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WHR 2023 | CHAPTER 2

World Happiness, Trust

and Social Connections
in Times of Crisis
John F. Helliwell
Vancouver School of Economics, University of
British Columbia

Haifang Huang
Department of Economics, University of Alberta

Max Norton
Vancouver School of Economics, University of
British Columbia

Leonard Goff
Department of Economics, University of Calgary

Shun Wang
International Business School Suzhou, Xi'an
Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Citation:
Helliwell, J. F., Huang, H., Norton, M., Goff, L., & Wang, S.
(2023). World Happiness, Trust and Social Connections in Times
of Crisis. In World Happiness Report 2023 (11th ed., Chapter 2).
Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Acknowledgment: The authors are grateful for the financial support

of the WHR sponsors and for data from the Gallup World Poll and the
Gallup/Meta State of Social Connections study. For much helpful
assistance and advice, we are grateful to Lara B. Aknin, Bernardo
Andretti, Chris Barrington-Leigh, Tim Besley, Jan-Emmanuel De
Neve, Anya Drabkin, Anat Noa Fanti, Dunigan Folk, Rodrigo Furst,
Rafael Goldszmidt, Carol Graham, Jon Hall, David Halpern, Nancy
Hey, Sarah Jones, Richard Layard, Eden Litt, Joe Marshall, Marwan H.
Saleh, Chris McCarty, Tim Ng, Sharon Paculor, Rachel Penrod, Anna
Petherick, Julie Ray, Ryan Ritter, Rajesh Srinivasan, Jeffrey D. Sachs,
Lance Stevens, and Meik Wiking.

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MARCH 20, 2023

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Chapter Contents

Introduction
By any standard, 2022 was a year of crises, including the continuing COVID-19
pandemic, war in Ukraine, worldwide inflation, and a range of local and global
climate emergencies. We thus have more evidence about how life evaluations,
trust and social connections together influence the ability of nations, and of the
world as a whole, to adapt in the face of crisis. Our main analysis relates to
happiness as measured by life evaluations and emotions, how they have evolved
in crisis situations, and how lives have been better where trust, benevolence, and
supportive social connections have continued to thrive.

In our first section, we present our annual ranking and modelling of national
happiness, but in a way slightly different from previous practice. Our key figure
2.1 continues to rank countries by their average life evaluations over the three
preceding years, with that average spanning the three COVID-19 years of 2020-
2022. That much remains the same. The main change is that this year we have
removed the coloured sub-bars showing our attempts to explain the differences
we find in national happiness. We introduced these bars in 2013 because readers
wanted to know more about some of the likely reasons behind the large
differences we find. Over the succeeding years, however, many readers and
commentators have thereby been led to think that our ranking somehow reflects
an index based on the six variables we use in our modelling. To help correct this
false impression, we removed the explanatory bars, leaving the actual life
evaluations alone on centre stage. We continue to include horizontal whiskers
showing the 95% confidence bands for our national estimates, supplemented
this year by showing a measure for each country of the range of rankings within
which its own ranking is likely to be. We also continue to present our attempts to
explain how and why life evaluations vary among countries and over time. We
then present our latest attempts to explain the happiness differences revealed by
the wide variations in national life evaluations.

In our second section, we look back once again at the evolution of life
evaluations and emotions since Gallup World Poll data first became available in
2005-2006. This year we focus especially on how COVID-19 has affected the
distribution of well-being. Has well-being inequality grown or shrunk? Where,
and for whom? We divide national populations into their happier and less happy
halves to show how the two groups have fared before and during the pandemic.
We do this for life evaluations, and for their emotional, social, and material
foundations.

In the third section, we document the extent to which trust, benevolence, and
social connections have supported well-being in times of crisis. First we add a
third year of COVID-19 data to illustrate how much death rate patterns changed
in 2022 under the joint influences of Omicron variants, widespread vaccination,
and changes in public health measures. Countries where people have confidence
in their governments were still able to have lower COVID-19 death tolls in 2022,
just as they did in 2020 and 2021.

