Subjective Happiness Among Polish and Hadza People

Tomasz Frackowiak; Anna Oleszkiewicz; Marina Butovskaya; Agata Groyecka; Maciej Karwowski; Marta Kowal; Piotr Sorokowski

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01173

Subjective Happiness Among Polish and Hadza People

Front Psychol. 2020 Jun 9:11:1173. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01173. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Tomasz Frackowiak¹, Anna Oleszkiewicz^{1

2}, Marina Butovskaya^{3

4}, Agata Groyecka¹, Maciej Karwowski¹, Marta Kowal¹, Piotr Sorokowski¹

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Psychology, University of Wrocław, Wrocław, Poland.
² Smell and Taste Clinic, Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Carl Gustav Carus Medical School, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany.
³ Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia.
⁴ Center for Social Anthropology, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia.

Abstract

Life satisfaction and happiness were broadly studied in Western populations, whereas evidence from traditional societies remains surprisingly scarce. We collected data on the happiness from 145 Hadza, and compared it with data obtained from 156 Poles, representing Westernized society. Participants were asked to answer four simple questions from Subjective Happiness Scale (Lyubomirsky and Lepper, 1999). Results indicate that Hadza report a higher level of happiness with their lives than do Polish people. Our findings also show that sex was not related to happiness in both populations, while age was a negative predictor of happiness, but only among Poles. Therefore, we hypothesize that positive perception of aging in societies may increase their actual happiness.

Keywords: Hadza; happiness; life satisfaction; modernization; positive psychology; subjective happiness scale.