Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2015;123(2):519-547.
doi: 10.1007/s11205-014-0747-y. Epub 2014 Sep 6.

Culture and Happiness

Dezhu Ye  1 , Yew-Kwang Ng  2 , Yujun Lian  3
Affiliations

Culture and Happiness

Dezhu Ye et al. Soc Indic Res. 2015.

Abstract

Culture is an important factor affecting happiness. This paper examines the predictive power of cultural factors on the cross-country differences in happiness and explores how different dimensions of cultural indices differ in their effects on happiness. Our empirical results show that the global leadership and organizational behavior effectiveness nine culture indices are all significantly related with happiness. Out of these nine indices, power distance (PDI) and gender egalitarianism (GEI) play the most important and stable role in determining subjective well-being (SWB). We further examine the relative importance of the various variables in contributing to the R-squared of the regression. The results show that PDI is the most important, accounting for 50 % of the contributions to R-squared of all variables, or equalling the combined contributions of income, population density and four other traditional variables. The contribution of GEI is 37.1 %, also well surpassing other variables. Our results remain robust even taking account of the different data for culture and SWB.

Keywords: Culture; GLOBE; Gender egalitarianism; Happiness; Power distance; Subjective well-being.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Andrews F, Mckennell A. Measures of self-reported well-being: Their affective, cognitive and other components. Social Indicators Research. 1980;8(2):127–155. doi: 10.1007/BF00286474. - DOI
    1. Arrindell WA, Hatzichristou C, Wensink J, Rosenberg E, van Twillert B, Stedema J, Meijer D. Dimensions of national culture as predictors of cross-national differences in subjective well-being. Personality and Individual Differences. 1997;23(1):37–53. doi: 10.1016/S0191-8869(97)00023-8. - DOI
    1. Azen R, Budescu DV. The dominance analysis approach for comparing predictors in multiple regression. Psychological Methods. 2003;8(2):129–148. doi: 10.1037/1082-989X.8.2.129. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Barnett RC, Baruch GK. Social roles, gender, and psychological distress. In: Barnett RC, Biener L, Baruch GK, editors. Gender and stress. New York: The Free Press; 1987.
    1. Benson C. The cultural psychology of self: Place, morality and art in human worlds. Philadelphia, PA: Rout ledge; 2000.

LinkOut - more resources