Mathews, G. (2012). Happiness, culture, and context. International Journal of Wellbeing, 2(4), 299-312. doi:10.5502/ijw.v2.i4.2 Gordon Mathews Chinese University of Hong Kong cmgordon@cuhk.edu.hk Copyright belongs to the author(s) www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org 299 ARTICLE Happiness, culture, and context Gordon Mathews Abstract: The first part of this paper discusses why statistical comparisons of happiness and wellbeing are insufficient. It considers criticisms of these statistical comparisons, and discusses how, while they are useful for some purposes, they do not enable fully adequate cross-cultural comparison. The paper then discusses the problem of surveys both in terms of language, given the subtly different terms in different languages for happiness, and in terms of culture, arguing that difference in cultures can cause the findings of surveys to be less than transparent. It then turns to a consideration of culture itself, which has become increasingly problematic in anthropology in recent decades. ‘Culture’ is a term that has been shifting in its meanings. Culture no longer refers simply to ‘the way of life of a people,’ but also to the array of choices individuals make from ‘the global cultural supermarket’; culture in both these senses needs to be analyzed in terms of how it develops in the individual, as recent anthropological theories have been exploring. This new-found complexity of culture does not mean that researchers on subjective wellbeing should abandon culture as a variable; rather, they should augment statistical surveys of wellbeing, which are based on the older, conventional conception of culture, with ethnographic interviewing conducted by researchers who understand the language and culture in a given society. Only on this basis can the cross-cultural study of wellbeing reach its full potential, the paper argues, a potential uniting of different academic disciplines in a common endeavor, that of fully understanding what happiness means and how it can best be attained in the world. Keywords: happiness, wellbeing, well-being, statistical surveys, ethnographic research, culture, the cultural supermarket 1.1 Why the statistical comparison of wellbeing is not enough Research into happiness and wellbeing has become increasingly sophisticated in recent decades. In an earlier era, wellbeing of societies was often assumed, particularly by economists, to equate unproblematically with per capita income (Conceição & Bandura, 2008: 2). Only in recent decades has it become fully understood that wellbeing cannot be equated with such a measure, but is more complex (McGillivray, 2007), involving different individuals and different societies in how they comprehend their lives. This shift has been led particularly by psychologists and other scholars emphasizing ‘subjective wellbeing’ (for example Diener & Suh, 2000), focusing upon how individuals across different societies report upon their wellbeing, rather than relying upon objective measures. Various prominent surveys of wellbeing ask, ‘Taken all together, how would you say that things are these days: would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?’ Alternatively, they may ask people to rate their life satisfaction on a scale of 0 to 10 (Conceição & Bandura, 2008: 6). These statistics are then used to compare various groups as to their degree http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Happiness, culture, and context Mathews www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org 300 of wellbeing. This effort at statistical measurement, the dominant form of research into wellbeing today in the social sciences, seems, on the surface, to be straightforward. But can statistical measures of wellbeing yield the kind of transparent comparison of wellbeing that their proponents seek? Many authorities have argued not. Kahneman and Tversky, after many attempts, eventually abandoned their attempts to find an impartial scale of subjective wellbeing apart from social context (Easterbrook, 2004: 167). As Kahneman and Krueger write in a recent paper, How should a social scientist interpret answers to questions about global life satisfaction or happiness? After all, life satisfaction [...] is a global retrospective judgment, which in most cases is constructed only when asked and is determined in part by the respondent’s current mood and memory, and by the immediate context (2006: 6). As they explain about surveys of subjective wellbeing: One of the difficulties of using data on subjective wellbeing is that individuals may interpret and use the response categories differently. If Jim says that he is ‘very satisfied’ and Tim says that he is only ‘satisfied,’ is Jim really satisfied more than Tim? Maybe. But maybe Tim is the type of person who rarely uses superlatives to describe himself, either when he is jubilant or depressed, while Jim tends to extremes in his self-descriptions. To put it another way, when Tim answers a 4 about the intensity of a particular emotion, maybe that is the equivalent of a 6 for Jim (Kahneman & Krueger, 2006: 18). They offer an alternative measure