Do unemployment, religiosity, or morality play a role in people’s perception of happiness and well-being?  Using large-scale survey data from more than seventy countries, Olga Stavrova shows in Fitting In and Getting Happy that to a large extent happiness depends on a match between individuals’ attributes and the sociocultural characteristics of the environment in which they live. The first systematic, theory-driven investigation of cross-cultural variability in the causes and correlates of happiness, this book also provides a comprehensive overview of prior theoretical and empirical literature on happiness and life satisfaction, and suggests a number of avenues for further research in the fields of subjective well-being studies and cross-cultural comparative studies.

Olga Stavrova is a research associate in social psychology at the Universität zu Köln, Germany.