Keywords

What is happiness? What makes people authentically happy? Is it an ecstatic feeling of bliss? Or a calm sense of harmony? Is it fleeting or enduring? Cyclical or progressive? Or is it perhaps less of a moment-to-moment feeling, and more of a cognitive evaluation: reflective retrospection on a job well-done, or even an entire life well-lived? Does happiness derive from a sense of safety and stability? Good health? Being surrounded by a loving family and deep friendships? Or does it arise from looking forward with a sense of hope for the future? Are any one of these factors in isolation sufficient? Or does happiness arise from particular combinations of these diverse elements? And, more broadly, is it the individual that strives to obtain a happy life, or is it an entire society that makes individual happiness possible? While happiness is a common pursuit for the myriad collectives—past and present—that constitute our shared humanity, and among the most enduring research themes across the humanities and social sciences, uncertainties around what it means to ‘be happy’ abound.

In the modern era, the drive for economic growth has been rooted in our strong belief that material wealth is the prerequisite for achieving happiness. Yet, human happiness existed prior to the materialism, infrastructures, and institutions of our contemporary world. For previous generations, or among those living in places not deeply touched by modernity, happiness would be found elsewhere. Achieving one’s goals in the face of difficult circumstances. Being respected by one’s peers or community. Experiencing the joys of family. As such, what most of us now view as indispensable ingredients for a happy life are, upon closer inspection, fairly recent requirements. Happiness must be understood as both something universal and unchanging across the diversity of human experience, and yet happiness is also something dependent on the times and places we find ourselves in. It is both something individuals share in common with others and the preferences that set them apart.

The Search for Twenty-First-Century Happiness

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have shaken our collective confidence in the patterns of the twentieth century, perhaps most of all the pathways to happiness it presupposed. The twentieth century was defined by rapid economic growth and narratives of progress and development. Growth on all fronts. The twenty-first century is, in stark contrast, being defined by stagnant economic growth, declining birthrates and aging populations, sagging public finances, growing populism and extremism, and a range of global crises, including viral pandemics and—perhaps most ‘existential’ of all—an accelerating climate crisis. Not expansion, but contraction. Gone is the strong confidence of the twentieth century and the naïve optimism about modern materialism in simple correspondence with happiness.

The symbol of twentieth-century happiness was arguably Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a single index of wealth that—at least in the minds of most policymakers and experts—provided a proxy indicator of happiness (‘quality of life’) in a given country. The twentieth-century pathway was one paved largely with material wealth, as money could buy the infrastructures, institutions, and entertainments that experts ‘knew’ would guarantee happiness. Indeed, for most of the twentieth century, attempting to measure happiness in any way different than aggregate GDP was denounced as ‘fuzzy’ or ‘fluffy’. This critique was mainly voiced among economists, those intellectual leaders of the twentieth-century GDP paradigm who had been schooled mainly in the theories of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, both of whom wrote at the optimistic outset of industrialization in eighteenth-century England.

It is this loss of faith in the twentieth-century patterns that has given rise to a recent explosion of scholarship on happiness, of which this volume itself is a part. Happiness, alongside allied terms such as ‘well-being’ and ‘flourishing’, has now emerged to become a major topic of scholarly interest. Debates over happiness and well-being are no longer confined narrowly to philosophy and psychology, but are taking place across the social sciences. Even many economists are now interested, as discussed below. Indeed, a casual online search of the terms ‘happiness’ and ‘well-being’ shows a rapid increase in such studies since the late 1990s. This surging interest has washed away the simplicity of the economists’ twentieth-century GDP formulation and, at the same time, much of the earlier methodological skepticism that happiness—what initially seems to be merely subjective preferences—could ever become an object of contemplation for ‘objective’, empirically rigorous social science.