in this paper, the ‚U-index,’‛ for measuring the mood of respondents over a more extended period, giving a fuller sense of subjective wellbeing than measurements of life satisfaction alone can allow (Kahneman & Krueger, 2006: 19). In a similar vein, Diener (2000: 34-35) discusses how, because subjective wellbeing consists of different components, it should be measured in multiple ways: not just in terms of life satisfaction, but also in terms of specific domains such as work and family, as well as levels of affect over time. These approaches reveal how the quantitative study of wellbeing is becoming progressively more sophisticated. And yet they do not fully solve the basic underlying problem that Kahneman and Krueger identify: Given the kind of variation described above, can statistical measurements of wellbeing ever be transparently valid, or are these measurements too imprecise, too prone to the variables of subjective interpretation to be fully reliable? I maintain that statistical measurements of wellbeing and happiness are indeed valid and useful in some contexts. The variation that Kahneman and Krueger describe may perhaps cancel itself out if there is a sufficiently large sample size, although this itself would need to be measured in survey questions designed to uncover the range of intensity of feelings from individual to individual. Given the current ‘state of the art,’ if a given society were to be measured as to wellbeing over a period of years or decades, using a sufficiently large sample size and the sophisticated array of survey instruments now available, thanks to the work of scholars like Diener, Kahneman, and Krueger, and many others, the changes in wellbeing shown statistically over that period might indeed be indicative of something very real. However, once we extend this comparison from that of individuals in a given society to that of societies across the globe, the validity of measurement becomes more doubtful. Happiness, culture, and context Mathews www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org 301 2. The statistical measurement of wellbeing across societies Kahneman and Krueger describe the difficulties of subjective wellbeing in terms of individuals, but even greater are the difficulties in comparing wellbeing across societal and cultural bounds. As Diener and Tov have written, Well-being can be understood to some degree in universal terms, but must also be understood within the framework of each culture [...] There are pancultural experiences of SWB (Subjective Well-Being) that can be compared across cultures, but [...] there are also culture-specific patterns that make cultures unique in their experiences of well-being (2007: 691). They are implying that cross-cultural statistical measures alone are not enough; rather, each culture must be understood on its own terms. This represents a new mode of thinking in Diener’s work, a new methodological caution in the work of a scholar who is arguably the most influential figure in the psychological study of wellbeing. Earlier, in Diener and Suh’s edited book Culture and Subjective Well-Being (2000), there was a generally unquestioned assumption that cross-cultural statistical measures of wellbeing reveal truth. Suh’s chapter in this book, for example, asks, ‚Why are North Americans happier than East Asians?‛ (2000: 64, 72). This question assumes that statistical survey results reflect the reality of happiness or its lack, rather than being the product of surveys themselves and their culturally shaped responses. Americans, a more detached observer has noted, may ‚inflate their reports of happiness [<] Most modern Americans say they are very or extremely happy, and one must be skeptical about whether their lives are really so wonderful‛ as the answers they give to survey questions indicate (Baumeister, 1991: 210). Indeed, in a society declaring in one of its founding documents the inalienable right to ‘the pursuit of happiness,’ its members seem all but culturally required to pursue and proclaim happiness in order to be fully American. In East Asian societies such as Japan, on the other hand, personal modesty is a key social value—one should not boast about one’s success or declare too loudly one’s wellbeing. To proclaim happiness, even in an anonymous survey, is felt by at least a few people I have spoken with to be an affront to good manners. Thus it seems plausible that North Americans are not ‚happier than East Asians,‛ but are simply more willing to proclaim their happiness on a survey form (Mathews & Izquierdo, 2009: 7). Psychologists investigating wellbeing have become increasingly aware of these difficulties. Diener, Oishi, and Lucas (2003: 411) note how North Americans may engage in self-serving biases such as self-enhancement more than East Asians, contributing to this difference in reports of subjective wellbeing, and also ask whether ‚impression management‛ might lead to different subjective wellbeing scores across cultures (2003: 413). In subsequent work, Oishi (2010) has demonstrated an acute insightfulness as to cultural variations in conceptions of wellbeing. He and scholars