Is Finland really the happiest country? Correcting five misunderstandings of what the rankings reveal

So, for the sixth year in a row, Finland is world’s happiest country, based on the annual ranking of World Happiness Report. Yippee-ki-yay!

While such stability starts to be boring, Finland’s constant success has meant that I – as one of the leading well-being experts from Finland – have given interviews to media across the world from New York Times, BBC, and New Scientist to Le Monde and Wired Japan. In these 40+ interviews, I’ve noticed that certain misunderstandings keep repeating themselves from year to year.

To help interpret what it means that Finland is the happiest in the world, here’s five most common misunderstandings about what the results mean – and what they don’t mean:

1. The whole ranking is based on one single question

Every year, it seems that half of the articles in the media misreport how the ranking is calculated. They talk about how the ranking is based on factors such as social support, income, health, freedom, generosity, and absence of corruption. While these are factors that potentially can make people happy – and thus explain why people in some countries are happier than in others – they are not happiness as such.

Happiness is about a person’s own feelings and how they see their own life. Accordingly, the happiness ranking is based on this one single question:

Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?

Some thousand people from each country answer this question. An average is calculated – and that average is the happiness score for the given country.

2. It’s not about Finland. It’s about the Nordics.

The happiness ranking is based on a representative sample from each country answering the same question. From politics we know that the opinion polls before elections always have their biases due to two key factors:

1) A sample of thousand people never perfectly represents the whole country introducing a margin of error compared to what the whole population would answer.

2) There can be response biases such as people in certain cultures being more prone to use extreme options (zeros and tens) in surveys or other cultural factors that lead certain countries to have slightly higher or lower averages than what they should have.

This year, the happiness report helpfully includes confidence intervals for the rankings, which reveal that Denmark’s position is somewhere between 2 to 4, Iceland’s 2 to 7, and Sweden’s 2 to 9, demonstrating the uncertainties in the results. While Finland with its average happiness of 7.80 has a small gap to the next countries – Denmark at 7.59 and Iceland at 7.53 – I would not read too much into that difference of 0.21 on a scale from 0 to 10.

But what is striking from the charts is the consistent success of the Nordic countries. The five Nordic countries – Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland – are all in the top 7 of the world. In fact, for the whole ten years when World Happiness Report has been published, the Nordic countries have constantly been in the top 10. So, when searching for an explanation for Finland’s success, I would focus on examining what the Nordic countries have done right compared to other countries.

3. It’s not about some cozy cultural habits, It’s about the institutions.

When Denmark topped the rankings, media went crazy about ‘hygge’ a Danish word for coziness – think blankets, armchairs, and candles. When Finland outranked Denmark, similar stories were written about Finnish sauna culture and the mystical national characteristics called ‘sisu’.

However, the real reasons for Finland’s and Denmark’s high rankings are more boring: It’s the high-quality institutions that explain the high rankings. That’s what we found out when we reviewed the scientific literature on the topic in a chapter published in World Happiness Report a few years ago.

When looking at rankings on lack of corruption, freedom of the press, rule of law, or quality of democracy, Finland and the other Nordic countries are consistently among the best performing countries in the world. The institutions simply work in Finland: Citizens feel that their voice is heard, and the institutions deliver what they are supposed to deliver.

Combine this with the welfare policies for which the Nordic countries are famous for – free health care, free education, relatively good unemployment benefits and pensions – and you start to get the picture: These are countries that take care of their citizens. When facing various challenges in life, the people can count on the institutions to take care of them. Not perfectly of course, but better than almost anywhere else in the world. 

4. It’s not about making people happy. It’s about removing sources of unhappiness.

The government can’t make citizens happy. But well-functioning institutions and welfare services can remove many sources of unhappiness from people’s lives. Finland is not the happiest in the world because there would be more extremely happy people in Finland than elsewhere. Instead, because the institutions serve the people so well, there is less extremely unhappy people in Finland and other Nordic countries than anywhere else in the world.

Instead of saying ‘Finland is the happiest country in the world’, a more accurate way of putting it would be to say that ‘Finland is the country where the least amount of population is miserable.’ And this is thanks to the institutions.

5. Happiness ranking is not just fun triviality, citizen happiness should be a serious political goal

For too long, policy-makers have focused on economic metrics when assessing the success and progress of the nation. While a functioning economy is an important factor in removing poverty, the richer the nation, the less people’s happiness and life quality is dependent on economics. Accordingly, the politicians and policy-makers should remember the ultimate goal of politics, already articulated by Adam Smith in 1759:

“All constitutions of government, however, are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them.”