Next we update our reporting on the extent to which benevolence has increased
during COVID-19, finding it still well above pre-pandemic levels.

Then we present data on how the conflict between Ukraine and Russia since
2014, and especially in 2022, is associated with patterns of life evaluations,
emotions, trust in governments, and benevolence in both countries.

Finally, we leverage new data from 2022 on the relative importance of positive
and negative aspects of the social context. These data show that positive social
environments were far more prevalent than loneliness and that gains from
increases in positive social connections exceed the well-being costs of additional
loneliness, even during COVID-19. These findings help us explain the resilience
of life evaluations. While crises impose undoubted costs, they may also expose
and even build a sense of shared connections.

Our concluding section provides a summary of our key results.

Measuring and Explaining National Differences in

Life Evaluations
Country rankings this year are based on life evaluations in 2020, 2021, and 2022,
so all of the observations are drawn from years of high infection and deaths from
COVID-19.

Technical Box 1: Measuring Subjective Well-Being

Our measurement of subjective well-being continues to rely on three main well-
being indicators: life evaluations, positive emotions, and negative emotions
(described in the report as positive and negative affect). Our happiness rankings are
based on life evaluations, as the more stable measure of the quality of people’s
lives. In World Happiness Report 2023, we continue to pay special attention to
specific daily emotions (the components of positive and negative affect) to better
track how COVID-19 has altered different aspects of life.

Life evaluations. The Gallup World Poll, which remains the principal source of data in
this report, asks respondents to evaluate their current life as a whole using the
image of a ladder, with the best possible life for them as a 10 and worst possible as
a 0. Each respondent provides a numerical response on this scale, referred to as the
Cantril ladder. Typically, around 1,000 responses are gathered annually for each
country. Weights are used to construct population-representative national averages
for each year in each country. We base our usual happiness rankings on a three-
year average of these life evaluations, since the larger sample size enables more
precise estimates.

Positive emotions. Positive affect is given by the average of individual yes or no

answers about three emotions: laughter, enjoyment, and interest (for details see
Technical Box 2).

Negative emotions. Negative affect is given by the average of individual yes or no

answers about three emotions: worry, sadness, and anger.

Comparing life evaluations and emotions:

Life evaluations provide the most informative measure for international

comparisons because they capture quality of life in a more complete and stable
way than do emotional reports based on daily experiences.

Life evaluations differ more between countries than do emotions and are better
explained by the widely differing life experiences in different countries.
Emotions yesterday are well explained by events of the day being asked about,
while life evaluations more closely reflect the circumstances of life as a whole.
We show later in the chapter that emotions are significant supports for life
evaluations.

Positive emotions are more than twice as frequent (global average of 0.66) as
negative emotions (global average of 0.29), even during the three COVID years
2020-2022.

Ranking of Happiness 2020-2022

The country rankings in Figure 2.1 show life evaluations (answers to the Cantril
ladder question) for each country, averaged over the years 2020-2022.[1]

The overall length of each country bar represents the average response to the
ladder question, which is also shown in numerals. The confidence intervals for
each country’s average life evaluation are shown by horizontal whiskers at the
right-hand end of each country bar. Confidence intervals for the rank of a
country are displayed to the right of each country bar.[2] These ranking ranges
are wider where there are many countries with similar averages, and for countries
with smaller sample sizes.[3]

In the Statistical Appendix, we show a version of Figure 2.1 that includes colour-
coded sub-bars in each country row, representing the extent to which six key
variables contribute to explaining life evaluations. These variables (described in
more detail in Technical Box 2) are GDP per capita, social support, healthy life
expectancy, freedom, generosity, and corruption. As already noted, our
happiness rankings are not based on any index of these six factors — the scores
are instead based on individuals’ own assessments of their lives, in particular
their answers to the single-item Cantril ladder life-evaluation question. We use
observed data on the six variables and estimates of their associations with life
evaluations to explain the observed variation of life evaluations across countries,
much as epidemiologists estimate the extent to which life expectancy is affected
by factors such as smoking, exercise, and diet.

