The 2025 World Happiness Report came out earlier this year, and the results were both interesting and mixed.
The World Happiness Report, published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford in 2012, combines data related to well-being from over 1,000 people surveyed in each country and from over 140 countries around the world. The aim of the report is to assess happiness in different categories. Not surprisingly, Scandinavian countries took the top five spots, with Finland coming in #1. The United States came in 24th overall.
The rankings were determined by gathering data in six categories related to kindness and generosity. They included if people gave money to charity, volunteered, or helped a stranger in the last month, which all would be considered kindness-related behaviors. The other categories were based on people’s beliefs in the benevolence of others. Those categories included survey questions such as whether a neighbor, a stranger, or a police officer would return a wallet they lost.
According to author John F. Helliwell and his fellow researchers, social connection is critical to happiness. Specifically, our perceptions and beliefs in others. Their research included several key findings.
Data showed that people are more pessimistic about the benevolence of others than they should be. In the study, when wallets were dropped in the street by researchers, the proportion of returned wallets was far higher than people expected, in some cases over 80%. Demonstrating that most people are honest, yet we still have little faith in others.
Also, our overall well-being depends on beliefs in the kindness of others, not just their actual kindness. Since people generally underestimate the kindness of others, our well-being can be improved by witnessing their acts of kindness and generosity. Apparently, seeing really is believing.
In addition, when society is more benevolent, the people who benefit most are those who are least happy, thus creating a more equal level of happiness throughout society.
Lastly, acts of kindness increased during COVID-19 in every region of the world. When people needed help, others stepped up. Despite a fall from 2023 to 2024, this increase has generally lasted, with kind acts remaining approximately 10% above pre-pandemic levels. Helping strangers, the most common of the three forms of kindness in most places is still 18% higher.
Kira Newman, managing editor of Berkley’s Greater Good magazine, writes that this year, the United States fell slightly from #23 to #24 out of nearly 150 countries, just below Germany and the U.K.
The happiest countries were Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
For the first time, none of the large industrial powers ranked in the top 20, and Western industrial countries have generally become less happy since 2010.
While the U.S. didn’t fare that well overall, it ranked higher on measures of actual and expected kindness, except for two. The U.S. is #12 in donating and helping strangers, #15 in volunteering, and #17 in expecting neighbors to turn in a lost wallet. Americans, however, are more wary of police and especially of strangers than people in other countries, ranking #25 in expecting police to track down a wallet’s owner and #52 for strangers.
With all of the doom and gloom in social media and mainstream news, it can sometimes be hard to see the best in others, but research shows how we predict strangers will behave tends to reflect how we view society as a whole. If we think others will do the right thing, we tend to have a more positive outlook and are happier than if we always expect the worst. The research data in this year’s report showed that countries, where more people donate, volunteer, and help strangers, are happier. In addition, how kind we think our communities are matters. If we believe we can trust those around us to treat us well, we are also happier.
According to Helliwell, believing that others would return a wallet predicts a larger boost to life satisfaction than a doubling of income. Believing that your lost wallet would very likely be returned is accompanied by life satisfaction that is higher by more than three-quarters of a point on the 0–10 scale. This effect is almost twice as large as being unemployed.
Expected kindness also seems to matter for happiness inequality, the gap between the happiest and least happy in a given country. When people see others as fair and helpful, other research finds they’re more resilient to stressors like unemployment, divorce, health issues, discrimination, and unsafe streets. A kinder society tends to benefit people who are struggling the most.
Certainly, there are some bad things in the world, but the bottom line, according to research, is that most people are good. The problem is that if we spend too much of our time focusing on negative things and have a lack of faith in others, we begin to believe things are worse than they actually are. “People may be made needlessly unhappy by their unwarranted pessimism,” write Helliwell and his team. Instead, our thoughts and our beliefs should be focused on the evidence which points to a society that is mostly filled with caring people who are willing to support and help us.