Yet today it is clear that amidst the search to find new models to fit a contracting world, thinkers of all stripes—economists, political scientists, sociologists, linguists, and many others—have shifted to view happiness more objectively. Furthermore, shared interests and collaboration across a range of research fields have given rise to ‘happiness researchers’, those who have solely focused on the topic and whose work spans disciplinary divides (Diener et al., 2014). In effect, the study of happiness has recently come into its own. Notwithstanding lingering concerns about the validity and reliability of measurement, advances in happiness research and the growing importance of subjective happiness measures over the past decade are undeniable (Oishi, 2009). Even if the twentieth-century GDP=Happiness formula remains strong in the minds of many, the growing addition of auxiliary indicators for happiness and well-being in current research—as reviewed below—arguably represents a crucial turning point for social science. It implicitly demonstrates our collective departure from twentieth-century ways of living, thinking, and being.

Real World Impact

Nor is this shift narrowly confined to academic research, but has recently exploded in the ‘real world’ of policymaking as well. This is particularly true over the past ten years, and the trend is evident at virtually all levels—global, national, and sub-national (local). The current situation stands in stark contrast to even the early 2000s, when there were virtually no policy-linked attempts to measure happiness. At the global level, consider just the last decade:

  • In 2011, the United Nations adopted resolution 65/309 entitled Happiness: Towards a Holistic Definition of Development. This was followed by a UN High Level Meeting entitled Wellbeing and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm. Out of these declarations came a first report outlining the state of happiness worldwide (with an opening chapter on Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness), later systematized into the annual World Happiness Reports (WHR). The WHRs annually bring together leading researchers and policymakers around key questions to measure, rank, discuss, and highlight happiness worldwide.

  • In 2011, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) created its Better Life Index (BLI), which aimed to collect comparative data on aspects of life other than macroeconomic growth measures. This includes indicators of social well-being (e.g., life-satisfaction, education, environmental quality, safety, and civic engagement). The BLI initiative explicitly stated the importance of going ‘beyond growth’ in the coming decades.

  • In 2013, World Health Organization (WHO) issued a report entitled Promotion of Mental Well-Being: Pursuit of Happiness, arguing for a shift in focus from mental illness to the promotion of well-being. “The concept of well-being, including mental well-being,” it argued, “needs to be operationalized widely a public health strategy” across the world.

  • In 2013, academic and business leaders centered around Harvard and MIT, and working closely with Nobel Laureates including Amartya Sen, Douglass North, and Joseph Stiglitz, created the Social Progress Index (SPI). It purposefully excluded economic indices such as GDP, instead focusing on indicators across three dimensions: ‘basic needs’, ‘foundations of well-being’, and ‘opportunity’. The European Union (EU) later adopted this Index, producing the first EU Social Progress Index in 2016.

  • In 2014, UNESCO Asia-Pacific offices launched a project called ‘Happy Schools’ with the aim of going beyond academic achievement and reforming schools to focus more on the promotion of happiness and well-being. The initial phase of the project built on Positive Psychology, a US-based movement initiated by the work, Authentic Happiness (Seligman, 2004), that aimed to move happiness to the center of educational institutions worldwide. The project has continued, with UNESCO Asia-Pacific recently producing the Happy Schools Guide and Toolkit (2021) that is currently being distributed to the 46 member countries of the Asia-Pacific, a region covering more than two-thirds of the world’s population.

  • In 2015, the OECD utilized its flagship Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA) platform to collect data on the happiness and well-being of 15-year olds worldwide. It inquired about students’ life satisfaction, creating a ranking of countries whose school systems produced both high-achievement and high well-being scores. In the PISA 2018 test, the OECD added further questions seeking to understand the frequency of particular emotions in the lives of students, including how often they felt ‘happy’, ‘joyful’, ‘cheerful’, as well as ‘sad’, ‘miserable’, and ‘scared’.