Figure 2.1: Country Rankings by Life Evaluations in 2020-2022

World Happiness Report 2023

Figure 2.1 Ranking of Happiness based on a three-year-average 2020-2022

Average Life Evaluation

Average Life Explained by six 95% Confidence

Evaluation Factors interval for rank

34 Kosovo Avg Life Eval

35 Chile
Search by Country
36 Mexico
37 Malta
38 Panama
39 Poland
40 Nicaragua
41 Latvia
Note:
42 Bahrain*
Countries with a * do not
43 Guatemala have survey information
44 Kazakhstan in 2022. Their averages
45 Serbia* are based on the 2020
46 Cyprus and 2021 surveys.
47 Japan
48 Croatia
95% confidence interval
49 Brazil
is show in the grey-
50 El Salvador
shaded area at the end of
51 Hungary each life evaluation bar.
52 Argentina
53 Honduras
54 Uzbekistan
55 Malaysia*
56 Portugal
57 Korea, Republic of
0 2 4 6 8 10
Average Life Evaluation

Notes: Those with a * do not have survey information in 2022. Their averages are
based on the 2020 and 2021 surveys.

What do the latest data show for the 2020-2022 country

rankings?[4]
Two features carry over from previous editions of the World Happiness Report.
First, there is still a lot of year-to-year consistency in the way people rate their
lives in different countries, and since our rankings are based on a three-year
average there is information carried forward from one year to the next (See
Figure 1 of Statistical Appendix 1 for individual country trajectories on an annual
basis). Finland continues to occupy the top spot, for the sixth year in a row, with
a score that is significantly ahead of all other countries. Denmark remains in the
2nd spot, with a confidence region bounded by 2nd and 4th. Among the rest of
the countries in the top twenty, the confidence regions for their ranks cover five
to ten countries. Iceland is 3rd, and with its smaller sample size, has a
confidence region from 2nd to 7th. Israel is in 4th position, up five positions from
last year, with a confidence range between 2nd and 8th. The 5th through 8th
positions are filled by the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland. The
top ten are rounded out by Luxembourg and New Zealand. Austria and Australia
follow in 11th and 12th positions, as last year, both within the likely range of 8th to
16th. They are followed by Canada, up two places from last year’s lowest-ever
ranking. The next four positions are filled by Ireland, the United States, Germany,
and Belgium, all with ranks securely in the top twenty, as shown by the rank
ranges.

The rest of the top 20 include Czechia, the United Kingdom, and Lithuania, 18th
to 20th. The same countries tend to appear in the top twenty year after year, with
19 of this year’s top 20 also being there last year. The exception is Lithuania,
which has steadily risen over the past six years, from 52nd in 2017 to 20th this
year.[5] Throughout the rankings, except at the very top and the very bottom, the
three-year average scores are close enough to one another that significant
differences are found only between country pairs that are in some cases many
positions apart in the rankings. This is shown by the ranking ranges for each
country.

There remains a large gap between the top and bottom countries, with the top
countries being more tightly grouped than the bottom ones. Within the top
group, national life evaluation scores have a gap of 0.40 between the 1st and 5th
position, and another 0.28 between 5th and 10th positions. Thus there is a gap
of less than 0.7 points between the first and 10th positions.

There is a much bigger range of scores covered by the bottom 10 countries,

where the range of scores covers 2.1 points. The range estimates show that
Afghanistan in the last position, and Lebanon second last, have ranks
significantly different from each other, and from all higher countries. Further up
the scale the gaps become narrower, and the ranges larger, with the 95% range
exceeding 25 ranks for several countries in the middle of the global list.

