Open society fosters satisfaction: explanation to why individualism associates with country level measures of satisfaction

ABSTRACT

Although the association between individualism and satisfaction in societies is well documented, the precise mechanism linking these two remained understudied so far. Here we coin and describe the specific facet of individualism responsible for the above 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, this paper finds the mechanism promoting life satisfaction of societies. Further, when open society attitudes are controlled for, the most common facet of individualism (quantified by Hofstede) turns out to be a negative predictor of satisfaction in societies. At the individual level of analysis, the relation of endorsement of four open society attitudes with individual life satisfaction is almost absent. Thus, open society promotes the satisfaction of communities in a eusocial way only.

KEYWORDS:

• Open society
• life satisfaction
• subjective well-being
• individualism
• collectivism
• trust
• tolerance
• materialism
• civic engagement
• happiness

Acknowledgments

We thank Janusz Reykowski for offering feedback on the presented idea.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Correction Statement

Data availability: Data and syntax supporting the results can be downloaded from (1) www.kuba.krys.pl/TheJournalOfPositivePsychology/OpenSociety_data_plus_syntax.zip and (2) https://osf.io/2fz98/?view_only=39530e2ee3d443c29b1eda2f1507e981.This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Polish National Science Centre under grant [2016/23/D/HS6/02946]; the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science under grants [P17806] and [17F17806]; and the Frank C. Diener Foundation.