Happiness really comes for free: study

Economic growth is often prescribed as a safe way to increase people’s well-being 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 a good reason to question that assumption. Researchers have begun to discover how people assess their subjective well-being in societies where money plays a minimal role and are generally not included in global happiness surveys. They found that most people reported remarkably high levels of happiness. This was especially true in communities with the lowest levels of monetization, where citizens reported a level of happiness comparable to that found in Scandinavian countries, which tend to have the highest rates 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.

Measuring happiness

To explore how monetization affects people’s sense of well-being, researchers spent time in several small fishing communities, with varying degrees of monetization, in the Solomon Islands and Bangladesh, two very low-income countries. For a few months, with the help of local translators, they interviewed citizens in rural and urban areas several times. The interviews, which took place in person and through calls at unexpected times, were designed to extract information about what constituted happiness for the study subjects, as well as to get a sense of their fleeting mood, their lifestyle, fishing activities. , home income and level of market integration.

In all, the researchers interviewed 678 people, with ages varying between 20 and 50 years, with an average age of about 37 years. Almost 85% of study participants were male. The disproportionate 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 responses of men and women to the study questions were not significantly different. However, this is not necessarily applicable to the situation in Bangladesh, as the social realities and lifestyles of men and women are very different. Further research will need to address whether social norms related to gender impact the association found in this study.

The early stages of monetization can be detrimental to happiness

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

“Our study suggests possible ways to achieve happiness that are not related to high incomes and material wealth,” says Eric Galbraith, professor in McGill’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and senior author of the study, which was recently published in PLOS One. “This is important because if we replicate these results elsewhere and can point out the factors that contribute to subjective well-being, it can help us to circumvent some of the environmental costs associated with achieving social well-being in less developed nations.”

“On less monetized sites, we found that people reported a greater proportion of time spent with family and contact with nature as being responsible for making them happy,” explains Sara Miñarro, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in (ICTA-UAB). “But with the increase in monetization, we found that the social and economic factors commonly recognized in industrialized countries played a bigger role. Overall, our findings suggest that monetization, especially in its early stages, may actually be detrimental to happiness.”

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

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