Despite the general consistency among the top country scores, there have been
many significant changes among the rest of the countries. Looking at changes
over the longer term, many countries have exhibited substantial changes in
average scores, and hence in country rankings, as shown in more detail in the
Statistical Appendix, and as noted above for the Baltic countries.

The scores are based on the resident populations in each country, rather than
their citizenship or place of birth. In World Happiness Report 2018 we split the
responses between the locally and foreign-born populations in each country and
found the happiness rankings to be essentially the same for the two groups.
There was some footprint effect after migration, and some tendency for migrants
to move to happier countries, so that among the 20 happiest countries in that
report, the average happiness for the locally born was about 0.2 points higher
than for the foreign-born.

Why do happiness levels differ?

In Table 2.1 we present our latest modelling of national average life evaluations
and measures of positive and negative affect (emotions) by country and year.[6]
The results in the first column explain national average life evaluations in terms of
six key variables: GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy,
freedom to make life choices, generosity, and freedom from corruption.[7] Taken
together, these six variables explain more than three-quarters of the variation in
national annual average ladder scores among countries and years, using data
from 2005 through 2022.[8] The six variables were originally chosen as the best
available measures of factors established in both experimental and survey data
as having significant links to subjective well-being, and especially life
evaluations. The explanatory power of the unchanged model has gradually
increased as we have added more years to the sample, which is now more than
twice as large as when the equation was first introduced in World Happiness
Report 2013. We keep looking for possible improvements as sufficient evidence
becomes available.[9] Chapter 3 introduces five measures of government
effectiveness, all of which are shown to be individually correlated with life
evaluations. It is reassuring for the robustness of our Table 2.1 equation that
these new measures of government effectiveness contribute importantly (as
shown in Chapter 3) to the explanations of the six variables used in Table 2.1, but
do not provide additional explanatory power when added to the equation in the
first column of Table 2.1.

The second and third columns of Table 2.1 use the same six variables to estimate
equations for national averages of positive and negative affect, where both are
based on answers about yesterday’s emotional experiences (see Technical Box 2
for how the affect measures are constructed). In general, emotional measures,
and especially negative ones, are differently and much less fully explained by the
six variables than are life evaluations. Per-capita income and healthy life
expectancy have significant effects on life evaluations,[10] but not, in these
national average data, on positive affect.[11] But the social variables do have
significant effects on both positive and negative emotions. Bearing in mind that
positive and negative affect are measured on a 0 to 1 scale, while life evaluations
are on a 0 to 10 scale, social support can be seen to have similar proportionate
effects on positive and negative emotions as on life evaluations. Freedom and
generosity have even larger associations with positive affect than with the Cantril
ladder. Negative affect is significantly ameliorated by social support, freedom,
and the absence of corruption.

Only at the extremes do country rankings for life

evaluations differ significantly from all others- Finland
at the top and Afghanistan and Lebanon at the bottom.

In the fourth column, we re-estimate the life evaluation equation from column 1,
adding both positive and negative affect to partially implement the Aristotelian
presumption that sustained positive emotions are important supports for a good
life.[12] The results continue to buttress a finding in psychology that the existence
of positive emotions matters much more than the absence of negative ones
when predicting either longevity[13] or resistance to the common cold.[14]
Consistent with this evidence, we find that positive affect has a large and highly
significant impact in the final equation of Table 2.1, while negative affect has
none. In a parallel way, we find in the final section of this chapter that the effects
of a positive social environment are larger than the effects of loneliness.

As for the coefficients on the other variables in the fourth column, the changes
are substantial only on those variables – especially freedom and generosity –
that have the largest impacts on positive affect. Thus we can infer that positive
emotions play a strong role in supporting life evaluations, and that much of the
impact of freedom and generosity on life evaluations is channelled through their
influence on positive emotions. That is, freedom and generosity have large
impacts on positive affect, which in turn has a major impact on life evaluations.
The Gallup World Poll does not have a widely available measure of life purpose to
test whether it also would play a strong role in support of high life evaluations.

