Culture and Happiness
Cultural Effects in Happiness Research
Culture and Happiness
• An analogy…
– Everyone enjoys humor, but each cultural group is drawn to particular types of humor.
– Two questions
• What are the most popular types of joke in each culture?
( What are the culture-specific contents of happiness?)
• Whether the jokes in some cultures are intrinsically more hilarious than those of others? ( Why are some cultures happier than others?)
Culture and Happiness (cont.)
• What makes up happiness in different cultures?
– Essay on “What is happiness?
• Asian respondents expressed the desire for a balanced emotional life and emphasized the importance of
fulfilling social expectations
– Fundamental inter-connectedness between self and significant others
• The Americans asserted the importance of personal agency over social restrictions
– Emphasizing the elements that promote, signify, and maintain a highly independent and agentic mode of being.
Culture and Happiness (cont.)
– People in collectivist culture,
• Are less inclined to equate an emotionally happy life with a good satisfying life
• Pay greater attention to how their life is appraised by significant others than to their inner emotion in their life satisfaction judgment
– In East Asian countries, happiness is more strongly associated with interpersonally engaging emotions (e.g., friendly feeling)
• In the U.S., it is more closely related with
interpersonally disengaging emotions (e.g., pride)
Culture and Happiness (cont.)
• Why are some cultures happier than others?
– Individualistic nations are happier than collectivistic nations
• Not fully explained by economic or political factors.
• Rice and Steele (2004)
Culture and Happiness (cont.)
• Collectivism
– Idealize the type of self that is able to keep one’s desires in check for the greater goods of the family, group, and community
– Self-regulation is sanctioned over self-expression
• Individualism
– The normative cultural expectation is that each person should be self-directive and self-sufficient
– Self-actualization is the key word of ideal living
• Which one has an edge in producing “happy life”?
Culture and Happiness (cont.)
• Koreans…
– Are more likely than individualists to curb their instinctive, self-gratifying desires (often including
personal happiness) in their bargain for social approval
• Question?
– Some might argue that social gains (e.g., social
approval) may fully compensate for the negatives of giving up personal desires in collectivist cultures.
• The social gains are positively related with happiness in collectivist cultures, but still, it is not happiness itself.
Culture and Happiness (cont.)
• Empirical findings from Korean university students
– SWB is related positively with independent self-construal and negatively with inter-dependent self-view
• Chinese students also reported that the frequency of experiencing
positive emotions is related more closely with the independent than the interdependent self
• Message from above findings
– “Those who enjoy high levels of happiness are people who have psychological disposition that fit into the cultural template (e.g., being interdependent in collectivist cultures)” Wrong!
– Regardless of cultural context, the independent cultural styles of thinking and behaving have a more direct connection to personal happiness.
Culture and Happiness (cont.)
• Lesson from the relative standards approach
Social comparison may be harmful … The East Asian self-system,
Is optimized for maintaining social connection with others
Evaluate itself more often by concrete social criteria (e.g., gaining admission to a top college)
Chronic reliance on explicit external criteria, such as social comparison information, is related with lower levels of
SWB
No one can satisfy all the social standards
Culture and Happiness (cont.)
• One more cultural difference
– Unlike Western cultural members, East Asians take a more dialectic perspective on the relationship
between happiness and unhappiness
• The happiness that has linearly increased since the past is expected to reverse its trajectory by Chinese, whereas Americans believe that the trend will continue.
