back and look at data points from over 130 countries, there are very minor differences in gender, especially when we focus in on the wealthier nations. There seems to be very little differences in gender across the lifespan. That being said, if we were to dive down into some minutia in specific countries, in specific regions, and in specific ages, there are differences, some that are predictable and some that are not. But one striking trend is especially young women in North America have been reporting some of lower levels of wellbeing for quite some time, especially since COVID, relating to your earlier question. And so that is one gender difference that has been receiving quite a bit of attention over the past several years.

Mills: What about differences between people in developed versus less developed countries? I'm wondering how much impact money or financial security has on people's level of happiness?

Aknin: Yeah, there are some striking differences in wealthier nations and less wealthy nations. That is one of the things we pay some attention to in Chapter 2. So I've been alluding to this fact that we rank countries by their self-reported life satisfaction in Chapter 2. Near the top of the list tends to be wealthier nations as opposed to countries at the bottom. And one of the main efforts of Chapter 2 is to try to understand what helps explain these global variations in life satisfaction ratings. And gross domestic product or GDP per capita seems to be one of the core explanatory variables. And I don't think that's ultimately all that surprising. Wealthier nations are able to often provide a lot of sense of security and opportunity and simply practical goods like clean water to some of their citizens. And so that's extremely important for living a healthy, happy life.

But I think there are also other variables in the report that help explain these national differences that are important to highlight too. So in addition to GDP per capita, how people, their healthy life expectancy is a key predictor of countries that are at the top versus the bottom of the scale. So too is some really important social variables, like whether you have someone to count on in times of need and also the level of generosity that people engage in. So I think GDP per capita is certainly a key predictor, but so are some other really meaningful and important variables as well.

Mills: Well, I want to talk for a minute or two about Finland. I recently read a news story about that country, which is it almost always ranks number one or very high on the World Happiness Report. And it was first again this year. This article quoted some Finnish people who said more or less, it's not that they're happy all the time, it's more that they have more reasonable expectations for happiness that are easier to meet. And I just wanted your take on that. To what extent do people's expectations of happiness levels play into how they report that they feel?

Aknin: So many interesting tidbits in that question, but yes. So first and foremost, Finland did top the charts again this year. I believe it's the seventh year in a row. So this year was not an anomaly. Finland seems to be doing something right that keeps them up at the top along—with many of the Scandinavian countries that have consistently been in the top 10. So why might that be? I think there are lots of factors, and it's hard to pinpoint just one, but I think moderate expectations matter. So as we talked about, the key measure that we use to rank nations is how people evaluate themselves on this Cantril Ladder from the worst possible life they can imagine to the best possible life. And so part of that is the objective reality of people are what people are living in. But the other part of it is where people see themselves relative to their expectations.

And so if your expectations are relatively modest, if you're not imagining a gold-plated toilet seat and multiple yachts to travel the world, then perhaps you're a little closer to the top. But if that is your expectation of success in the best possible life, it might be harder to achieve. And so I think there's something there to these more modest expectations. And I also think it's worth pointing out that although we call this the World Happiness Report, I think a lot of people imagine happy is kind of this joyful, exuberant, skipping down the street kind of emotion. But because our main metric used in Chapter 2 is really about people's life satisfaction on this imagined or personally relative scale, I think that helps us understand why it's not just people skipping down the streets of Finland, but maybe being content with the lives that they have and perhaps their relatively modest expectations of where they do fall.

Mills: Is there any plan to change the name to the World Contentment Report? Would that be more accurate?

Aknin: Well, so something about satisfaction I think might be, but the happiness verbiage does draw people in. I think that's an accessible term that many people kind of gravitate and understand.

Mills: So raising, moving to the other side of the globe, the world of happiness, researchers were able to include India for the first time this year. Why is that significant and what did you find?

Aknin: Yeah, this year's report was the first to be able to examine India, which is an incredible addition because India is one of the world's most populated regions. And so to be able to take a deep dive into this extremely populated country is important for understanding where the world is in terms of global happiness levels. It's also important because this year's report provided by the team in India was able to present some of the first data from a country, a national survey, trying to understand older adulthood in India. And so this plans to be a longitudinal data set that we'll be capturing and tracking the wellbeing of older adults in India. But this is the first year snapshot. But it's incredible because I think it shows a large scale effort to try to understand wellbeing of citizens around the globe in such a populated area or nation of the world, but also because India has some of the, not just one of the largest populations, but one of the largest aging populations in the world.

