Happiness Is a Cultural Preference, Not a Human Default
Monday, December 29, 2025.
Western culture treats happiness the way it treats Wi-Fi: as something everyone should have constant access to—and something to complain about loudly when it flickers.
A large, cross-national study now suggests this assumption is not just provincial but culturally specific.
Happiness maximization is not a universal human motivation but a culturally situated value system that emerged alongside Western individualism and modern economic life.
For much of the world, happiness is not the main project of adulthood. It is, at best, a by-product. At worst, a distraction.
The study—published in Perspectives on Psychological Science—does not argue that people outside the West dislike happiness.
It argues something more destabilizing: they do not organize their lives around maximizing it.
That difference matters.
The Western Assumption Psychology Rarely Questions
Modern psychology has quietly carried a moral belief system into the lab: that all humans are motivated, at root, by the pursuit of happiness.
This assumption underwrites everything from positive psychology interventions to therapy goals to economic policy models. It appears in treatment plans as “increasing positive affect” and in cultural advice as “choosing joy.”
The problem is not that happiness feels good. The problem is that Western psychology has treated the maximization of happiness as universal rather than cultural—more biology than belief.
Kuba Krys and an unusually large international consortium decided to test that assumption rather than inherit it.
A Truly Global Test of the Happiness Hypothesis
The research team collected data from 13,546 participants across 61 countries, spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, and South America. This was not another Western study wearing a global costume. It was designed explicitly to test whether Western psychological priorities survive contact with non-Western value systems.
Participants completed standardized measures assessing happiness maximization: the degree to which they believed happiness should be the most important goal in life, and whether one should strive to feel as happy as possible as often as possible.
The researchers then calculated a WEIRD distance score for each country—measuring how culturally far each nation sits from the United States, the unofficial headquarters of happiness optimization.
The Pattern Was Not Subtle
WEIRD is a term used in psychology to describe populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic—a small, affluent slice of humanity that produces most psychological research and is then quietly treated as representative of everyone else.
The results were remarkably clean.
The closer a country was to the United States on the WEIRD index, the more strongly its citizens endorsed happiness maximization.
In these cultures, happiness functions as a personal achievement, a moral obligation, and a social signal. Feeling good is not merely pleasant—it is proof of social competence.
The farther a country was from the U.S., the weaker this endorsement became.
In many societies, the “good life” was not defined by sustained positive emotion at all. Instead, meaning clustered around social harmony, duty, endurance, or moral responsibility. Happiness was allowed, but it was not worshipped.
One might say the West treats happiness as a performance metric. Much of the world treats it as weather.
Three Competing Models of a “Good Life”
Western happiness maximization is not the only way to organize a life. It is one model among several:
Eudaimonic Endurance: well-being rooted in virtue, effort, and moral coherence rather than emotional elevation.
Relational Equilibrium: a good life defined by harmony, obligation, and role fulfillment within social systems.
Stoic Containment: emotional moderation prioritized over emotional expansion, valuing steadiness above intensity.
These frameworks do not reject happiness. They simply refuse to enthrone it.
Cultures do not fail when they do not prioritize happiness; they prioritize something else instead.
What “Happiness” Even Means Depends on Where You Live
Many ideas modern culture takes for granted—like the belief that people are meant to maximize happiness or prioritize feeling good—are not universal human drives so much as WEIRD cultural preferences.
Calling a population WEIRD is simply a way of reminding us that what often passes for “human nature” is, in fact, local custom with crisp academic credentials.
The study underscores a point Western discourse often forgets: happiness itself is not a stable construct.
In WEIRD societies, happiness is typically high-arousal—excitement, enthusiasm, feeling “up.”
It is visible, expressive, and culturally encouraged. People are expected not only to feel it, but to display it competently.
In many East Asian, African, and Latin American contexts, well-being is more often associated with low-arousal states—calm, balance, peace, or relational stability. Openly striving for happiness can even be viewed as immature, selfish, or socially disruptive.
In other words, what Westerners call happiness, other cultures might call noise.
A Predictable Objection—and Why It Fails
A common counterargument is economic: perhaps non-WEIRD populations deprioritize happiness simply because material insecurity leaves little room for it.
The data do not support this explanation.
Even in economically stable, non-Western societies, happiness maximization remains comparatively muted. Cultural values around well-being often precede economic change and outlast it, persisting across modernization without converging on Western affective ideals.
Wealth explains resources. It does not fully explain values.
Why Maximizing Happiness Can Backfire
There is a quiet irony here. Western cultures that prize happiness most aggressively also report high levels of distress about not being happy.
A substantial body of research shows that when happiness becomes a mandate, failing to feel it registers as personal failure. This paradox—where the pursuit of happiness undermines well-being—has been documented repeatedly in Western samples. Valuing happiness too strongly predicts lower emotional well-being over time.
Sometimes not chasing happiness is the healthier move.
What This Means for Therapy and Mental Health Models
The implications are uncomfortable for Western mental health practice.
If happiness maximization is a cultural value rather than a human constant, then exporting Western therapeutic goals wholesale—especially into non-Western or mixed-culture contexts—risks misunderstanding the client’s value system.
A client from a collectivist background who reports feeling “fine but not happy” may be incorrectly pathologized in Western therapy models, when in their cultural framework the absence of distress—not the presence of joy—is the marker of success.
Not everyone comes to therapy to feel happier.
Some come to endure more cleanly.
Some come to repair obligation.
Some come to restore dignity.
A therapeutic model that treats happiness as the primary outcome may miss the actual work the client is trying to do.
A Brief Historical Note the West Often Forgets
Even within Western societies, happiness maximization is historically recent.
Its rise accelerates after World War II, alongside consumer capitalism, individual self-branding, and the moralization of personal fulfillment. Earlier Western moral traditions—religious, civic, or philosophical—rarely treated happiness as life’s central task.
The West did not always speak this way. But it has learned to.
Limitations Worth Taking Seriously
The authors are appropriately cautious. The data relies on self-report measures shaped by language and cultural norms. The sample leaned toward university students, who may be more Westernized than their broader populations.
Still, the pattern held when controlling for age and gender and replicated across regions. This was not statistical noise. It was cultural structure.
The Bigger Reframe: Happiness Is Optional
The most important contribution of this research is philosophical.
It suggests that happiness maximization is not a biological mandate but a cultural artifact—one that arose alongside individualism, market economies, and emotional self-optimization.
That doesn’t make happiness bad.
But it does makes it situated.
Psychology that treats happiness as mandatory risks misunderstanding most of the world.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Krys, K., Kostoula, O., van Tilburg, W. A. P., Mosca, O., Lee, J. H., Maricchiolo, F., … Uchida, Y. (2023). Happiness maximization is a WEIRD way of living. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(5), 1109–1131. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231173688
Mauss, I. B., Tamir, M., Anderson, C. L., & Savino, N. S. (2011). Can seeking happiness make people unhappy? Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness. Emotion, 11(4), 807–815. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022010
Uchida, Y., & Kitayama, S. (2009). Happiness and unhappiness in East and West: Themes and variations. Emotion, 9(4), 441–456. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015634
Illouz, E. (2007). Consuming the romantic utopia: Love and the cultural contradictions of capitalism. University of California Press.