Table 2.1:Regressions to Explain Average Happiness across Countries

(Pooled OLS)

Dependent Variable

Independent Variable Cantril Positive Negative Cantril

Ladder Affect Affect Ladder
(0-10) (0-1) (0-1) (0-10)

Log GDP per capita 0.359 -.015 -.001 0.392

(0.067)*** (0.009) (0.007) (0.065)***

Social support (0-1) 2.526 0.318 -.337 1.865

(0.356)*** (0.056)*** (0.046)*** (0.35)***

Healthy life expectancy at birth 0.027 -.0005 0.003 0.028

(0.01)*** (0.001) (0.001)*** (0.01)***

Freedom to make life choices (0- 1.331 0.371 -.090 0.505

1)
(0.297)*** (0.041)*** (0.039)** (0.278)*

Generosity 0.537 0.088 0.027 0.33

(0.256)** (0.032)*** (0.027) (0.245)

Perceptions of corruption (0-1) -.716 -.009 0.094 -.712

(0.262)*** (0.027) (0.022)*** (0.249)***

Positive affect (0-1) 2.285

(0.331)***

Negative affect (0-1) 0.185

(0.388)

Year fixed effects Included Included Included Included

Number of countries 156 156 156 156

Number of observations 1,964 1,959 1,963 1,958

Adjusted R-squared 0.757 0.439 0.334 0.782

Notes: This is a pooled OLS regression for a tattered panel explaining annual
national average Cantril ladder responses from all available surveys from 2005
through 2022. See Technical Box 2 for detailed information about each of the
predictors. Coefficients are reported with robust standard errors clustered by
country (in parentheses). ***, **, and * indicate significance at the 1, 5, and 10
percent levels respectively.

Technical Box 2: Detailed information about each of the predictors in

Table 2.1
1. GDP per capita is in terms of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) adjusted to
constant 2017 international dollars, taken from the World Development
Indicators (WDI) by the World Bank (version 17, metadata last updated on
January 22, 2023). See Statistical Appendix 1 for more details. GDP data for
2022 are not yet available, so we extend the GDP time series from 2021 to
2022 using country-specific forecasts of real GDP growth from the OECD
Economic Outlook No. 112 (November 2022) or, if missing, from the World
Bank’s Global Economic Prospects (last updated: January 10, 2023), after
adjustment for population growth. The equation uses the natural log of GDP per
capita, as this form fits the data significantly better than GDP per capita.

2. The time series for healthy life expectancy at birth are constructed based on
data from the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Health Observatory
data repository, with data available for 2005, 2010, 2015, 2016, and 2019. To
match this report’s sample period (2005-2022), interpolation and extrapolation
are used. See Statistical Appendix 1 for more details.

3. Social support is the national average of the binary responses (0=no, 1=yes) to
the Gallup World Poll (GWP) question “If you were in trouble, do you have
relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them, or
not?”

4. Freedom to make life choices is the national average of binary responses to the
GWP question “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose
what you do with your life?”

5. Generosity is the residual of regressing the national average of GWP responses

to the donation question “Have you donated money to a charity in the past
month?” on log GDP per capita.

6. Perceptions of corruption are the average of binary answers to two GWP

questions: “Is corruption widespread throughout the government or not?” and
“Is corruption widespread within businesses or not?” Where data for
government corruption are missing, the perception of business corruption is
used as the overall corruption-perception measure.

7. Positive affect is defined as the average of previous-day affect measures for

laughter, enjoyment, and interest. The inclusion of interest (first added for
World Happiness Report 2022), gives us three components in each of positive
and negative affect, and slightly improves the equation fit in column 4. The
general form for the affect questions is: Did you experience the following
feelings during a lot of the day yesterday? See Statistical Appendix 1 for more
details.

8. Negative affect is defined as the average of previous-day affect measures for

worry, sadness, and anger.

