Americans want to be happy, just like everyone else from different parts of the world. In fact, the pursuit of happiness is even an inherent right for Americans, according to the Declaration of Independence.
However, some recent studies may have found a mystery: The pursuit of happiness is likely to make some Americans unhappy. Did the Founding Fathers set us up to fail in this pursuit?
A new study has looked at this odd American contradiction, implying that the relationship between the pursuit of happiness and decreased well-being, far from being for everybody, may actually be a product of our individualistic culture.
Brett Ford, of the University of California, Berkeley, collaborated with researchers from around the world to look at the pursuit of happiness in four culturally-distinct locations: the United States, Germany, Russia, and East Asia. College undergraduates residing in each location answered questionnaires gauging their psychological and physical well-being, their desire to pursue happiness, and the degree of how they view happiness in social terms, meaning that for them happiness is linked to social commitment and helping others.
Ford and his colleagues then evaluated the data to figure out how these factors communicate with one another in various cultural settings. The findings which were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology revealed that the pursuit of happiness actually led to lowered subjective well-being for Americans, a data that copy prior studies. For Germans, however there was no effect of the pursuit of happiness on well-being, while for the Russian and East Asian students, the pursuit of happiness actually corresponded with more happiness, not less.
Ford explained that although great motivation to pursue happiness has been very strongly connected to worse well-being in the U.S., the opposite pattern found in other cultures show that the relationship between the motivation to pursue happiness and well-being is culturally influenced.
The effect of culture on the quest for happiness seems to be connected to the way different culture view happiness. In Russia and East Asia, participants of the study were observed to strongly relate happiness with social relationships, something Ford says is associated with their "hoarding" personality or being group-oriented cultures. In Germany and the United States on the other hand, this wasn't the case, probably a result of their more self-centered orientation.
This suggests that in individualistic cultures, people look for social solutions for becoming happier, since social connection and social links are well-known determiners of subjective well-being, this may explain why they actually feel happier.