  • In 2017, leaders of the United Arab Emirates and Dubai announced the launch of the Global Happiness Council (GHC), a high-level think-tank aimed at promoting happiness in public policymaking deliberations around the world. Comprised of global leaders in happiness research and development programming, the GHC divided into six sub-councils that advance the happiness in the following policy areas: health, education, personal, workplace, measurement, and city planning. The Council presents its annual reports at the World Government Summit each year, seeking to engage high-level policymakers in a ‘Global Dialogue for Happiness’.

  • In 2020, UNICEF launched a report entitled Worlds of Influence: Understanding What Shapes Child Well-Being in Rich Countries, gathering evidence on 41 member countries of the OECD and/or European Union. It ranked countries according to three categories of ‘good childhood’—good mental well-being, good physical health, and skills for life. In 2021, UNICEF followed this with Understanding Child Subjective Well-Being: a call for more data, research, and policymaking targeting children. This report announced UNICEF’s intention to rollout a larger global survey on child well-being in coming years.

In the wake of these myriad global initiatives, national policymakers have responded. European countries including the UK, France, and Germany have been working on formulating country-level indicators of happiness and well-being. In Japan—a key reference point throughout the current volume—the Prime Minister’s Office established an Ad Hoc Research Council on Well-Being in 2011, producing a draft index of well-being indicators. Much of this national measurement work follows the increased demands for global data reporting and comparison, as demanded by organizations such the OECD and UN. That is, the inclusion of well-being indicators in the OECD’s PISA studies, for example, has led several countries to discuss the inclusion of well-being measurement and initiatives in schools across the country. For example, in March 2023, Japan’s Central Council of Education officially recommended ‘well-being’ as an education policy focus for the coming decade. Moreover, this momentum at the national level has rippled down to the development of sub-national and even municipal level indicators of well-being. For example, one small city tucked into the mountains in eastern Japan (Hatoyama City), claims to be the ‘happiest city’ based on these new sub-national comparative indicators. Meanwhile, windswept Aalborg (Denmark) has claimed to be the happiest city in Europe, following results of an EU sponsored happiness survey.

In this way, from a discussion dominated by GDP two decades ago, the world has shifted dramatically toward a discussion centered on happiness and well-being today. Over the past decade, the infrastructures—scholarly, bureaucratic, media, and measurement—have been laid for turning the once ‘fuzzy’ concept of happiness into a new lodestar for policymaking. Importantly, this shift is not evident merely at the macro-level of overarching policy goals, but is instead coming—as shown in the list above—into more delimited policy domains, including labor policy (workplace well-being), organizational management, urban development, health policy, and—in particular—education. In the current volume, we will focus most of our attention on education, largely for three reasons. First, the domain of education clearly illustrates the strong ‘real world impact’ that this macro-shift has generated for practice. Second, a focus on education highlights the problems that inhere in this recent shift. Given that education is such a deeply cultural domain, it is an arena that clearly reveals the cultural tensions that are central to this volume. Third, education focuses our attention on the future. That is, when the current shift to happiness is recognized as a departure from twentieth-century models—as we have outlined above—then the creation of a new future beyond GDP=Happiness will inevitably fall on the next generation. What the next generation is being taught today gives us our best glimpse of how happiness will be understood in the future.

If education is one focal point of this volume, the environment is the other. But our analysis seeks to show that the two can be recognized as deeply connected once we adopt an interdependent lens. The accelerating, ‘existential’ climate crisis unfolding rapidly today is one major cause for the loss of faith in the twentieth-century models. The 2011–2012 high-level UN meetings that generated momentum around the happiness agenda explicitly underscored the unsustainability of the existing ‘economic paradigm’. We lead Chap. 6 with this discussion. Several years later, the UN replaced the still optimistic Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) with the more pessimistic Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and began talking explicitly about the ‘existential’ character of the climate crisis. Taking its cue from this, UNESCO has advanced an Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) agenda. Meanwhile the OECD, an organization whose mandate had always been economic growth, has in recent years recognized the climate crisis as the world’s foremost challenge. All of this underscores that Happiness≠GDP is being understood within a larger horizon of our highly precarious collective environmental situation. Put simply, the shift away from GDP we outlined above is not simply a pragmatic response to low growth rates, declining birthrates, and weak public finances, but an urgent response to the climate crisis. Even if the eco-existential dimension is not how the general public understands the new happiness and well-being agenda, there is little doubt that intellectual and political elites are turning to face environmental (un)sustainability through this agenda. We wait to address this issue until Chap. 6, in light of the alternative model of happiness and well-being we put forth in the intervening chapters.

