Finland again! Is the annual happiest countries list getting it wrong? New study suggests the World Happiness Report might be going about it the incorrect way. Society © Xavier Lorenzo/stock.adobe.com It’s that time of year again when the World Happiness Report is released. Finland – surprise! – tops more than 140 nations for the seventh consecutive year. Yes, seven years in a row. The Finnish young and old – and everyone in between – are the happiest in the world. In this space in 2023, we explored the reasons why Finland is the world’s happiest nation year in year out. To be, or not to be, happy, is that the question? However, a research team led by Lund University in Sweden (ranked fourth) now explains why we might be measuring happiness wrong. The findings were published in the journal ‘Scientific Reports’. The report is based on a simple question that assesses general well-being and life satisfaction. Known as the Cantril Ladder, it asks respondents to think of a ladder, with the best possible life being a 10 and the worst a 0. Then, they are asked to rate their own lives on this 0 to 10 scale. The team of researchers analysed how over 1 500 adults in the United Kingdom interpreted the question when compared with differently phrased questions. The results revealed that it made the volunteers think more about power and wealth. The respondents thought less of power and wealth when the researchers tweaked the Cantril question. For example, they replaced ‘best possible life’ with ‘most harmonious life’. Moving the happiness yardstick “[O]ur results indicate that we aren’t necessarily measuring happiness and well-being in a way that is in line with how we actually define those concepts in our lives,” explained first author August Nilsson, a doctoral student at Norway’s Oslo Metropolitan University, in a news release. “This deserves further exploration. It is particularly relevant to understand how people interpret happiness questions, since how happy someone is and how they define happiness can’t be determined by a researcher but by people themselves.” The authors concluded in the paper: “The Cantril Ladder is arguably the most prominent measure of well-being, but the results suggest caution in its interpretation—the Cantril Ladder’s structure appears to influence participants to attend to a more power- and wealth-oriented view of well-being.” Keywords happiness, World Happiness Report, Finland, Cantril Ladder, Cantril, well-being, life satisfaction, power, wealth
