Based on previous theoretical models, the present research investigated three different psychological constructs (religious belief, trust in government, and the experience of personal control) as moderators of the link between country’s economic growth (i.e., Gross Domestic Product) and income inequality (i.e., Gini) on health, happiness, and life satisfaction. Using a large cross-national data set (N = 490,579), we found that personal control predicted health, happiness, and life satisfaction above and beyond reliance on God and trust in government. Religious belief predicted greater health and buffered the negative effect of income inequality on health only in wealthy economies, but yielded negative correlations with health in poor economies. The associations between personal control and trust in government with well-being outcomes were consistently positive across different levels of countries’ GDP and Gini. Further, personal control also served a compensatory function by buffering the negative effect of income inequality in wealthy economies.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
From
Income inequality has become an increasing problem since the early 1980s (
Throughout human history, people turn to God or governments to gain control over their life (
It can be inferred from numerous theories that perceived personal control is a resource that can be drawn from
The question put forth in this paper is simple: if God and governments are theorized to be the universal protective systems on which people can rely (
H1. We predicted that personal control will correlate positively with well-being outcomes, including levels of happiness, perceived health, life satisfaction, above and beyond religious belief and trust in government.
Social researchers do not always agree that people everywhere around the world practice personal control or need it. Some argue that personal control is a phenomenon more highly valued in Western, individualistic world, and psychological well-being would be derived less from having high personal control for those in collectivistic cultures (
If one predicts that personal control is only linked to well-being in countries that are wealthier and lower in inequality, we refer to this as the
Yet, the importance of personal control has been emphasized and supported by many theories (
H2. We predicted that personal control would correlate more strongly with well-being outcomes at lower levels of GDP and higher levels of inequality.
Our analyses comprise data collected from 104 countries and were compiled into 6 quadrennial periods: 1981-1985, 1990-1994, 1995-1998, 1999-2004, 2005-2009, 2010-2014. This provided us data from 490,579 individuals with data on at least one of the variables of interest between 1981 and 2014 Eight countries (WVS/EVS country codes: RS, TW, ME, GB-NIR, CS, PS, BOS, CY-TCC) in the WVS and EVS data sets were not included in our analyses because they did not provide any data on all our variables of interest across 6 waves.
To ensure that we will include data from a broad sample of countries and citizens around the world, we obtained individual-level data from the longitudinal data set collected between 1981 and 2014 from the World Value Survey (WVS) and between 1981 and 2008 from the European Value Survey (EVS) (
Two researchers went through the questions included in the WVS and EVS and identified items to measure religious belief, trust in government, personal control, and items that assess well-being outcomes. Once items were identified, only items that both researchers agreed represented the concepts of interest were used in the calculations of the variables. Overall, the researchers agreed 100% on items that represent religious belief, personal control, perceived happiness, health, and life satisfaction. For the items that measure trust in government, final decisions were made by choosing items that have the strongest face validity, and with the least missing data across countries and waves. See items and available data in
We conceptualized religious belief as the extent to which religion is important and salient in one’s daily life such as through religious attendance or prayers. To capture this conceptualization, we used five items from the WVS and EVS that were similar to the items used to measure religious beliefs in previous studies. The first item asked the participants to indicate how important religion is in their lives, and the responses ranged from 1 =
Trust in government is measured using items that reflect a confidence in one’s government and the belief that the government is doing a good job at governing the country. Both the WVS and the EVS included items that asked how much confidence the individuals have in different organizations in their countries (e.g., the churches, the armed forces, the labor unions, etc.). To measure individuals’ overall trust in their government, we used two general items capturing confidence in the Parliament and in the government. These two items were rated on 4-point scale (1 = “A great deal”; 4 = “None at all”), and were reverse coded so that higher scores indicate greater confidence. We also identified a third item, which asked participants to rate how well or poorly they perceived their political system has governed their countries. The three items were standardized and averaged into a composite score (α = .64) with higher scores representing more trust.