The Problems Inherent in Twenty-First-Century Happiness

Despite our agreement with the general departure from twentieth-century patterns, we still have serious concerns in regards to this recent shift. These concerns motivated us to write this volume. Each new happiness ranking and world report heightens collective interest in happiness and well-being. But—at the same time—it causes the complexities surrounding happiness, those we outlined at the outset, to recede from view. The sequence is by now predictable: national happiness rankings are reported, then headlines and debates ensue for why Country X is so happy, and then everyone rushes to replicate Country X. The headline ‘Finland: the happiest Country in the World for Fifth Year Running’ is quickly followed by the next: ‘7 Lesson Learned from the Happiest Country in the World’ (these are actual headlines). Rarely asked are the deeper questions: What is being measured? How is happiness being understood? What forms of happiness and well-being are the focus?

Let us again consider the complexities of happiness, but add another layer of complexity: what shapes our perception of happiness? In this volume, our starting point is a realization that while we may experience happiness as an individual feeling, our perception of that experience inevitably reflects the values, norms, history, language, societal zeitgeist, and geographical situatedness of the age and culture we live in. Take, for example, the happiness one derives from spending time in nature versus consumption (e.g., shopping). Those from rural areas derive happiness from these two activities differently from their urban counterparts. The term ‘happiness’ denotes an ideal state for people living in any situation, but what that ‘ideal’ signifies and how we go about ‘achieving’ that ideal differs from culture to culture. This dual recognition of (1) the diversity of views of happiness, and (2) the way culture(s) shapes collective perceptions is what we mean when we refer to a “cultural view of happiness” (Uchida and Ogihara, 2012).

A cultural view of happiness recognizes that the values and views of life that constitute a culture inevitably shape the perceptions of ideal states as well. Depending on the impacts of socio-ecological environment and dominant religious and ethical backgrounds, factors that predate modernity by millennia, the specific forms of happiness that people experience and perceive inevitably differ. Once a given cultural background is firmly in place, subsequent generations consciously or unconsciously reproduce a given cultural view of happiness, learning to answer the ubiquitous question “happiness is ________” (insert here: wealth, freedom, connection, harmony, health) in different ways. A cultural view of happiness recognizes more persistence in perception than twentieth-century Modernization Theory would have us believe: instead of the myriad collectives that constitute humanity sloughing off their cultural skin to emerge as moderns, there is persistence in how different groups see the world and understand modernity. Culture is transmitted through education, language, and institutions, and these cultural institutions and practices persist even today. Recognizing this cultural durability is an important step to understanding how given groups of people perceive happiness differently, their different motivations for happiness, how they seek to obtain happiness in different ways, and even—quite unexpectedly—different views of what an ideal level of happiness may be. Surely everyone wants to maximize happiness, right? Wait until Chap. 4.

