Others-Benefiting Attitudes Prevalent in Open Societies is A Key for Societal Happiness

We propose and describe the specific facet of individualism responsible for the individualism-happiness association–the “open society”. Open societies foster four others-benefitting attitudes: tolerance, trust, civic engagement, and minimization of materialistic pressure. In the others-benefitting qualities of these four attitudes, we propose to search for the mechanism promoting happiness of individualistic societies. We further document that the sense of freedom in a society partially mediates the open society and societal happiness association. When open society attitudes are controlled for, the most common facet of individualism (as presented by Hofstede) turns out to be a negative predictor of societal happiness. At the individual level of analyses, the relation of endorsement of the four open society attitudes with individual happiness is almost absent. Thus, open society promotes happiness of communities in an eusocial way, this is, not by directly increasing happiness of individuals endorsing them, but by fostering societal environment for happiness of the community as a whole. This study is based on the World Values Survey data.