ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
High life satisfaction reported among small-scale societies with low incomes.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Life Satisfaction is More Strongly Correlated with Flourishing Than Cantril's Ladder.Applied research in quality of life · 2026Article
- Gatherer ancestry associated with national happiness.PloS one · 2026Article
- Wellbeing across the American Nations: First Settler Effects influence traditional and existential wellness.PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
- Is the frequency of breakfast consumption associated with life satisfaction in children and adolescents? A cross-sectional study with 154,151 participants from 42 countries.Nutrition journal · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
31 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Global polls have shown that people in high-income countries generally report being more satisfied with their lives than people in low-income countries. The persistence of this correlation, and its similarity to correlations between income and life satisfaction within countries, could lead to the impression that high levels of life satisfaction can only be achieved in wealthy societies. However, global polls have typically overlooked small-scale, nonindustrialized societies, which can provide an alternative test of the consistency of this relationship. Here, we present results from a survey of 2,966 members of Indigenous Peoples and local communities among 19 globally distributed sites. We find that high average levels of life satisfaction, comparable to those of wealthy countries, are reported for numerous populations that have very low monetary incomes. Our results are consistent with the notion that human societies can support very satisfying lives for their members without necessarily requiring high degrees of monetary wealth.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.