And so we were really excited to kind of see these efforts and to see what is being learned in such pretty monumental investigation into the wellbeing within a nation. What did we learn from that chapter in particular? There are a lot of interesting findings, but I think one of the important underlying messages is that many of the findings we see from higher level, from higher income countries seem to be parallel in the data collected in India as well. So for instance, people with higher levels of education, people who tend to be partnered or married tend to report higher levels of happiness. And while that might seem not all that surprising data collection needs to expand to other countries and cultures and populations around the world, not just high income countries to capture how people are experiencing their lives. And so I think this look into how people are reporting their lives in one of the most populated countries in the world is important to see parallels, and it's important to see differences where they do exist.

Mills: Let's change gears for a minute and talk about your research. Most of your work focuses on how being generous and doing things for other people tends to make people happy. Do you have any favorite studies that you want to talk about that can illustrate this?

Aknin: Yes. This is one of my favorite topics, so I could go on for quite some time, but maybe I'll tell you about two. The first was one of the earliest studies we ran, but I think one of the clearest to explain the general question that I'm after. So in one of my first studies in graduate school, I had the pleasure of going out on the university campus in the morning hours and inviting people to participate in a short study on what we call just everyday spending habits. And if the people we spoke to were so inclined, they were given, they were randomly assigned to one of four conditions in our experiment, which involved me digging into my backpack, pulling out an envelope that had one of two different monetary amounts inside. So half of the folks were given a $5 bill, the other half were given a $20 bill.

And along with the bill that they received, it was a small slip of paper with some spending instructions. And so critically, half of these folks were asked to spend the money by the end of the day on a small gift for themselves, and the other half were asked to spend the money on a gift for someone else or a charitable donation, and we let them go on their merry way. They did whatever they wanted to do with this money. We asked them to spend it by 5 o'clock, and then a research assistant called them at the end of the day to see how they were feeling. And importantly, this research assistant didn't know what they had been asked to do or how they had been asked to spend the money. And we asked them in this phone call to report how happy they were feeling.

And what we found was that it didn't matter so much how much money people had received to spend. What really mattered for their happiness at the end of the day was who they spent the money on, such that people who spent the money on others were significantly happier than those who spent on themselves. And this question about whether being generous and specifically whether being generous with our financial resources is something that has fascinated me now for over a decade. And I've really been trying to understand, is this something that those of us living in North America who are fortunate enough to have extra disposable income might simply get to enjoy or whether this is something that is much more consistent to the human experience, whether it might be something we can see in most countries and cultures across the age spectrum and across different lived experiences. And so we've run a number of studies. I've had the great pleasure of collaborating with people from all around the world, but the other study I wanted to tell you about is with young kids, because I wondered at what age do we begin to find giving rewarding? And so partnering with a developmental psychologist and another social psychologist, we ran these studies where we got toddlers just under the age of 2 to come into the lab with a parent. They were taken through a five-phase, very brief, it was just a few minutes, but they saw a small puppet show and they got to interact with the puppets. So in the first phase, they met a stuffed animal monkey who liked they found out likes eating treats. Then this child themselves received a few treats and they got to eat them. They were just edible crackers that kids really enjoy.

And then critically, over the next minute or so, they got the chance to give one of their own treats to the puppet. They got to watch as the experimenter gave a treat to the puppet, or they got to give one of the experimenters treats to the puppet. So they either got to engage in costly giving or not costly giving. And every time the puppet got a treat, they ate it in a very excitable way, and we wanted to know how the kids felt when they got to give. And so we learned that you can't just ask 2-year-olds how happy they are because they say they're happy all the time. So instead, what we did was we set up a video camera over their shoulder and we captured their facial expressions. And later we coded these for the extent to which the kids were smiling. And what we found I think was really fascinating. So first and foremost, we found that kids smiled more when they gave away treats to the puppet than when they received the treats themselves. But critically, what I thought was so interesting and exciting was that kids smiled more when they gave away a treat that belonged to them than when they gave away an identical treat that didn't. And so what my colleagues and I argued is that even under the age of 2, we see some evidence for the fact that people might feel good when they give, and perhaps especially when it involves a sense of self-sacrifice.

