Line of Inquiry: Thomas Talhelm on the Happiness Gap between Cultures

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Psychologists for decades have known that one of the best predictors of people’s happiness is social relationships, right? People who spend more time with other people, who have better relationships with other people are happier, and it’s a very strong finding in psychology.

Now, we also know that cultures, particularly in East Asia, tend to prioritize social relationships. So cultures that are known for interdependence or collectivism tend to spend more time with other people, and they tend to place a high priority on those relationships.

Now, the paradox comes in when you look at cultural research on happiness. Interdependent cultures tend to be less happy than cultures that are more individualistic, where social relationships are less important. And so it seems like the cultures that sort of should be the happiest are actually underperforming when it comes to happiness.

One thing that goes along with interdependence in a cultural level is not just prioritizing relationships. Another component of that is social comparison. So if you’re in a culture that heavily emphasizes interdependence, another thing that comes with that is comparing yourself or your social status to other people. And it’s not hard to imagine how that would undermine people’s happiness.

And so the theory that we wanted to test was, could that explain why interdependent cultures are sort of less happy than they should be, because of this social-comparison element? And so what my colleagues and I wanted to do was we wanted to compare different regions within China.

One nice thing about China from a research perspective is that there are cultural differences within a single country. And so Southern China farms rice historically, and rice is a more interdependent crop. It’s based on these irrigation networks, where farmers have to coordinate their work together. Rice also requires more labor than crops like wheat and corn. And so farmers are more reliant on other farmers in times of sort of peak labor demands. And so what that’s created is a sort of natural experiment within China where you have the southern rice farming region that’s more interdependent—the culture there sort of historically. And then you have Northern China that has traditionally farmed wheat, and you have a little bit more of an individualistic tendency within the same culture.

So what we did is we looked at national surveys that measured happiness around China. And what we found is that people in the rice-farming regions were less happy than people in the more individualistic wheat-farming regions in the north. What we wanted to test was whether we could find any evidence that social comparison might be causing these differences in happiness within China. And so we looked for: What’s a basic thing that people tend to compare? It seems like one of the most basic things that people compare is money, is their income. And so what we looked at in these surveys was how closely related was people’s happiness to their income.

And what we found is that income was much more closely related to people’s happiness in the rice regions than in the wheat regions. And so it suggested that perhaps they’re comparing money more, and that might explain why their overall happiness is lower. One interesting side note is that it’s actually the rice regions of China that are wealthier in terms of GDP per capita than the wheat regions. And yet it’s people in the rice regions that are less happy than people in the wheat regions. So if economic development were to explain all of these differences, it would have a hard time explaining why the rice regions that are more interdependent are still less happy than the more individualistic wheat regions.

We also looked at other things that people socially compare. So the status of their careers, for example, is one thing that people compare. Educational background is another thing that people compare. And what we found is that people in the more interdependent rice-farming regions, they tended to have their happiness more closely related to these sort of social-status markers. And so that’s consistent with the idea that social status, and social comparison, is more closely related to people’s happiness in interdependent cultures. And perhaps that’s what’s driving these differences, why these cultures are sort of underperforming in their happiness.

So one of the things we couldn’t tell in those large, nationally representative surveys was, you know, we didn’t have direct evidence of people socially comparing. And so what we did next is we actually found a unique natural experiment. So there are these two farms in Northern China that were founded in the 1950s by the government. The government set these up as state-run farms. And what they basically did is they opened up new land to farmland. This is sort of, you know, a remote area of Northwest China. The government came in in the 1950s and said, “We’re gonna put farms here to put people to work and also increase agricultural output.” And we found these two farms, 56 kilometers away from each other—so about an hour down the road—and one farm’s rice and one farm’s wheat. And because these were founded as, you know, national farms, the state farms, the government essentially randomly assigned people. A lot of these are former soldiers or youth during the Cultural Revolution that got sent to the countryside to either the rice farm or the wheat farm. And so what we had is probably the closest thing we’re ever gonna get to a natural experiment, where some people were assigned to farm rice and other people were assigned to farm wheat.

So we went to these farms, my research assistant and I, and we gave people measures of social comparison. So what we wanted to know is, do people on the rice farm think more about how to compare themselves to other people on the farm than people on the wheat farm? And that’s indeed what we found.

So people on the rice farm reported more social comparison about money, about how good of a person they were, how good their social relationships are, and so on than people on the wheat farm. And because these people were essentially randomly sort of top-down assigned to these farms, we can be pretty sure that it’s not due to, you know, probably any of the compounds that you could think between two different sorts of world regions. There’s something about, you know, rice farming and wheat farming. There’s something about the interdependence versus the relative sort of independence and freedom that leads people to compare themselves to other people more than, you know, in other systems.

So the overall idea is that, you know, interdependent cultures, they emphasize relationships, and that’s great, but one downside is that leads to more social comparison and that seems to harm people’s happiness.

So another explanation for what might be going on in these cultural differences in happiness is, I wonder whether happiness is sort of asking the wrong question, right? I wonder whether different cultures prioritize happiness more than others, right? I wonder if it’s an accident that a lot of the people who created the research on happiness and decided how to measure it were Western researchers. And what research has found is that people in Western cultures like the United States or Western Europe, they tend to place a high value on the feeling of happiness.

Now, is it a surprise that when we go to other cultures around the world, people might report less happiness, right? Well, maybe people in those cultures would’ve asked different questions than, “How happy am I in this moment?”

The modern world, like, you know, the United States is not a place that tends to score very high on social comparison. But I wonder whether our world is changing in a way that’s making that more common. So with social media and, you know, now you post something online and you instantly know how many likes your post got versus how many likes somebody else’s post got, how many followers you have versus somebody else. Our new online ecosystem seems to make it really easy to socially compare ourselves, and I’m not sure that that’s good for our happiness.