Happiness really comes for free: study

Economic growth is often prescribed as a safe way to increase the well-being of people in low-income countries, but a study led by McGill and the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA- UAB) suggests that there may be good reason to question this assumption. The researchers tried to find out how people rate their subjective well-being in societies where money plays a minimal role, and which is usually not included in global happiness surveys. They found that the majority of people reported remarkably high levels of happiness. This was especially true in communities with the lowest levels of income, where citizens reported a degree of happiness comparable to those in Scandinavian countries that usually rate the highest in the world. The results suggest that high levels of subjective well-being can be achieved with minimal monetization, challenging the perception that economic growth will automatically increase life satisfaction among low-income populations.

Measure happiness

To investigate how monetization affects people’s sense of well-being, the researchers spent time in different small-income fishing communities, with varying degrees of income, in the Solomon Islands and Bangladesh, two very low-income countries. Over the course of a few months, with the help of local translators, they interviewed citizens in both rural and urban areas a number of times. The interviews, which took place in person and through telephone calls at unexpected moments, were designed to elicit information about what happiness entails for the students, as well as to get a feel for their passing moods, their lifestyle, fishing activities, household income. and level of market integration.

In total, the researchers interviewed 678 people, ranging from the mid-twenties to early fifties, with an average age of about 37. Nearly 85% of the study participants were men. The excessive number of men in the study was due to the fact that cultural norms in Bangladesh made it difficult to interview women. In the Solomon Islands, the answers to men’s and women’s study questions were not significantly different. However, this does not necessarily apply to the situation in Bangladesh, as men and women’s social realities and lifestyles differ so much. Further research will need to discuss whether gender-related societal norms have an effect on the association found in this study.

Early stages of monetization can be detrimental to happiness

The researchers found that residents in the communities where money is used more, such as in urban Bangladesh, reported lower levels of happiness.

“Our study suggests possible ways to achieve happiness that are not related to high income and material wealth,” said Eric Galbraith, a professor in McGill’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and senior author of the study, who recently in PLOS Een. “This is important because if we can repeat these results elsewhere and determine the factors that contribute to subjective well-being, it can help us circumvent some of the environmental costs associated with achieving social well-being in the least developed countries. “

“On low-income sites, we deserve that people have reported a greater proportion of the time they spend with the family and have contact with nature as a responsibility to make them happy,” explains Sara Miñarro, lead author of the study involving a postdoctoral research fellow at (ICTA-UAB). “But with increasing monetization, we have found that the social and economic factors commonly recognized in industrialized countries have played a greater role. Overall, our findings suggest that monetization, especially in its early stages, is actually detrimental to happiness. can be.”

Interestingly, although other research has found that technology and access to information from distant cultures with different lifestyles can influence people’s sense of well-being by offering standards with which people compare their own lives, this does not seem to be the case in this case. be not. communities.

“This work contributes to a growing awareness that important support for happiness is not in principle related to economic production,” adds Chris Barrington-Leigh, a professor at McGill’s Bieler School of the Environment. “When people are comfortable, safe and free to enjoy life in a strong community, they are happy – whether they earn money or not.”