Mills: What happens when people don't have enough resources for themselves? If you're struggling with poverty or other hardships, can being generous still make you feel happy?

Aknin: I think so. I mean, I kind of alluded to this in my last question. So I've had the good fortune of working with collaborators from all around the world to try to test this question in places where people might have objectively very little to give. And the short answer is we see that even in places where people, and among samples where people are having trouble meeting their own basic needs, they also feel good when they give. And I think one kind of important feature of the work that sometimes gets lost is that people don't need to be giving a lot to feel good about giving. So in many of our experiments, people are giving the equivalent of $2. They're buying a chocolate bar for a sick kid at a local children's hospital or buying a very similar chocolate bar for themselves. It doesn't need to be these momentous donations. You don't need to be gifting a wing at the library to feel good about giving. These small acts of generosity seem to be enough to lead us to feel good about giving. And part of the reason I think for that is that we're just extremely social creatures, and these small acts of giving and generosity allowed us to build and facilitate and maintain these relationships we have with other people.

Mills: Let me ask you about another area you've been doing some research in. You published a study recently with another scientist we've had on Speaking of Psychology, Gillian Sandstrom, that looked at how people feel about reaching out to old friends. What inspired that study and what did you find?

Aknin: Sure. Yeah. Gillian is a good friend of mine, and it was such a pleasure to work on this with her because it was a very clear example of what we joke about as me search, not research, me search, because she and I have been friends since we were graduate school buddies. And she moved to the U.K., I stayed in Canada, and although we've had projects to keep us connected over the years, those kind of wax and wane. And unfortunately because I'm not good at keeping in touch when projects end, I don't get to speak to her as regularly. And about 2 years ago, on New Year's Day or around New Year's, I realized that I hadn't spoken to her. I really missed her. So I sent a text message saying, I miss you. We should find a new project to work on so we can connect.

Originally, the project was designed to look at what kind of situations encourage people to reach out to old friends. Like I had taken New Year's as an opportunity, this inspiration, this excuse if you will, to reach out to Gillian. But as we started exploring this question, we just found that no matter what kind of situations we threw at people as excuses to reach out to old friends, they were particularly reluctant to do so. And so we've spent the last two years trying to explore whether people have old friends, the people that they care about, but they've lost touch with. And the answer seems to be yes. What excuses people think are valid to reach out to old friends. The short story is not many. The only one that seems that people will endorse is reaching out for a birthday. And then we tried to find ways, well, we tried to benchmark this reluctance. We found that people are as willing to reach out to an old friend as they are to pick up garbage and talk to a complete stranger. And then we tried to figure out ways to get people to do it. And that wasn't easy. We found one way, but we hit a lot of roadblocks before we found one successful intervention.

Mills: And what is that?

Aknin: The successful intervention is getting people to basically do a warmup or practice activity. So in one experiment, we recruited about 200 people on a university campus. All of these individuals told us that they had an old friend—that is someone they care about, but they've lost touch with. This is also someone who they think would be happy to hear from them and they have contact information for. And then one group was randomly assigned to this warmup practice task where they sent a couple messages to current friends and family. The other half was randomly assigned to simply browse Facebook or any social media they choose. So it was kind of a passive social comparison. And then when three minutes were up, we asked people to draft a message to an old friend, and we gave them the opportunity to send it. And what we found was in our control condition, very similar to our previous experiments, only about 30% of people were willing to hit send that message they had just drafted. But in the experimental condition where people had practiced for 3 minutes prior, it was almost double that it was just over 50%.

Mills: What are you working on now? What are the big questions you're trying to answer?

Aknin: Well, some of these questions are kind of emerging from this, reaching out to old friends question, trying to understand who are the individuals that are most likely to reach out and how people feel when they do. Students in my lab are also very interested in multiple forms of generosity, so advice giving, food sharing, and how that makes people feel. And also, we have a couple projects looking at how people express their thanks to one another and what is some of the most meaningful content in a gratitude message.

Mills: That all sounds interesting and uplifting, the kind of research that makes you happy to do, right?

Aknin: Certainly.

Mills: Well, I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been very interesting. Thank you, Dr. Aknin.

Aknin: Thank you.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org, or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can reach us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.