Most People Are Happy According to Science
1n 1995 science was done and it found to some suprise that most people are happy.
There was this study by Myers and Diener in ’95 that asked “Who’s happy?”
But instead of just looking at who’s happy and who’s not, they also wanted to know who’s more happy and who’s less happy.
Turns out, most people actually report feeling pretty darn good about their lives! They’re satisfied with things like their marriage, their job, and their leisure time. Even folks in disadvantaged groups tend to feel positive about their well-being on average. And when researchers measured people’s happiness in ways other than just asking them, like through observations, most people were still found to be feeling pretty pleasant.
Plus, cross-country data shows that people all over the world generally have a positive level of well-being, except in really poor societies. Actually, in 86% of the 43 countries they studied, people reported feeling above neutral.
Measuring Happiness
The way that happiness is measured in surveys might lead to biased positive responses. However, other methods of measuring subjective well-being (SWB) show similar positive results. For example, studies using experience-sampling…
