People almost universally value having good character, happiness, health, meaning, and relationships, followed by religion/spirituality and money: Commonalities but also variation in priorities across 22 countries in the Global Flourishing Study
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Ascertaining how people are faring in life is difficult since wellbeing is multidimensional and people invariably do better in some ways than others. A further complication that renders such assessments more complex is people can vary in the importance they place on different dimensions of wellbeing. Thus even if we can reliably assess how well people are doing in various domains, unless one can contextualise these assessments through the lens of people’s own priorities, one will have a skewed understanding of their wellbeing. We explore this issue by examining cross-sectional data from 131,487 people across 22 countries in the Wave 1 “mid-year” survey of the Global Flourishing Study (GFS), which includes a set of items in which people rate, on a 0–10 scale of importance, seven key outcomes. Strikingly, people strongly valued many aspects of flourishing in common across cultures, indicating perhaps some universality, on average deeming “being a good person” to be most important (8.9), followed closely by “being healthy” (8.8),“having good relationships” (8.7), and “being happy” and “having a meaningful life” (both 8.5), then slightly lower “having plenty of money to do what you want” (8.0) and lastly “having a religious or spiritual life” (7.0). There was some cross-cultural variation, however, with seven countries putting health first (China, Germany, Israel, Japan, Nigeria, Poland, and South Africa) and three religion/spirituality (Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania). We also analyzed seven sociodemographic correlates of these responses. While there were myriad differences in priorities, some general trends were observed, including that females had higher importance ratings than males on all outcome variables, people with more education gave higher ratings on all values except religion, and all importance ratings increased with age except for happiness and money. The data advance our understanding, especially cross-culturally, on what people perceive as mattering in life.
