BHappiness used to be a simple way: Every year, people were asked to rate their lives on a scale of one to ten. Ten stands for the best possible life, zero for the worst. Scientists have been using this information to calculate the World Happiness Score for the United Nations for ten years. Scandinavian countries are particularly high up here. Where Fun celebrated and – as the media would have you believe – togetherness is promoted, that’s happiness. In the most recent survey, Finland and Iceland occupy the top places when it comes to the average rating of life, Germany is in seventh place.
But now a group of Belgian psychologists asked 7,443 people in forty countries about their well-being. The result appeared in the Science Reports and raises doubts as to whether the World Happiness Score paints a realistic picture. Especially where the supposedly happiest people live, others feel under pressure – from the expectation that they also have to be happy. The authors of the study suspect that there may be a particularly large number of happy people living in such countries, but also a particularly large number of unhappy people. According to the initiators of the World Happiness Score, this is not the case. Western European countries, which rank near the top of the list, also have the lowest “inequalities in well-being,” according to one of their surveys. Egon Dejonckheere of the Catholic University of Leuven, lead author of the Belgian study, believes that the calculations for the World Happiness Score are a good thing in their own right – but policymakers should not rely on them alone.