Right now, the happiness ranking is too often treated as a fun triviality – reported in ‘lifestyle’ rather ‘politics’ sections in newspapers. Instead, we should take the happiness indexes as seriously as we take metrics like GDP. Rise of citizen happiness should be celebrated, while a drop in average happiness should be treated as a national crisis, meriting serious attention.

In the end, it is no surprise that the same countries that rank high in various democracy indexes, rank also high in happiness indexes: Given functioning democracy, those at the top have to care about those at the bottom. Too many countries are built to serve those in power, coming to ignore the well-being of a large part of the population.

So, the ultimate secret to Finnish happiness is simple but hard to put in practice: Build institutions that truly serve the citizens at large, not just a narrow elite within it.

Read more:

Martela, F., Greve, B., Rothstein, B., & Saari, J. (2020). The Nordic Exceptionalism: What Explains Why the Nordic Countries are Constantly Among the Happiest in the World. In J. F. Helliwell, R. Layard, J. Sachs, & J.-E. De Neve (Eds.), World Happiness Report 2020 (pp. 129–146). Sustainable Development Solutions Network. https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2020/the-nordic-exceptionalism-what-explains-why-the-nordic-countries-are-constantly-among-the-happiest-in-the-world/

Maslow 2.0: Replacing the Pyramid of Needs with a Sailboat of Needs

At the 50th anniversary of Abraham Maslow passing away, a bold new book provides an updated version of his theory of needs by integrating it with the latest developments in empirical psychology. But what exactly are these new growth-oriented needs of humans?

Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs is undoubtedly one of the most iconic psychological images. Reprinted countless of times, the pyramid depicts physiological needs such as breathing, food, and water at the base of the pyramid. The next layer is safety and security, then comes love and belonging, then self-esteem and respect, with self-actualization at the top.

Once you’ve seen it, the idea of a pyramid of needs sticks with you. It is intuitive, it is memorable – and it is wrong. As an image of human needs, Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs is mistaken on two accounts: It’s not Maslow’s pyramid. And the needs don’t form a pyramid.

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First, rather surprisingly, Abraham Maslow himself never created a pyramid of needs. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1908, Maslow is still regarded as one of the most influential Twentieth-century psychologists who is indeed especially famous for his theory of human needs. Reacting to the atrocities of the WWII, Maslow wanted to develop a psychology of human potential, the good in each of us, and what humans ultimately need to flourish.

However, the shape of a pyramid is nowhere to be found in Maslow’s writings. It was a bunch of management scholars who in the late 50s and early 60s drew the pyramid as a mnemonic for managers wanting “maximum motivation at lowest cost.” The pyramid, thus, does not have anything to do with Maslow himself but rather the iconic shape spread through management textbooks and business consultants eager to sell the pyramid as a tool to extract motivation from unsuspecting employees.

Second, the scientific community realized already decades ago that while humans certainly might have psychological needs, these needs don’t arrange themselves into a clear hierarchy. Furthermore, the list of needs provided by Maslow has been challenged by newer, more empirically supported theories.

In a bold new book, entitled Transcend – The New Science of Self-Actualization, psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman aims to make Maslow relevant again by retaining the healthy core of his theory, while integrating his ideas with the developments of empirical psychology that have taken place in the five decades since Maslow passed away in Menlo Park, Ca., on June 8, 1970, when his eager writing to revise his theory came to an unfortunate halt through a fatal heart attack.

Kaufman argues that the part of Maslow’s theory that has stood the test of time is a distinction between two types of needs. First, there are the deficit needs, which dominate our motivation and trump any higher needs when they are urgently lacking. If I am underwater and start to be out of oxygen, self-realization is not the first thing on my mind. The only need I care about is the necessity of being able to breath again. The more precarious a physical need becomes, the more it preoccupies our mind. Hunger is a powerful motivation. However, as long as my access to water, food, and shelter feels secured, I don’t think about them much. Deficit needs thus become activated mainly when we are lacking them.

Human existence, however, is not mere passive reactance to deficits. As the movie character Solomon Northup memorably states in 12 Years a Slave: “I don’t want to survive. I want to live.” We humans are not mere survival-machines, but active and growth-oriented, eager to take on challenges through which to manifest our full potential. A human being has a tendency for self-fulfillment, “to become actualized in what he is potentially”, as Maslow put it. In this quest to realize ourselves, we are guided by what Maslow called growth needs. While deficit needs are driven by fears, anxieties, and a push to quench what we are lacking, growth needs pull us towards what we find intriguing and valuable. They are the sources of intrinsic fulfillment we are drawn towards when we don’t have to worry about mere survival.

