Over the past 20 years, the number of Russians who consider themselves happy has almost doubled, from 42% to 79% of the population. This is evidenced by the data of a survey conducted at the beginning of 2013 by VTsIOM sociologists. A more recent VTsIOM poll confirms this optimistic evidence: even over the past two years, the number of happy people in the country has increased by 10%, while only 18% of the unhappy remain.
Psychologists, who interviewed their colleagues around the same time, came to exactly the opposite conclusions — they believe that the situation of Russian society has become worse in recent decades in all key positive indicators. PublicPost spoke with Andrey Vladislavovich Yurevich, one of the authors of the survey, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Deputy Director of the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Is there a healthy, happy society somewhere in the world, or is it, in principle, an unattainable ideal?
This, of course, is not a utopia, although health and happiness are relative categories, and it is better to talk about a society that is more psychologically healthy and happy or less happy and healthy.
In general, both for modern social science and for modern politicians, a new reference point for the psychological, and not the economic state of society, has become very characteristic. Although more often they operate with slightly different terms — the concepts of psychological well-being, life satisfaction, happiness, and so on.
Today, the goal of any government should not be to achieve economic indicators (GDP grows even when a prison is built), but to achieve maximum life satisfaction for people.
Since the beginning of 1972, the Bhutanese authorities have been governing the kingdom, focusing on the Gross National Happiness indicator. Five-year plans in the country do not rush economic progress, trying to preserve nature and traditional values. Unfortunately, the closeness of Bhutan from the international community does not allow an unequivocal assessment of the fruits of this policy.
Hence the current interest in various social indicators. For some time now, the largest international organizations began to calculate “happiness indices”. Of course, at the same time, no one rejects traditional economic indicators, but they are no longer considered as a goal, but as a path to that very maximum satisfaction, to the happiness of citizens.
At the same time, an interesting trend was revealed in Western countries: the standard of living is growing, but the satisfaction and happiness of citizens are not increasing. In an economically prosperous society, people do not become happier, and this can be called a very serious problem. Just to solve it, it is proposed to reorient policy from economic to social and psychological indicators.
These indicators are changing quite quickly, dynamically, but according to recent studies of the index of happy years of life, the happiest countries in the world are Nigeria and Venezuela. Characteristically, the position of Western countries in this ranking is not high.
According to a survey conducted as part of the World Values Survey, residents of Nigeria, Mexico and Venezuela feel subjectively happier than others (and citizens of Russia, Armenia and Romania feel the most miserable). On the other hand, the Life Satisfaction Index for different countries, developed by the British social psychologist Adrian White, gives different estimates. According to 2006 data, the first positions in it are occupied by Denmark, Switzerland and Austria. The United States is in 23rd place, Russia — in 167th. In the study World Happiness Report, conducted by American scientists commissioned by the UN in 2012, the Nordic countries — Denmark, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands — as well as Canada are in the lead. Russia ranks 76th in it.
Happiness can be defined in many ways, but the key concept for it is life satisfaction. The concept of psychological health is closely related to it, although it does not completely coincide. In the end, a mentally ill person can be happy.
To what extent is the moral state of society connected with happiness?
A person cannot be happy in a morally dysfunctional society, and we see this very clearly in the example of modern Russia. Indeed, perhaps the main contribution to well-being and happiness is made by a feeling of kindness, non-hostility of the environment. When the outside world is perceived as dangerous and aggressive, most of the population cannot feel happy.
Can this be called a sense of security?
Including security in the physical sense. But in a broader sense, say, in doing business, it is a feeling of reliability of partners, that you will not be deceived. In everyday life — a sense of reliability of friends and spouses. Etc.
— It is believed that in the late Soviet society, in the 1980s, the feeling of security was incomparably higher than now. Was the society of that time healthier and happier than today’s?
It was on this topic that we conducted a study, interviewing expert psychologists who assessed the state of our society at four points in time — 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011. The dynamics of changes in 70 different psychological indicators was considered: 35 positive (benevolence, justice, diligence, and so on) and the same number of negative ones (rudeness, commercialism, and so on).
It turned out that degradation can be traced in almost all positive psychological characteristics: each subsequent decade is perceived by our experts worse than the previous one. And 2011, in comparison with 1981, is assessed as psychologically much less prosperous.