such as Helliwell et a1. (2010), Veenhoven (2010) and Frey (2008) are becoming progressively more aware of the impact of sociocultural differences on wellbeing. However, because they are professionally committed to the statistical measurement of wellbeing, they can only note these differences while continuing with measurements that seem unable to take these differences fully into account. As of this writing, the latest major work on cross-cultural wellbeing is Helliwell, Layard, and Sachs’ World Happiness Report (2012). It is sophisticated in its careful parsing of different types of measurements of happiness, distinguishing between current emotion, remembered emotion, and life evaluation and also in acknowledging cross-cultural variation. Nonetheless, it Happiness, culture, and context Mathews www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org 302 never fully analyzes statistical data in terms of sociocultural context in its chapters. In their chapter in the book, Helliwell and Wang simply say that: one basic check, once comparable data are assembled, is to see to what extent the answers drawn from different nations and cultures appear to be influenced by the same factors, and to the same extent. As it turns out, the cross-cultural commonality of the correlates of life evaluation is substantial (2012: 19). This may be true, but a degree of cross-cultural commonality does not indicate that culture can be ignored. This does not mean that the cross-cultural measurement of wellbeing is without value, despite what some critics seem to argue.1 These statistical comparisons viewed very broadly seem indeed to be accurate. When Helliwell and Wang (2012: 12-13) note that several societies in Northern Europe have far higher ratings in life evaluation than do several of the more poverty-stricken societies in sub-Saharan Africa, where life expectancy is almost thirty years shorter and poverty is endemic, the truth of this seems indubitable. The broad fact that the statistical data from developed-world societies represent those societies as happier than developing-world societies is important, and by no means self-evident: the data teach us something. But other, less extreme variations in these statistical data, such as the fact that northern European societies show on average a higher degree of happiness than East Asian societies, calls for cultural contextualization of a kind that these authors do not provide. Indeed, I argue that all of the subtle differences in happiness between different societies shown in the data require cultural contextualization in order to be fully comprehensible. 3. Why and how culture must be considered Scholars of wellbeing have argued that the effect of culture on wellbeing is not especially pronounced. The psychologists Diener, Oishi, and Lucas (2003: 419), analyzing two large samples, maintain that between-nation differences amount to 12% and 15% of variance in life satisfaction, with much of the rest due to individual differences within societies. 2 The sociologist Ruut Veenhoven in 2005 told me during a personal conversation that in his own and others’ survey research on happiness, statistical analysis reveals that only a small degree (‚no more than 20 percent‛) of variation between societies can be attributed to cultural factors. These views imply that overemphasis on cultural difference in the measurement of wellbeing cross- culturally may be misguided; culture may not be all that important. But while I certainly do not claim that culture is everything, as I will shortly discuss, to use survey results that may be culturally problematic to demonstrate that culture does not matter leads to the downplaying of culture as a foregone conclusion. The situation is like that of the joke about a man searching for his car keys at night. He is asked, ‘Where did you lose them?’ and points into the blackness: ‘Over there.’ ‘Well, why are you looking for them here?’ ‘The light’s better here’ (Mathews & Izquierdo, 2009: 7). If valid knowledge is viewed as being only 1 One recent analysis (Eckersley, 2009) argues that Western liberal democracies rank highest in wellbeing surveys largely because of the skewed methodologies of investigators. ‚SWB is a dubious measure for comparing countries because of cultural differences in response and because other attributes and attitudes also need to be considered... If there is a ‘holy grail’ of a single indicator that accurately measures how well nations and people are faring, SWB is not it; the search must continue‛ (2009: 9, 10). 