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Light or Dark? 281

important, or not at all important: family, friends, leisure time, poli-
tics, work, religion, service to others.” Measured was the percentage
choosing “very important” for leisure time. 11

The correlates and predictors of happiness at the national level are there-
fore, first, a perception of life control, a feeling that one has the liberty to

live one’s life more or less as one pleases, without social restrictions that
curb one’s freedom of choice; and second, importance of leisure as a per-
sonal value. Happiness, life control, and importance of leisure are mutually
correlated, and these associations remained stable over subsequent survey

waves. They thus defined a strong common dimension.
Apart from the three key items, the dimension was also positively
associated with a high importance of having friends and negatively with
choosing thrift as a valuable trait for children.
It follows that one of the two poles of this dimension is characterized
by a perception that one can act as one pleases, spend money, and indulge
in leisurely and fun-related activities with friends or alone. All this predicts

relatively high happiness. At the opposite pole we find a perception that
one’s actions are restrained by various social norms and prohibitions and
a feeling that enjoyment of leisurely activities, spending, and other similar
types of indulgence are somewhat wrong. Because of these properties of
the dimension, Misho has called it indulgence versus restraint (IVR). 12
National scores for the dimension are listed in Table 8.1. 13
The definition that we propose for this dimension is as follows: Indul-

gence stands for a tendency to allow relatively free gratifi cation of basic and
natural human desires related to enjoying life and having fun. Its opposite pole,
restraint, refl ects a conviction that such gratifi cation needs to be curbed and
regulated by strict social norms. As a cultural dimension, indulgence versus

restraint rests on clearly defined research items that measure very specifi c
phenomena. Note that the gratification of desires on the indulgence side

refers to enjoying life and having fun, not to gratifying human desires in
general.
This is a truly new dimension that has not been reported so far in the
academic literature; it deserves more study. It somewhat resembles a dis-
tinction in U.S. anthropology between loose and tight societies. In loose
societies norms are expressed with a wide range of alternative channels,
and deviant behavior is easily tolerated; tight societies maintain strong
values of group organization, formality, permanence, durability, and soli-