The pyramid fails to capture this fundamental distinction between deficit and growth needs. In its place Kaufman proposes a sailboat. Life isn’t a project or a competition; it is a journey to travel through “a vast blue ocean, full of new opportunities for meaning and discovery but also danger and uncertainty.” The hull of the boat is what keeps us afloat, offering security from the waves. It represents the deficit needs essential for survival. Kaufman proposes three such needs: feeling safe, feeling of belonging and not being rejected by others, and protecting our self-esteem. In other words, we need to feel safe both in the physical realm, in the interpersonal realm, and in our relation to ourselves.

But having a protective body is not enough for real movement. Kaufman quotes Seneca: “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.” What we need to do is to open our sail and dare to embrace life and direct our efforts towards actualizing ourselves. As for the growth-oriented needs, Kaufman again proposes three: exploration, love, and purpose. We explore our environment for the sheer pleasure of it, we want to feel a deep sense of connection and love with others, and we seek goals worth pursuing to energize our activities. The growth needs are thus not depicted as a pyramid to climb; they are ultimately about opening up to life, daring to treat life as a quest. Of course, the stronger the hull, the easier it is to boldly open up the sails.

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However, I would dare to go beyond Kaufman’s contribution by offering three other needs to fill in the sail of the boat. In 1970, the same year that Maslow passed away, Edward Deci, a young psychologist inspired by Maslow, got his PhD from Carnegie-Mellon University. He was soon joined by Richard Ryan and guided by a Maslowian vision of humans as inherently self-motivated beings actively following their internal motives, goals, and values, this dynamic duo of professors founded Self-Determination Theory. The research around the theory has exploded especially in the last two decades, with the number of empirical articles on the theory counted in thousands, and it being applied in contexts ranging from education, work psychology, and sports coaching to promotion of health behavior and parenting, to name but a few. This has made self-determination theory one of the most empirically validated theories of motivation and well-being available in psychology.

At the core of the theory is the idea that humans have three psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy as a need is not about independence and standing apart from others but about a sense of volition: We humans need to feel that we are the authors of our own lives, endorsing our own actions, rather than being forced to do things. Competence is about the sense of fulfillment we get from learning and getting better at something and the sense of mastery of being at the top of our game and getting things done. Relatedness is about having deep, mutually caring relationships in one’s life. Chronic frustration of these needs has been shown to hurt our motivation, leading to deviance, depression, and other psychological ill-adjustments. The satisfaction of the three needs, however, has been associated in hundreds of studies with becoming more energized and engaged, more intrinsically motivated, and experiencing a higher sense of well-being.

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My own encounter with Self-Determination Theory started on a riverboat in Moscow in 2012. Attending a psychology conference, I had just heard a keynote speech by professor Ryan when I saw him in the bar of the riverboat, where the conference dinner was held. I decided to approach him. In hindsight, he treated me surprisingly encouragingly, given that I was a student who had just first time heard about the theory he and hundreds of others had spent decades in developing, and in the naïve hubris of youth I was already proposing a bold revision of the whole theory.

Long story short, half a year later I was, with my family, boarding a plane to Rochester, NY, to move there to join Ryan and Deci’s Motivation Research Group. My own research has especially concentrated around psychological needs and meaning in life, aiming to demonstrate that the three needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are not only important for our sense of well-being but also for our sense of meaning in life. They indeed seem to be the higher needs Maslow was trying to identify that go beyond mere survival and point the way towards what makes this human life of ours truly worth living.

In investigating meaning in life, I am fortunate to live in a time when it has become a legitimate topic for empirical research, with new studies on the nature and sources of meaning proliferating. Here, psychological science is finally aiming to fulfill Maslow’s vision. He was not content with merely listing the psychological needs of humans. In his later years, he was working towards a humanistic revolution in psychology. In one of these drafts, Maslow confides that his ultimate aim is to spell out “the consequences of the discovery that man has a higher nature and that this is part of his essence.“ He wanted to work towards a world where each of us would have the means to transcend the mere strive for survival, and be in better touch with what is higher in us.

Maslow’s message to us, as distilled by Kaufman, is that “each of us is capable of transcendence in this brief, suffering, and yet sometimes miraculous lifetime.“ The better angels of our nature already live within each of us. As Maslow put it, “human beings can be wonderful out of their own human and biological nature.” We just need to ensure that each of us is in a secure place, where our inherent tendency for growth is supported, and our basic needs satisfied. The worse in humans – passivity, selfishness, aggressiveness – is typically a reaction to one’s basic needs having been frustrated for too long.

Maslow wanted to democratize the opportunity to live a growth-oriented life through removing the obstacles for it, like material scarcity, emotional coldness, and institutions crushing our dreams. This is the legacy of Maslow worth fighting for: To build a culture and institutions that support the ability of each of us to grow and become the best versions of ourselves. This is done through ensuring that as many as possible can grow up, live, and work in environments that support the satisfaction of our basic psychological needs.

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