Page 309 - Cultures and Organizations

278 DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

Happiness, or subjective well-being (SWB), as academics prefer to call
it, is a universally cherished goal. Some philosophical schools, such as clas-
sic Buddhism, condemn the pursuit of happiness and consider it a reproach-
able waste of time in which an enlightened person should not engage.
However, such elitist doctrines cannot have been easily embraced by the
masses. Throughout the world and regardless of their religion, most people
would like to attain a state of bliss here and now and, in contrast to classic
Buddhist pundits, are not deterred by the certainty of its transience.
Unfortunately, some nations as a whole do much better than others in
the universal chase of happiness. Even more disturbing for the stragglers
is that research on cross-cultural differences in SWB evidences a high level

of stability in the country rankings. There are fluctuations, to be sure, but

no major shifts have been observed since the first national rankings were
reported decades ago, based on large-scale measurements of happiness.
Moreover, some studies have demonstrated a high similarity between the
SWB rank order of twenty nations and the SWB rank order of groups of
Americans with ancestors from those nations. This means that even when
people of different ethnic origins share the same environment, they do not
become equally happy, and some old differences remain for some time. 2

The Nature of Subjective Well-Being

There is a vast academic literature on SWB. Usually, two main aspects are
distinguished: a cognitive evaluation of one’s life and a description of one’s
3
feelings. Life satisfaction and emotional affect are not necessarily one and
the same phenomenon. Some people may perceive that their lives are going
well without necessarily being in an elevated mood, and vice versa.
The World Values Survey addresses both aspects of SWB by asking

people how satisfied they are with their lives and how happy they feel.

Nations that score high on the first of these two questions usually score
high on the second as well, but the correlation is not very strong. National
differences in life satisfaction can be explained convincingly by means of
differences in national wealth, but this variable has relatively little to do
with the happiness item in the WVS. The countries with the highest per-
centages of very happy respondents are typically poor or not particularly
wealthy. They are located in western Africa (Nigeria, Ghana) and in north-
ern Latin America (Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela). What are
we to make of this?