Our emphasis on continuity is not intended to deny change. As we will discuss at various parts in this volume, but particularly in Chap. 6, specific cultural definitions of happiness do evolve. For example, one study examined the evolution of the definition of “happiness” in English-language dictionaries (Oishi et al., 2013). In older definitions, the idea that happiness was ‘good luck’ prevailed. Yet, as modern ways of life gathered pace, English-language definitions of happiness gradually became closer to the idea that happiness is something ‘an individual acquires on his or her own’. In contrast, in the case of Japan, and despite all the outward modernization of Japanese society and institutions, even today Japanese definitions of happiness retain a strong sense of ‘being lucky’. In China too, despite an entire twentieth century focused on deep, even radical modernization of the culture (e.g., the Cultural Revolution), the connection between happiness and luck is unshaken, as seen every year in Chinese New Year’s Celebrations where across every doorway, even in sparkling modern high-rise apartments, on finds the Chinese characters for ‘luck descending’ (fu dao). Change occurs. Cultures evolve. Yet, any new directions are understood within older frameworks, inevitably shaping those new patterns in ways that represent more cultural continuity than we moderns might expect, and definitely more continuity than the utopian-tinged twentieth-century narratives of progress and development would lead us to believe.

Our Approach

In the widest sense, the current volume seeks to make visible this cultural view of happiness. As twentieth-century frameworks lose their appeal and the turn toward twenty-first-century happiness gains momentum, our primary aim is to open our readers to some sense of the diversity of patterns of happiness and well-being worldwide. We are concerned that the uniformity in measurement over the past decade is leading us toward uniform policy prescriptions in the coming one. Not only would such policies lack ‘fit’ in diverse contexts worldwide, but they may even be detrimental for happiness and well-being in some cultural contexts. In Chap. 5, we discuss how, for example, educational policies in Japan aiming for greater ‘self-esteem’ may actually lower happiness in that context. Moreover, the uniformity in measurement and policy may obscure other forms of happiness useful to address collective global challenges, including the climate crisis. This is an issue to which we dedicate all of Chap. 6.

What we seek to share in this volume is the notion of ‘Interdependent Well-Being’. This is a form of happiness and well-being that still remains largely overlooked by most in Western contexts, but is found widely across Japan. We do not intend to claim that this is a specifically Japanese model, only that much of the existing empirical support for the existence of this model comes from Japan. In fact, we believe Interdependent Well-Being is, in many respects, a dominant foregrounding across much of East Asia. At the same time, it is not a model that is only intelligible to Japanese and other East Asian communities. We are neither indigenous psychologists nor philosophical relativists. Instead, our starting point is a strong belief that Interdependent Well-Being is recognizable in other contexts worldwide, even within Western countries wherein the dominant discourse—particularly in North America—draws attention to a more Independent Well-Being mode. Here, at the outset, we also wish to underscore that Interdependent Well-being would only be one among a vast number of other options worldwide. We wholeheartedly endorse recent research that pushes us to look deeper into different forms of interdependence beyond East Asia. Our volume, in addition to whatever it may reveal about Interdependent Happiness and Well-Being, is really an appeal to other researchers worldwide to elaborate a range of additional, alternative models. Only with the diversification of research today will we be able to achieve a level of diversification in thinking, policymaking, and being in the future.

Let us briefly mention something of our paths to collaborate on this volume. Uchida’s field of specialization is cultural psychology. Arising out of dialogue between psychology and anthropology, the approach of the burgeoning field of cultural psychology is to empirically examine how a wide range of psychological activities, such as how people think, how they make decisions, how they connect with others, how they perceive themselves, and how they experience emotions, are related to the phenomenon of ‘culture’. Research findings across a range of fields have found that how we see things, how we understand human relationships, and how we think about the causes of other people’s behavior cannot be understood in isolation from ‘culture’. Yet understanding the interaction between the ‘macro’ social phenomenon of culture and the ‘micro’ psychological phenomenon of how each individual’s mind works is a difficult puzzle, not only for cultural psychologists but for all social science researchers. In the context of this volume, such tensions play out in a central question: How does happiness and emotion relate to the culture in which we live? This question has been Uchida’s driving research question for over two decades, a curiosity that initially arose from her interest in richly emotive Japanese classical literature as an undergraduate student at Kyoto University: reading the Tale of the Genji and trying to imagine what made Japanese people of eleventh-century Kyoto ‘happy’.

