What does it take to be happy? Three simple and surprising questions may hold the answer, research found. While most of us seek more money and greater achievement as paths to happiness, these questions are all about connection. They’re more strongly associated with self-measured life satisfaction than either money or success. That’s according to the 2025 World Happiness Report published by Oxford University and based on a study of people in 147 countries.
“The quality of our social connections is perhaps the single most underrated driver of our mental wellbeing, and yet they are absolutely critical for wellbeing across the life course,” Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, who was one of six editors of the World Happiness Report, though not involved in the publication of this paper, told Newsweek.
He said that these results “echo what we find each year in the World Happiness Report; levels of social support, trust, and having people to rely on are the factors which make a huge difference when explaining differences in wellbeing at both an individual and population level.”
Well-being is increasingly recognized as a more meaningful measure of societal progress than economic output, yet most international comparisons continue to emphasize economic indicators. This focus has reinforced the perception that Europe is lagging behind the United States, with the productivity gap shaping the European Commission’s recent competitiveness agenda. Here, we compare European and American development from 1990–2023 using an interdisciplinary well-being framework that integrates five scientific schools of thought. We find that while the US increasingly outperformed the EU on productivity and income, the EU caught up in terms of various well-being indicators, including life satisfaction and education, while increasingly outperforming the US in life expectancy and safety. Europe also exhibits more equitable well-being outcomes and achieves them at lower environmental cost. However, in both regions, the conditions underpinning future well-being are under increasing pressure. These results challenge the dominance of economic metrics in evaluating progress and emphasize the need for inclusive development strategies that place sustainable well-being at their core.
Arguably the strongest evidence comes from the World Happiness Report – a yearly analysis of wellbeing based on a global survey from the opinion polling company Gallup. In 2024, the company was sponsored by the Japanese food manufacturer Ajinomoto to add a section on people’s eating habits, which included the following questions:
Thinking about the last 7 days …
(1) On how many days did you eat lunch with someone you know?
(2) On how many days did you eat dinner with someone you know?”
“My eyes lit up when I saw,” De Neve says, who co-authored a chapter on the importance of commensality in the latest World Happiness Report. “We’re looking at about 150,000 individuals around the world who responded to that question.”
De Neve’s team found that the more meals that people shared with others, the higher they scored on standard measures of emotional wellbeing, with quite astonishing consistency. “It was as predictive of someone’s life satisfaction as their employment status and your relative income,” he says – two factors that are known to be enormously important for wellbeing.
Although social connections are important drivers of wellbeing, and sharing meals is a nearly universal practice, the relationship between sharing meals and wellbeing remains underexplored. In Study 1, using novel data from Gallup surveys in 142 countries and territories (2022–2023), we use the frequency of meal sharing as a global measure of social connections, and investigate its relationship with subjective wellbeing. We find a significant, positive relationship in almost all world regions. The number of shared meals explains as much variation in wellbeing as some key socioeconomic indicators, such as income or unemployment. In Study 2, we use data from the American Time Use Survey (2003–2023) to document changes in meal sharing in the United States over time. We find clear evidence that, with every passing year, Americans are dining alone more and more often, particularly the younger generations. Using Day Reconstruction Method data, we show that Americans who eat at least one meal with others report higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress, pain and sadness on that day. Finally, we point to a number of promising avenues for future research and discuss implications for policy.
In a difficult business environment, artificial intelligence can look like an obvious answer for executives seeking faster work, lower costs and new efficiencies. But as AI moves into everyday business use, the more important question is whether those gains will last.
New research led by Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve of Saïd Business School, University of Oxford suggests companies may be making a strategic mistake if they treat AI mainly to cut headcount. The research argues that businesses focused too heavily on automation risk weakening the human capabilities they will need for growth, including creativity, judgment, institutional knowledge and leadership development.
“It’s a classic manifestation of status quo bias,” says De Neve. “It’s far easier for an executive to look at a spreadsheet and imagine using AI to streamline what people already do than it is to do the heavy strategic lifting of reimagining how technology can produce entirely new value. Treating AI as a headcount-slashing tool might yield quick, visible cost savings, but it is ultimately a path of organisational contraction that trades away a company’s long-term capacity to innovate.”
“Wellbeing and happiness are ultimately – there is no way around it – in the eye of the beholder,” says De Neve, who is the co-founder of the World Wellbeing Movement; a charity which, for the past three years, has commissioned an annual UK Wellbeing Report which aims to assess the nation’s level of wellbeing by collating key UK data.
And, while there are many objective factors – such as physical and mental health, education, and income – that contribute to an individual’s wellbeing, the metric for assessing it couldn’t be simpler: asking people, on a scale of zero to 10, how satisfied they are with their life these days.
After nearly a decade of steady-increases in national wellbeing, since 2020 the UK has experienced the largest drop in life satisfaction since records began. In 2025, life satisfaction across the country continues to stagnate in England, Wales and Scotland, but Northern Ireland experiences a stronger recovery. Across the country, 1 in 8 adults still live below the Happiness Poverty Line and only 1 in 4 adults live above the Flourishing Line – the same number as in our previous report. For the first time, we also show that these trends are also strongly related to whether people support the government, vote for the government, or participate in elections. When comparing UK regions over time, higher wellbeing relates to stronger support for the incumbent government, a higher vote share for the government, and higher election turnout. In a horse-race with household income and unemployment, wellbeing measures typically matter as much as – and in some cases more than – these key economic indicators.
Finland is starting to sound like a nirvana. A few months ago, it was named the happiest country in the World Happiness Report, topping the chart alongside its Nordic neighbours, which occupy five of the top six spots. And this was no fluke – Finland has now come first for nine years in a row.
Ostensibly, there are plenty of factors that ought to make people in Nordic countries less than content, not least the dingy weather and high taxes. Then again, there is a sense that these taxes really go somewhere, with residents reaping the rewards of investment into healthcare, education and transport. Plus, the low population density, massive forest coverage and access to lakes and coastlines all mean that even city dwellers are never too far from nature.
But how much confidence should we place in these global rankings? After all, happiness is a slippery concept, and all sorts of factors – not least how different cultures understand what it means to be happy – could conceivably skew the results. To delve into these questions, New Scientist spoke to economist and behavioural scientist Jan-Emmanuel De Neve at the University of Oxford, the editor of the World Happiness Report. He explained how his work attempts to measure true happiness, why he believes Finland deserves its top spot and what the rest of us can do to bring a bit more joy to our everyday lives.
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, an economist and director of Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Centre, told Business Insider he expects more companies to make similar trade-offs as they pursue AI, saying it is indicative of a “short-term mindset.”
“When leaders openly cut human compensation to fund AI, they are trying to project decisive, tech-forward management. However, the actual message traveling to the workforce is that they do not have a secure future in the organization,” De Neve said.