Finally, drawing on previous theoretical descriptions of self-efficacy, autonomy, and competence (e.g.
We retrieved three items from the WVS and EVS to capture participants’ happiness (i.e., Taking all things together, would you say you are…; 1 = “
We also retrieved the following variables to use as controls in our analyses: gender (0 = male, 1 = female), age, marital status (0 = non-married, 1 = married), and social class. For social class, we picked the item that included 5 categories, including upper class, upper middle class, lower middle class, working class, and lower class, and this item was recoded so that a higher score indicates higher social class.
To capture countries’ economic performance, we retrieved countries’ GDP and Gini from the World Bank for every year from 1981 to 2014. We grouped the years into the same waves as those in the WVS and EVS. To address missing values, we performed multiple imputations (
To observe each independent main effect of religious belief, trust in government, and personal control on three well-being indices, including health, happiness, and life satisfaction, we conducted 3-level multi-level models using HLM7, in which individuals were nested within period, which were nested within countries. Being sensitive to the fact that those countries also belong to different continents, which might contribute into shaping the social, economic, and political structures of the countries due to their proximity to one another (being in the same continents), in both models, we controlled for the continents to which the countries are classified. We did this by entering five dummy codes that compared countries in Africa (DUM1), Asia (DUM2), Australia (DUM3), North America (DUM4), South America (DUM5) to those in Europe. These dummy codes were entered at level 3 and served to account for the fact that countries in close geographical proximity to one another are likely to share similar culture or affect each other’s economic growth compared to countries that are located in different continents (see Syntax file named Level3.sps provided in the
The first model investigated the links of religious belief, trust in government, and personal control to health, happiness, and life satisfaction. The model was constructed as follows:
Outcomeijk = π0jk + π1jk(GENDERijk) + π2jk(AGEijk) + π3jk(MARITALijk) + π4jk(CLASSijk)
+ π5jk(RELIGIONijk) + π6jk(GOVERNMENTijk) + π7jk(PERSONAL CONTROLijk) +
π0jk = β00k + β01k(GDP) + β02k(GINI) + β03k(GDP ✕ GINI) + r0jk
π1jk = β10k
…
π7jk = β70k
β00k = γ001 + γ003(DUM1) + γ004(DUM2) + γ005(DUM3) + γ006(DUM4) + γ007(DUM5) + u00k
β01k = γ010
…
β73k = γ730
All continuous variables were standardized (
Following the practices of the most recent study on the interaction of GDP and Gini on well-being (
In a second HLM, we considered the interactions between personal control with country’s GDP, Gini, and the interaction of GDP and Gini with well-being outcomes in separate models. The second model was as follows:
Outcomeijk = π0jk + π1jk(GENDERijk) + π2jk(AGEijk) + π3jk(MARITALijk) + π4jk(CLASSijk)
+ π5jk(PERSONAL CONTROLijk) +
π0jk = β00k + β01k(GDP) + β02k(GINI) + β03k(GDP ✕ GINI) + r0jk
π1jk = β10k
…
π5jk = β50k + β51k(GDP) + β52k(GINI) + β53k(GDP ✕ GINI) + r0jk
β00k = γ001 + γ003(DUM1) + γ004(DUM2) + γ005(DUM3)
+ γ006(DUM4) + γ007(DUM5) + u00k
β01k = γ010
…
β53k = γ530
Personal control was entered at Level 1, controlling for demographic variables. Standardized GDP and Gini (around country’s average) again were entered into the formula to predict the slope of personal control. For example, in the second model presented above, β51k tells us the interaction between personal control and country’s GDP, and β52k represents the interaction between personal control and country’s Gini. We expected that the slope for personal control would be larger at lower levels of country’s GDP, and at higher levels of country’s Gini. Finally, because previous study suggested that GDP and Gini interacted in predicting citizens’ life satisfaction (
All items are normally distributed. Because items were rated on different scales, all items were standardized before they were combined into composites (see
Variable / Item | