Hidden flaw in world happiness rankings exposed by researchers

According to a new study, the World Happiness Report, which rates countries based on how happy their residents are, may have a major flaw in determining who comes out on top.

The article heavily depends on something known as the Cantril Ladder, which is really simply one question that asks people to imagine a ladder numbered zero to 10. Ten is supposed to be the best life possible, and zero is the pits. Then, people have to say where they think they land on this ladder. However, researchers from Scandinavia and the United States discovered that this question may reveal more about how people believe they compare to others than about how happy they truly are.

Here's the kicker: when people are presented with the Cantril Ladder, many of them don't even choose 10 as their ideal place. On average, people go for eight. This made the study authors decide to do a little experiment. They asked different groups the same question about well-being, but they mixed it up by sometimes leaving out the ladder or changing the wording.

Researchers found the original Cantril Ladder made people focus more on money and power instead of thinking about what really makes them happy. When they ditched the ladder, people started talking about stuff like health, family, relationships, and having enough money to get by. And guess what? These folks were more likely to pick 10 as their happy place.

Now, this doesn't mean we should throw in the towel when it comes to measuring happiness around the world. It can still give policymakers some useful nuggets about what makes people tick, so they can focus on the right stuff.

What's really ironic is how the media tends to report on these happiness rankings. They love to play up the whole "who's beating who" angle, which just feeds into that competitive mindset that makes it hard to be happy in the first place.

As Jamil Zaki, a head-shrinking professor at Stanford, puts it: "As decades of evidence demonstrate, happiness often comes not from comparing ourselves to others, but through connection with them, something that might be missing from some of the [World Happiness] report's key variables." In other words, making global happiness into a contest misses the point - it's not about keeping score.

Sure, it makes sense that we want to measure and rank happiness around the world. It could give leaders a kick in the pants to put policies in place that boost things like social connections, health, education, and making sure people have enough money to live on. But boiling it down to a simple list might gloss over the complicated realities of people's emotional lives and what really makes them tick.

In a world preoccupied with quantifying happiness, we need to step back and consider the drawbacks of our current approach. The Cantril Ladder, which is used for the World Happiness Report, may be unintentionally delivering the impression that status and one-upmanship are most important.