The variables we use in our Table 2.1 modelling may be taking credit properly due
to other variables, or to unmeasured factors. There are also likely to be vicious or
virtuous circles, with two-way linkages among the variables. For example, there
is much evidence that those who have happier lives are likely to live longer, and
be more trusting, more cooperative, and generally better able to meet life’s
demands.[15] This will double back to improve health, income, generosity,
corruption, and a sense of freedom. Chapter 4 of this report highlights the
importance of two-way linkages between altruism and subjective well-being.

Another possible reason for a cautious interpretation of our results is that some
of the data come from the same respondents as the life evaluations and are thus
possibly determined by common factors. This is less likely when comparing
national averages because individual differences in personality and individual life
circumstances tend to average out at the national level. To provide even more
assurance that our results are not significantly biased because we are using the
same respondents to report life evaluations, social support, freedom, generosity,
and corruption, we tested the robustness of our procedure by splitting each
country’s respondents randomly into two groups (see Table 10 of Statistical
Appendix 1 of World Happiness Report 2018 for more detail). We then examined
whether the average values of social support, freedom, generosity, and absence
of corruption from one half of the sample explained average life evaluations in
the other half of the sample. The coefficients on each of the four variables fell
slightly, just as we expected.[16] But the changes were reassuringly small
(ranging from 1% to 5%) and were not statistically significant.[17]

Overall, the model explains average life evaluation levels quite well within regions,
among regions, and for the world as a whole.[18] On average, the countries of
Latin America still have mean life evaluations that are significantly higher (by
about 0.5 on the 0 to 10 scale) than predicted by the model. This difference has
been attributed to a variety of factors, including some unique features of family
and social life in Latin American countries.[19] In partial contrast, the countries of
East Asia have average life evaluations below predictions, although only slightly
and insignificantly so in our latest results.[20] This has been thought to reflect, at
least in part, cultural differences in the way people think about and report on the
quality of their lives.[21] It is reassuring that our findings about the relative
importance of the six factors are generally unaffected by whether or not we
make explicit allowance for these regional differences.[22]

We can now use the model of Table 2.1 to assess the overall effects of COVID-19
on life evaluations. A simple comparison of average life evaluations during 2017-
2019 and the pandemic years 2020-2022 shows them to be down slightly
(-0.09, t=2.2) in the western industrial countries[23] (for which the 2022 data are
complete) and slightly higher than pre-pandemic levels in the rest of the world,
where there are fewer available surveys for 2022. Our modelling suggests that
the growth of prosociality cushioned the fall of life evaluations in the industrial
countries, and made it a net increase in the rest of the world. Thus if we add an
indicator for the three COVID years 2020-2022 to our Table 2.1 equation, using
data only from the three COVID years and the three preceding years, it shows no
net increase or decrease in life evaluations.[24] This suggests, in a preliminary
way, that the undoubted pains were offset by increases in the extent to which
respondents had been able to discover and share the capacity to care for each
other in difficult times. We shall explore other evidence on this point in the next
section.

Inequality measured by happiness gaps differs by a full

five points between the most equal and the least equal
countries.

Inequality of happiness before and during COVID

Last year, we traced the longer-term trends in life evaluations and emotions as
part of our review of the first ten years of the World Happiness Report.[25] This
year we dig deeper to search for trends in the distribution of well-being. Our
main technique is to calculate trends in all these same variables separately for
the more and less happy halves of each national population. We are thus able to
show in Figure 2.2 the size of the happiness gap between the more and less
happy halves of the population, ranking from the smallest to the largest gap. The
happiness gap takes the average life evaluation among those above the median
response and subtracts the average life evaluation among those below the
median, with those exactly at the median split equally across the two halves. A
higher ranking in Figure 2.2 means a lower happiness inequality, as measured by
the happiness gap[26]

Figure 2.2: Happiness gaps between the top and bottom halves of each country’s
population, 2020-2022

World Happiness Report 2023

Figure 2.2 Happiness gaps between the top and bottom halves of each country's population, 2020-2022

Bar chart Table Back to the 2023 report