Abstract
A well-known finding in the happiness literature is that Latin Americans report, on average, high happiness. It is not only high, but higher than expected for their socioeconomic situation, as portrayed by commonly used indicators. High happiness in Latin America is a puzzle, and some scholars consider it a paradox, which calls for new and fresh research to understand high happiness in the region. In fact, the high-happiness-in-Latin-America phenomenon constitutes an excellent opportunity to further understand the drivers of happiness, as well as to highlight some drivers that have not received the attention they deserve. This paper argues, and empirically shows, that person-based interpersonal relationships are important in explaining people’s happiness, that they are abundant in Latin America, and that they are uncorrelated with income. In consequence, it is reasonable to observe high happiness in Latin America, as well as happiness that is higher than what would be predicted according to socioeconomic indicators. The empirical analyses are based on information from three high-happiness Latin American countries. Abundance and good quality of interpersonal relationships positively impact on affective and evaluative experiences of being well, as well as on life satisfaction. The Latin American phenomenon indicates that the interpersonal relationships people create and maintain in their journey of life are fundamental for their happiness. Person-based interpersonal relationships allow for the joint enjoyment of life.
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Notes
Life satisfaction and positive affect are higher than what would be predicted based on income levels in the region, as well as based on the six explanatory variables used by the World Happiness Report: Logarithm of household per capita income, count on the help, donated money, freedom in your life, corruption within businesses, and corruption in Government (Rojas 2018).
SSI (Survey Sampling International) in the USA, CNC (Centro Nacional de Consultoría) in Colombia, Borge y Asociados in Costa Rica, and DATA Opinión Pública y Mercados in Mexico.
A well-known finding in the subjective well-being literature states that the handling of well-being variables as cardinal, instead of categorical, does not imply substantial changes in the main results (Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters, 2004). Econometric analyses for this paper -not presented here- corroborate this well-known finding: the main results do sustain when the categorical life satisfaction variable was treated as ordinal -running ordered probit regressions- rather than as cardinal -running OLS regressions-.
In most cases, the first two response categories were considered as portraying a high relational situation. Some exceptions apply for questions with particular response scales.
A robustness test was implemented to study the consequences of working with dichotomized variables rather than with the original response scales -which have higher variability-. The robustness test shows that there are no major changes in the main findings of the paper if the input variables are treated in their original scale or if they are dichotomized.
STATA’s rowmean procedure is used to construct the mean values based on the available information; thus, observations with ‘does not apply’ responses in some questions are not discarded.
When an ordered-probit estimation is used it is also found that the estimated coefficient for the quality of other relationships is positive and statistically significant.
In cross-section analyses the estimated coefficient for the income variable tends to be overestimated due to the impossibility of differentiating between relative and absolute income effects. Thus, it is very likely for the absolute income effect to be lower than what the estimated coefficient in Table 5 suggests. It is unclear whether relative and absolute relational effects do exist.
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Grants: The research leading to these results received funding from The John Templeton Foundation and Saint Louis University
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Appendix 1
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Rojas, M. The Joint Enjoyment of Life. Explaining High Happiness in Latin America. J Happiness Stud 25, 100 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-024-00817-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-024-00817-9