Rappleye’s fields of specialization spans comparative philosophy, sociology, and education. His approach is to understand the interplay between the pervasive ideas/ideologies of a given society (e.g., philosophy), its institutions (e.g. education systems), and the concrete practices that keep those ideas alive (e.g., school routines and pedagogical models). Numerous studies have shown, for example, just how different philosophy and education are across East Asia, as compared with Western countries. Yet there is little work that links the various fields, despite strong resonance, as we discuss in Chap. 5, between leading themes in Japanese philosophy, dominant institutional patterns in contemporary Japan, and the driving motifs of ‘modern’ Japanese education. Yet, while Rappleye’s approach draws attention to the interplay of various elements of the ‘macro’ social phenomenon of culture, it has its limitations in understanding how pervasive all this is as the ‘micro’ level of psychological phenomenon. This is where our transdisciplinary complementarity arises: the ‘macro’ perspective found in comparative philosophy, sociology, and education complement and are complemented by the ‘micro’ perspectives offered by cultural psychology. To what extent do the philosophical, social, and educational patterns shape and, in turn, come to be shaped by the ‘culture’ of a given society? This question has been at the heart of Rappleye’s research for much of the past decade, a question arising from the personal disjuncture between being raised in California (an extreme example of independence, even in a Western context) and yet finding ‘happiness’ in a very different form in East Asia, after living in Japan, Taiwan, and China for two decades (Rappleye, 2020).

Our formal collaboration began around 2017, catalyzed by the release of the OECD’s PISA 2015 Student Well-Being Report (OECD, 2017). The PISA 2015 results showed that East Asian countries scored the lowest in ‘student well-being’ (defined as life-satisfaction) globally. We discuss the details in Chap. 5. Reaching out to Uchida for help in understanding the intricacies of the OECD metrics, Rappleye took his first step into the world of cultural psychology, finding a wealth of research largely missed by educational researchers who conceptualize ‘globalization’ narrowly in political and sociological terms. Inspired by the richness of cultural psychology, several years later he, through the help of Yukiko, would spend a year-long sabbatical at Stanford University, learning from Hazel Markus and others in the Social Psychology Lab there. Subsequent work has combined the perspectives of cultural psychology and education, as in a 2020 consultancy to ‘rewrite’ the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Happy Schools project mentioned earlier. Meanwhile, Yukiko was being asked to participate more in policymaking circles in Japan. In 2020 she was invited to become a Member of Japan’s Central Council for Education. As the top education policymaking body in the country, she would be asked to translate the findings of cultural psychology into the realm of education policy. Despite different disciplinary foci at the outset, the larger global policy discourses have brought us together. Collaboration has been surprisingly seamless, perhaps a reflection of the fact that the earliest cultural psychology experiments were conducted in Japanese classrooms, catalyzed by Japan’s world leading student performance in international comparative tests in the 1980s. At a deeper level, cultural psychology and philosophical pedagogy at Kyoto University trace similar roots: the Kyoto School of philosophy and the pioneering work of those like Kawaii Hayao.

One distinct advantage to the transdisciplinary approach we unfold in this volume is that it allows us to think beyond cultural psychology’s central focus on the ‘mind’. The standpoint of mainstream psychology has generally been to carefully examine the intra-psychic process of individuals—perception, cognition, emotion, motivation, and action. Cultural psychology pushes mainstream psychology to recognize inter-psychic processes, focusing on the ways that contexts, such as culture, influence ways of thinking. Yet, given policy developments over the past decade, it is now imperative that cultural psychology expand further to discuss happiness and well-being in relation to institutional and ideational structures in the wider society, and in relation to new policy movements. What is the ‘mindset’ and its concomitant social institutions that support a happy community? What about a happy workplace? A happy school? What policies and pedagogies would allow for greater happiness and well-being? Understanding better how these more ‘macro’ structures create the ‘micro’, and how the ‘micro’ create the ‘macro’ is an important new direction for this line of research. Through transdisciplinary collaboration and the urgency generated by ‘real world’ policy shift toward happiness and well-being, we attempt to make a modest contribution here as well.