Soviet society is described by experts as a fairly kind society, non-mercantile and practically devoid of the main negative psychological characteristics. In contrast, modern Russian seems to be angry, aggressive, hostile to man and very unfavorable for his psychological health and comfort.
To what extent can these assessments be related to the nostalgia for the past common to all people, even experts?
To take this factor into account, other methods of assessing the psychological state of society can be used in parallel, for example, sociological surveys. For example, the Levada Center regularly reveals the ratio of the number of optimists and pessimists, the percentage of happy people, and so on.
Another approach is an assessment based on objective statistical indicators. For example, we calculate the index of the psychological state of society, based on six indicators: mortality from diseases of the nervous system, the number of mental disorders, suicides, murders, divorces and orphans.
According to these indicators, the situation in our country also looks rather difficult, worse than in European countries, including Eastern Europe. The only exception is Estonia, where the numbers are even worse. However, approximately since the beginning of the 2000s, these statistics show a trend towards improvement and inspire reasonable optimism. It is interesting that this optimism in no way coincides with the results of the expert survey; this shows a noticeable discrepancy.
Indeed, the bias of expert assessments towards the negative can be caused, among other things, by nostalgia for the past. It is clear that our experts in 1981 were young people, and youth in general is characterized by a more optimistic perception of what is happening than more mature age. In addition, subjective expert assessments are more sensitive to the current situation. For example, if our football team wins, if the weather is good, a significant part of the people will feel happy, but not for long, because the feeling of happiness caused by situational factors is very unstable.
On the other hand, the statistics are not perfect. Its data is always received with some delay — only now we have begun to receive data for 2012. In addition, it captures already established trends.
Therefore, those and other indicators will inevitably diverge. And if our expert assessments show a clearly more difficult situation in 2011 than in 2001, then the statistics here show something else. According to these indices, in 2011 the situation was better than in 2010, in 2010 it was better than the year before, and so on. Statistically, the situation has been improving in recent years. This turning point, according to our data, occurred around 2002.
Although it should be noted that the schedule is very broken: the psychological state of our society has been continuously deteriorating from 1990 to 1994, after which it began to improve. Then in 1998 there was a new collapse associated with the default. This event became not only economic, but also social: the default undermined faith in the government and its policies, so that from 1998 to 2002 there was a decline again. And then, as people adapted to the new realities, there was again a trend towards an improvement in the psychological state of society, which is observed up to the last year that we considered, until 2012.
— It’s clear that it’s too early to speak responsibly about 2012 and 2013, but maybe we can give some preliminary assessments of what has changed lately, and how?
The easiest way to make a forecast is to extrapolate, develop the trend that is already observed. And if we do so, we can expect some improvement. In the end, during this time, no global social and economic events that could injure a significant part of the population have occurred. Therefore, it can be assumed that the general trend will continue.
— According to statistics, the improvement has been going on for at least ten years — have we returned during this time to the state in which we left the Soviet Union?
We haven’t returned yet, but we’re getting closer. If we speak in specific terms of the composite index of the macropsychological state of society, which is calculated on the basis of statistical indices, then in 1991, from which we begin the calculation, it was 6,76, and in 2011 — 6,41. For comparison, the 2002 low was 4,02. In general, judging by the statistical indicators, the situation has noticeably improved.
On the other hand, it can be assumed that statistics have simply learned to correct in the right direction — not all of its data are sufficiently trustworthy. For example, in recent years, the number of unreported crimes that remain invisible to statistics has increased.
— And who is to blame for these jumps in the psychological well-being of our society?
the social situation itself. Almost everywhere where reforms are taking place, especially such radical ones as we have, the psychological state is deteriorating quite a lot, this was also observed throughout Eastern Europe. At the same time, our country is larger, the social environment is not so homogeneous, and everything turns out to be much more complicated. We can also say that our politicians are not acting as wisely as the leaders in Eastern European countries, and as a result we are experiencing these transition periods more painfully.
— It is customary to say that the media, which create a flow of negative information, is largely to blame …
Of course, and this is one of the important factors. For example, you can not report a high-profile murder at all, you can simply report it, or you can show the corpse. Our media clearly prefer the third option, according to the principle of «the corpse revives the frame.» And, of course, the constant demonstration of deaths, violence, crimes on TV — and a similar situation in films, which today are almost always dedicated to bandits — greatly affect the psychological state of the inhabitants of Russia, creating an image of an aggressive and hostile outside world.
