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The samples in Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and the UAE are more urban, more educated, and/or more affluent than the general population. The survey results for these markets should be viewed as reflecting the views of the more “connected” segment of their population.
It’s pointless survey.
It’s usually an annotation because Internet/phone penetration among the rural, uneducated, and poor in those countries isn’t great. They don’t have means to survey these people. Surveying the people who do have access to Internet is representative of what “normal people” feel.
The US has ~91% Internet penetration, while China only has 73% and India only 43%.
That’s a factor sure, but someone living in rural country and urban city will have different happiness index based on their living conditions and satisfaction drivers. So comparing X with Y = flawed results.
Isn’t happiness the goal? Why does it matter what their driver is?
Tell me you didn’t read the report without saying you didn’t read the report. Satisfaction drivers are the metrics for the happiness in that report.
Then your statement doesn’t make sense lol
The rural/urban divide isn’t unique to China or India or Brazil. It’s everywhere. Drivers are always different across the urban/rural divide.
That is the point. When you exclude that group of people only from 15 out of 32 surveyed countries, you skew the results for the whole survey. You can’t draw parallel conclusions from different samples.
The goal of this comparison is to compare urban-to-urban, because those countries which don’t have this exclusion have relatively tiny rural populations.
“This survey doesn’t fit my worldview so it’s pointless.”
I bet you verify the fine print on surveys that do fit your worldview too, huh
Yes, I check the data makeup of every survey I view. The sample data that is not using the same criteria for every participant skews the results. If I ask 10 politicians if they think they are doing a good job I get one set of results, but if I ask 10 McDonald employees if their elected politicians are doing great job, results will be different. If you can see the difference there, then the problem is you, not me.
there is no unhappiness in ba sing se
…closely followed by Saudi Arabia. Yeah, I’m not a big fan of these happiness reports.
Idk I think I’d enjoy being obscenely rich off of my government’s oil money
The real question is why western countries consistently score so low on these reports. If western countries are so great and free, then you’d expect people to be reporting high level of happiness across the board.
I do agree, but I don’t think China performing well qualifies as World News, because subjective well-being is only loosely connected to actual experiences.
Subjective well-being is literally what happiness is. The question of whether you feel good is inherently subjective by its very nature. Valid criticisms could be found around the demographics being sampled, and people having access to the survey though. As people pointed out, many poor people don’t have internet access in countries like India meaning that there’s a bias in participation.
I meant subjective as in what you say. All that humans do is to strive to fulfill their own motivations, and communication is just doing so through interaction with other humans. The only reason for that what we say is connected to what we actually experience is that we don’t like people finding out we are misleading them and as a result like us less.
Nobody else can really measure our happiness, though, so there is no concrete motivation to respond to such questions as accurately as possible, so we’re much more inclined to just say what is socially the most favourable.
Like, do you genuinely reply how you are feeling when someone asks you how you’re doing? I’d say most people don’t.
We’re talking about people replying to a survey here and reporting how they feel. The difference from a question of how you’re doing is with that question being largely rhetorical and being asked out of protocol as opposed to genuine interest. People obviously answer the question differently based on whether their expectation is that the question is asked out of genuine interest or out of politeness.
Read Hofstede’s “Exploring Culture”, and consider that a person in a high-collectivity culture, which also is a high-power-distance culture, may well answer the survey with what “face” requires them to say, instead of answering with what they, themselves, feel.
If you aren’t correcting for that, you’re doing propaganda, not science.
Different cultures REQUIRE different subjectivities be taken-into-account.
I think it would be more valid to dig into specific dimensions of happiness, & make some of those objective ( cortisol-blood-levels, for measuring stress, e.g. )
WHEN you ask people in individualistic cultures a question, and THEN you ask people in collectivist cultures the SAME question, they are not answering the same question, they are answering the social-pressure question, instead.
It makes complete mincemeat of cross-cultural measuring of “objective” things.
Try reading Lanier’s “Foreign to Familiar” book, & understand just HOW different warm-vs-nordic cultures are, in instinct/reactions,
then it should be more obvious how such surveys are disinformation, not information.
Happiness is qualia and it’s an inherently subjective thing. Talking about it as science is nonsensical. However, we can consider the quality of a culture by whether the subjective experience this culture creates ends up being mostly positive or negative. If a particular cultures results in majority of people being miserable then perhaps it needs to do some self reflection.
Yes, but in the end, there is no real motivation to respond accurately to surveys either. It’s just that it’s our reflex based on our previous social interactions that it feels wrong to respond inaccurately. Similarly, it will feel wrong when responding in a socially unfavourable way to a question about well-being, even if it’s a survey.
Additionally, longer-term happiness is a quite vague experience so there isn’t much keeping one from interpreting it however you like.
Of course, I’m not saying that there is no truth to the report. I’m just saying it’s not particularly newsworthy because the numbers aren’t particularly concrete and it doesn’t describe any single important event at all.
There’s no motivation to respond inaccurately either. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that people who choose to participate would be honest about their experience. The report isn’t meant to be concrete, it just gives an idea of the pulse of how people who were sampled report feeling across different countries.
