“The extent to which one shares meals,” says Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Oxford and co-editor of the World Happiness Report, “is an extraordinary proxy for measuring people’s social connections and their social capital. It underpins people’s social support. It drives prosocial behaviors, and all of that, in turn, leads it to be a very strong indicator — predictor — for people’s life satisfaction.”
But how important is eating together to our happiness? This is the question that I and my co-authors answer in the World Happiness Report 2025. In our new data and analysis we looked at the link between how often people share meals and whether they feel good about their lives and experience positive emotions. We also documented that there was a massive difference between countries and regions when it came to how often people shared meals.
People who share meals with others have higher levels of life satisfaction than those who dine alone, according to research.
In the UK, people on average dine with others for seven of their meals each week – four dinners and three lunches, data suggested.
Researchers said the data on meal sharing had been “collected and analysed at a global scale” and remarked that their findings were surprising in the “strength of the connection of meal sharing with positive life evaluations and emotions”.
The research was carried out as part of the The World Happiness Report published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford.
Belief in the kindness of others is much more closely tied to happiness than previously thought, according to findings published today (20 March) in World Happiness Report 2025.
Global evidence on the perceived and actual return of lost wallets shows that people are much too pessimistic about the kindness of their communities compared to reality. Actual rates of wallet return are around twice as high as people expect.
Believing that others are willing to return your lost wallet is also shown to be a strong predictor of population happiness: Nordic nations once again top the ranking of the world’s happiest countries, but they also rank among the top places for expected and actual return of lost wallets.
The findings are published today to mark the UN’s International Day of Happiness. They are powered by Gallup World Poll data and other sources, including the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll, and analysed by leading experts in wellbeing science.
Further results published in this 13th edition of the World Happiness Report, focused on the theme of “caring and sharing”, include:
World Happiness Report 2025 also contains a ranking of the world’s happiest countries. Finland leads the world in happiness for the eighth year in a row, with Finns reporting an average score of 7.736 (out of 10) when asked to evaluate their lives.
Costa Rica (6th) and Mexico (10th) both enter the top 10 for the first time, while continued upward trends for countries such as Lithuania (16th), Slovenia (19th) and Czechia (20th) underline the convergence of happiness levels between Eastern, Central and Western Europe.
The United States (24th) falls to its lowest-ever position, with the United Kingdom (23rd) reporting its lowest average life evaluation since the 2017 report.
Country rankings are based on a three-year average of each population’s average assessment of their quality of life. Interdisciplinary experts from economics, psychology, sociology and beyond then seek to explain the variations across countries and over time using factors such as GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, a sense of freedom, generosity and perceptions of corruption.
These factors help to explain the differences across nations, while the rankings themselves are based solely on the answers people give when asked to rate their own lives.
Lara B. Aknin, professor of social psychology at Simon Fraser University, and an editor of the World Happiness Report, said: “Human happiness is driven by our relationships with others. Investing in positive social connections and engaging in benevolent actions are both matched by greater happiness.”
John F. Helliwell, an economist at the University of British Columbia, a founding editor of the World Happiness Report, and a long-time lost wallet researcher, said: “The wallet data are so convincing because they confirm that people are much happier living where they think people care about each other. The wallet dropping experiments confirm the reality of these perceptions, even if they are everywhere too pessimistic.”
Jon Clifton, CEO of Gallup, said: “Happiness isn’t just about wealth or growth — it’s about trust, connection and knowing people have your back. This year’s report proves we underestimate how kind the world really is. If we want stronger communities and economies, we must invest in what truly matters: each other.”
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, professor of economics at the University of Oxford, and an editor of the World Happiness Report, said: “This year’s report pushes us to look beyond traditional determinants like health and wealth. It turns out that sharing meals and trusting others are even stronger predictors of wellbeing than expected. In this era of social isolation and political polarisation we need to find ways to bring people around the table again — doing so is critical for our individual and collective wellbeing.”
Jeffrey D. Sachs, President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and a founding editor of the World Happiness Report, said: “The findings in this year’s World Happiness Report reconfirm a fundamental truth: happiness is rooted in trust, kindness, and social connection. It is up to us as virtuous individuals and citizens to translate this vital truth into positive action, thereby fostering peace, civility, and wellbeing in communities worldwide.”
The World Happiness Report is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an independent editorial board.
The editorial board consists of John F. Helliwell (University of British Columbia), Richard Layard (London School of Economics and Political Science), Jeffrey D. Sachs (Columbia University), Jan-Emmanuel De Neve (University of Oxford), Lara B. Aknin (Simon Fraser University), and Shun Wang (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University).