— In this regard, is it worth regulating the activities of the media?
In all countries, including those that are considered the most democratic, there is censorship — but not state-ideological, to which we are accustomed, but moral.
A study initiated by the American Congress showed that the demonstration of aggressiveness always leads to an increase in its real level. Therefore, the Western media, of course, strive for freedom, but both society and the state strive to limit the amount of violence that they present to society.
Sometimes we are told that censorship is harmful in any form, and the true freedom of the media consists in the complete absence of control over them by society. But this is absolutely not the case, as evidenced by the experience of democratic Western countries.
— Suppose the media calm down, and the government will shift the focus of its work from economic to psychological indicators of society. Wouldn’t this be another experiment, another attempt to force a person to be happy, to remake his nature?
It is believed that human nature cannot be changed. But with the help of social measures, a system of laws, moral restrictions, it is quite possible to limit the manifestations of the negative features of our nature and stimulate the manifestations of the positive ones.
And I can notice that in our modern society there are also positive phenomena. We can recall, for example, the trend towards the emergence of volunteer societies and movements. Or the fact that our motorists have finally begun to let pedestrians through, although, of course, they do not always do this.
The world today is becoming more and more globalized. We, Europeans or Americans, often watch the same films, get the same news. Is the influence of these factors the same in different countries or is it different everywhere?
First, the same factors do not exist anywhere. For example, the economic crisis in different countries manifests itself in different ways. Secondly, all of them are superimposed on the peculiarities of the national mentality, so the perception of these factors is also different everywhere. This can be seen most clearly in very different types of mentality — for example, Western Christian or Islamic.
If we talk about Russia, then the specifics of our mentality is known from the works of our scientists and philosophers, classical and modern. Mention may be made, in particular, of collectivist tendencies. For Americans or other Westerners of individualistic thinking, the market is one thing, but for our collectivist traditions it is quite another.
— Can we say that Russia really has its own “special” path?
Every nation has its own way. But Europe, with all its internal differences, is more homogeneous than Russia in cultural, geopolitical and other respects, therefore our historical fate differs from the fate of European countries more than the fates within Europe itself differ. In this sense, we are talking about Russia’s «special path». An equally “special” way, for example, is in Japan, China, etc.
— Do our cultural characteristics somehow complicate our adaptation in the modern global world?
Of course, there is such an influence. An example is our attitude towards wealth. In European and American society, wealth is perceived positively, but in our country it has never been cultivated, including due to the peculiarities of Orthodoxy. As a result, wealth is perceived negatively by the majority of the Russian population in itself — hence our attitude towards rich people.
Another feature of ours is the desire for justice. We believe that the world should be arranged fairly, that property and income should be distributed fairly. Against this background, the appearance of a large number of people who have earned a fortune in clearly unfair ways is very annoying.
— Maybe the difficult psychological state of modern society in Russia arises from the contradictions between our mentality and the political, economic situation in which we find ourselves?
You can say so. In any case, these contradictions are undoubtedly added to the action of other factors. For example, in Hungary or the Czech Republic, in the course of political, social and economic reforms, the psychological state also worsened — people had to adapt to the new circumstances of life. At the same time, the Hungarian or Czech mentality is undoubtedly more suitable for market relations than the traditional Russian one. Therefore, our features, of course, make their contribution — although as an additional factor, and by no means the only one.
— Can it happen that in this contradiction the mentality will win the reforms, and not the reforms — the mentality?
There is no need to present the national mentality as something stable and unchanging, given once and for all time. He is able to change and adapt to the environment. The reforms that have taken place in Russia have already led to its change. The younger generation is more individualistic, more material-oriented, and less fair-minded than the older generation.
On the other hand, the adjustment of our reforms, their direction is largely due to the specifics of our mentality. In particular, the idea of sovereign democracy grew out of this. This is also an attempt to adapt Western democratic principles to our particularities. There is a mutual adaptation of social institutions and mentality. Most likely, both sides will suffer «losses»: they will have to — and already have to — change Western social models, but our mentality will also have to change.