2 As Diener, Oishi, and Lucas indicate (2003: 410), it is easier to compare nations than cultures, since the bounds of the latter may not be clear. This is quite true: culture today in one sense cannot be thought of apart from the context of nation-states, which shape their citizens into adhering to a common cultural framework. However, as I shortly discuss, culture today is more complex than this. Happiness, culture, and context Mathews www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org 303 that which can be revealed through statistical measures, then that which is not statistically measured is rendered irrelevant, even though it may have fundamental value. Scholars such as those cited above are well aware of the problems in using surveys and statistical measures to compare wellbeing across cultures, societies, and nations, but again, because their professions are based on the use of statistics, they attempt to address these problems by using still more surveys and statistical manipulations. This is not meant to in any way disrespect the scholars mentioned in the previous paragraphs, who are pioneers in the study of happiness in their disciplines and who have done very significant research. It is only to suggest that perhaps the answer to the problem of cross-cultural statistical measurement lies not in further statistical measurement, but rather to move beyond such measurement. If cross- cultural statistical measurement of wellbeing cannot fully explicate sociocultural difference, as all the studies thus far discussed seem to indicate, then other kinds of explication become necessary. In interpreting statistics purporting to compare wellbeing across societies, anthropologists and linguists and other scholars who have expert cultural knowledge of these different societies must be consulted; otherwise the meaning of the data will remain open to question. There are two levels of problems that must be dealt with in the cross-cultural statistical measurement of happiness. The first is at the level of translation: the term for ‘happiness’ or ‘life satisfaction’ in one language may have subtly different nuances than that in another, affecting the data arrived at in surveys; this problem may be in some cases uncorrectable, but at least it must be acknowledged. Thus, for example, the Japanese terms shiawase or kōfuku have subtly different implications than the English term happiness, as does too the Cantonese term hoisam, with speakers of Japanese and Cantonese using these terms in slightly different contexts than speakers of English use the term happiness. Surveys purporting to statistically compare happiness cross-culturally must acknowledge and account for these differences. A term such as life satisfaction may be more easily translatable cross-culturally, but still may be problematic, since in some societies the term may appear more alien and experience-distant than in others, leading to subtly skewed statistical results. Even a slight difference in nuance may result in a quite significant difference in survey results; but investigators into cross-cultural subjective wellbeing have for the most part not adequately addressed this fact. But the problem is not only linguistic. There is also the broader problem of cultural understanding, whereby the cultural context of happiness and wellbeing must be fully unpacked in any given society in order to understand statistical measurements of happiness in that society. How much does happiness matter in a given society? It is no coincidence, I argue, that happiness researchers have been based overwhelmingly in Western Europe and particularly the United States, societies emphasizing the individual pursuit of happiness; in many other societies, the individual pursuit of happiness is not of such salience (see, for example, Mathews, 1996: 12-49). The personal pursuit of happiness is more highly valued in some places in the world than in others. Beyond this, the array of particular cultural meanings of happiness differs in different sociocultural contexts. I address this issue in the final section of this paper, in advocating interviews and their analysis as a supplement to surveys and their statistical data; but first there is another problem that must be addressed. After this paper’s initial discussion of the importance of culture, we must ask: what is culture? 4. The shifting meanings of culture Ironically, at the same time that researchers from other disciplines have been realizing the importance of culture, anthropologists have been turning away from the concept. In Happiness, culture, and context Mathews www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org 304 anthropology today, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that the word ‘culture’ can no longer be used with a straight face. If I were to go to an American Anthropological Association meeting and speak of ‘Japanese culture’ or ‘American culture’ or ‘Chinese culture,’ I might not even be argued with, but merely smirked at as being hopelessly naïve. Culture today, in the anthropological world, can be used in its adjectival form, but not as a noun; one can speak of something being cultural, in terms of it being socially constructed, but not of ‘Indonesian culture,’ or ‘the culture of Turkey’ (see Brightman, 1995: 510). This is because it has become increasingly apparent to anthropologists in recent decades that societies do not have walls around them. There is no absolutely separate set of values distinguishing all those who are Japanese or German or Brazilian from all those who are not; rather there are so many borderlands and other imprecisions that all such cultural comparison becomes questionable. As Hannerz has written, Humankind has