Outline of the Book

Our argument unfolds across the next five chapters. To reiterate, the overarching goal is (1) elaboration of an Interdependent Well-Being approach (or mode) and presentation of (2) evidence to support the assertion that this Interdependent mode is not simply present in Japan/East Asia cultures, but may be an important option for all cultures to engage with, as we collectively face the future. That is, we wish to go beyond mere cataloging of difference in the interest of multiculturalism, and instead move toward a global dialogue and expansive worldwide search for pragmatic policy and practice suggestions. We imagine our primary audience not as specialists in cultural psychology, but instead a wider range of policymakers, experts, social scientists, and media analysts. In short, we want to reach anyone advocating for alternatives to the twentieth-century GDP formulation, but who might not be familiar with decades of work in cultural psychology and the comparative social sciences. With this in mind, we attempt to minimize specialized vocabulary, and provide accessible summaries of recent academic research. As discussed, we return repeatedly to the example of education throughout this volume, as it is an arena that is both widely accessible and highly topical: the meanings, assumptions, and measurement errors we see in education are representative of what is happening across a range of policy and practice domains. In the interest of garnering a more global readership, we have also intentionally minimized references that are too specific (e.g., intra-national variation within Japan). Inevitably some nuance is lost in our decision to privilege accessibility over specificity, and global diversity to local nuance. The same decision was made in relation to the length: we sought to keep this volume compact and concise in the hope that more people will find time to read it.

In Chap. 2, we sketch a world map of happiness and well-being. We begin by addressing several dominant views: that there is a universal model (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs), that money brings happiness, that happiness is higher in developed countries and so on. We then initiate our discussion of a cultural view of happiness, examining the case of the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS). Our purpose is to provide the historical background, philosophical touchstones, and key definitions that we draw upon throughout the volume.

In Chap. 3, we extend this discussion deeper by digging into definitions of happiness and the ways these definitions are operationalized in measurement. This connects with policymaking, and how policymaking has utilized happiness measures in recent years. Here we return to critically reexamine the policy initiatives around happiness we highlighted previously, showing how nearly all are founded on an Independent Well-Being mode. Independent versus Interdependent mode is, again, the key distinction driving the volume as a whole.

In Chap. 4, we lay out the Interdependent Well-Being approach, showings it distinctiveness from an Independent mode. Here we summarize a wealth of findings from cultural psychology, and draw connections to work in philosophy and history that further support the conceptualization. This is the core chapter of the entire volume, elaborating the difference on which the critiques found in Chaps. 2 and 3 make sense, and upon which the implications found in Chaps. 5 and 6 are grounded.

In Chap. 5, we work to link Interdependent Well-Being to the macro cultural contexts. We highlight the Culture Cycle (Markus & Kitayama, 2010), first providing a conceptual model of how cultural institutions and mind co-constitute, and then highlight practices, thus showing how the Interdependent Happiness mode is ‘held in place’ by the wider cultural ecology. Here we focus specifically on how an Interdependent mode leads to different forms of measurement, different educational practices, and a different view of society and social capital.

In Chap. 6, we turn to explore the future of happiness in the twenty-first century. Here we focus on the pragmatic implications of an Interdependent Well-Being approach, arguing it is worthy of greater discussion because of its links to, among other things, the climate crisis. Herein we share a range of emerging empirical evidence suggesting that shifting toward an Interdependent mode may hasten the return to more sustainable forms of life, and—meanwhile—greater levels of well-being. Much of the research we feature here has just emerged in the past year or two, and gives a preview of how cultural psychology and environmental concerns will overlap in the future.

A brief concluding chapter (Chap. 7) then reviews the argument of the book, points out the limitations of our work, and suggests pathways for future research. Here the key themes become inter-disciplinarity, inter-cultural learning, and urgency.