What Brings Greater Happiness Than Money?
What makes us happier than money? UC Irvine’s Belinda Campos, Ph.D. has an answer: relationships.
According to Campos, Professor and Chair of Chicano/Latino Studies, “Relationships can bring happiness and protect health. Indeed, it is now well established that high-quality relationships are associated with better health and longer life whereas poor relationships or a lack of relationships are as risky to health as cigarette smoking.” She recently spoke with the Greater Good Magazine, a publication of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Listen to her full remarks here.
Here are excerpts from that fascinating conversation:
On economic advantages and happiness
“One of the striking things is that Latino Americans and throughout Latin America, tend to report higher than expected levels of happiness. In places you would think that because of the relative economic disadvantages of those regions and those areas, that you would find less happiness.
This tends to be really surprising to people. I’ve even seen it described as a paradox, a paradox of happiness.
We think that more money should be linked to greater happiness. And we just don’t find that to be necessarily true.”
Sources of happiness outside the self
“What you find in the Latinos and the Latin Americans that are in various studies that have been studied is that it’s relationships that are really important. This is a culture that doesn’t emphasize the self in the same ways American culture tends to.
What you find throughout Latin America is greater connections to your relationships, greater pro-social behavior. And it may be that that’s what’s the key link to the greater happiness that we see in Latin American societies.
The emphasis in these cultures is on managing relationships in ways that put others before the self. So adjusting to the preferences of others via acts as simple as what we’re eating or what we’re doing for fun, or they can be as serious as what career we’re pursuing, what person we might marry, and how we’re going to take care of our loved ones during crisis.”
Viewing caring for others as normal
“It starts to be something that is more likely to occur if you’re socialized into thinking of it as normal rather than if you’re socialized into thinking of it as an effort that you’d have to put forth.
So, for example, getting together with your family on weekends, being there, if somebody is moving, making, you know, showing up at the hospital, if somebody’s sick, showing up for all the baptisms and birthday celebrations and holiday events, those are things that are really prioritized.
It emphasizes having mutual obligations to others. There is a definite negative connotation to obligation in English. If you say the same word in Spanish obligación, it really doesn’t sound so negative.
And it’s almost a stand-up quality, you know, to meet the duties of what you need to do in your life to be there for the people that need you.”
Read more at Greater Good Magazine.
Intrigued about perceptions of happiness across cultures? The Mental State of the World report – drawing on over 220,000 responses from 34 countries – found that countries that highly valued performance orientation and individualism had the poorest mental wellbeing. The report also found that economic prosperity did not lead to greater mental wellbeing, but in fact, in some cases there was a negative correlation.
Read the full Mental State of the World Report here.