this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Subjective well-being is literally what happiness is. The question of whether you feel good is inherently subjective by its very nature. Valid criticisms could be found around the demographics being sampled, and people having access to the survey though. As people pointed out, many poor people don't have internet access in countries like India meaning that there's a bias in participation.
I meant subjective as in what you say. All that humans do is to strive to fulfill their own motivations, and communication is just doing so through interaction with other humans. The only reason for that what we say is connected to what we actually experience is that we don't like people finding out we are misleading them and as a result like us less.
Nobody else can really measure our happiness, though, so there is no concrete motivation to respond to such questions as accurately as possible, so we're much more inclined to just say what is socially the most favourable.
Like, do you genuinely reply how you are feeling when someone asks you how you're doing? I'd say most people don't.
We're talking about people replying to a survey here and reporting how they feel. The difference from a question of how you're doing is with that question being largely rhetorical and being asked out of protocol as opposed to genuine interest. People obviously answer the question differently based on whether their expectation is that the question is asked out of genuine interest or out of politeness.
Read Hofstede's "Exploring Culture", and consider that a person in a high-collectivity culture, which also is a high-power-distance culture, may well answer the survey with what "face" requires them to say, instead of answering with what they, themselves, feel.
If you aren't correcting for that, you're doing propaganda, not science.
Different cultures REQUIRE different subjectivities be taken-into-account.
I think it would be more valid to dig into specific dimensions of happiness, & make some of those objective ( cortisol-blood-levels, for measuring stress, e.g. )
WHEN you ask people in individualistic cultures a question, and THEN you ask people in collectivist cultures the SAME question, they are not answering the same question, they are answering the social-pressure question, instead.
It makes complete mincemeat of cross-cultural measuring of "objective" things.
Try reading Lanier's "Foreign to Familiar" book, & understand just HOW different warm-vs-nordic cultures are, in instinct/reactions,
then it should be more obvious how such surveys are disinformation, not information.
Happiness is qualia and it's an inherently subjective thing. Talking about it as science is nonsensical. However, we can consider the quality of a culture by whether the subjective experience this culture creates ends up being mostly positive or negative. If a particular cultures results in majority of people being miserable then perhaps it needs to do some self reflection.