Read the report in full at worldhappiness.report.
In this chapter, we explore links between sharing meals, social connections, and wellbeing. Although the topic of sharing meals has remained relatively understudied in the academic literature, the connection between food and social relationships is far from new. In French, copain (friend) and in Italian compagno (mate) come from the Latin cum+pānis, literally “with-bread”. The Chinese term for companion/partner, 伙伴, stems from a similar term (火伴) which literally translates to “fire mate”, a reference to sharing meals over a campfire.
The World Happiness Report is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an independent editorial board.
Any views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation, agency, or program of the United Nations.
Dr Alberto Prati (UCL) made the case for the importance of distilling both present and past subjective wellbeing measures at the latest of the Wellbeing Research Centre’s Seminar Series.
His work, undertaken alongside Wellbeing Research Centre colleague Dr Caspar Kaiser (Warwick), looks at the importance of life satisfaction recall, and the effect which the mechanism of memory can have on subjective wellbeing measures.
Watch the full presentation on the Centre’s YouTube channel.
The paper estimates the causal effect of a health treatment on patients’ beliefs, preferences and memories about the treatment. It exploits a natural experiment which occurred in the United Kingdom during the COVID-19 vaccination campaign. UK residents could choose to opt into the vaccination program, but not which vaccine they received. The assignment to a vaccine offered little objective information for learning about its qualities, but triggered strong psychological demand for reassuring beliefs. We surveyed a sample of UK residents about their beliefs on the different COVID-19 vaccines before and after receiving their jab. Before vaccination, individuals exhibit similar prior beliefs and stated preferences about the different vaccines. After vaccination, however, they update their beliefs overly optimistically about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine they received, state that they would have chosen it if they could, and have distorted memories about their past beliefs. These results cannot be explained by conventional experience effects. At the aggregated level, they show that random assignment to a health treatment predicts a polarization of opinions about its quality. At the individual level, these findings provide evidence in line with the predictions of motivated beliefs and over-inference from weak signals in a real-world health setting.
A study of the UK population’s attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines has revealed how psychological factors can distort opinions about scientific facts.
New research, published today (Wednesday) in the Journal of Health Economics, tracked how a sample of 856 UK residents viewed the Pfizer and Moderna jabs both before and after their vaccination.
The vaccination policy in the UK, which did not allow patients to choose the type of their vaccine, provided researchers with a rare real-world opportunity for a natural experiment to study the dynamics of memory and beliefs in a personal health context.
Individuals were asked for their opinions of both the safety and effectiveness of both vaccines, as well as – if given the choice – whether they would choose a Pfizer or Moderna dose.
They found that, on average, individuals viewed ‘their’ vaccine as far better than they used to think, both in terms of its safety and its effectiveness.
There was also a trend for people to misremember their previously-stated beliefs, tending to believe that they thought well of their own vaccine all along, and would have chosen it if they could: even if they had previously stated a different preference.
Researchers believe that this uptick in optimism can be explained by a combination of motivated reasoning (where the desire to achieve a certain conclusion impacts our support of evidence), and humans’ tendency to overvalue events which are poorly informative (like one’s own experience with vaccination).
The findings shows that people tend to display retrospective optimism. Revising one’s own memories and opinions can protect individuals’ wellbeing by reducing fear and anxiety, especially given the irreversible nature of vaccine injection.
A previous study at the Wellbeing Research Centre found a similar form of retrospective optimism also using happiness measures.
Dr Alberto Prati, Ajinomoto Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, Assistant Professor in Economics at the University College London, and co-author of the study, said:
“I think we helped uncover the roots of why people disagree. When people developed different hopes for what the scientific truth is, they ended up disagreeing about it. This shows that disagreement is more than a simple matter of different amounts of knowledge.”
Dr Charlotte Saucet, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and co-author for the study, said:
“This study teaches us that beliefs are very adaptive. They change as a function of humans’ needs and desires. In real life, it is quite rare to have situations that allow to observe this phenomenon as neatly as during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK.”
‘The causal effect of a health treatment on beliefs, stated preferences and memories’ is published in the Journal of Health Economics.
Image: Andrew Parsons / No 10 Downing Street, reproduced under license CC BY 2.0 DEED.
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Wenn man älter wird, werden die Partys langweiliger, aber das dort servierte Essen immer besser. Sprüche, die man auf Partys jenseits der 30 hört. Aber war früher wirklich alles besser und war man vor allem glücklicher? Eine Studie gibt Antworten.
