The influence of individuals’ emancipative values (mis)match on subjective well-being

Abstract

Social sciences pay a great deal of attention to the effects of one’s (dis)similarity with one’s environment. Research of values is one aspect of these studies, where values are most abstracted individual goals which help one evaluate various phenomena as either good or bad. Most often, scholars focus on similarities and conclude that being similar to one’s environment makes one happier and self-confident and results in better relations with other people. There are relatively few studies that focus on the effects of dissimilarities, which leaves an opportunity for new studies. Based on the most recent waves of the World Value Survey and European Value Study (N = 122,224), this paper investigates whether one’s difference in Welzel’s emancipative value index (EVI) from the mean country level affect individual subjective well-being (SWB). Our analysis suggests that this effect depends on (1) the sign of the difference and (2) the country mean EVI. In low-EVI countries people with lower levels of EVI tend to be happier than other people in their country. There is no effect in high-EVI countries. Furthermore, high levels of mean country EVI is a stronger predictor of happiness than are individual differences.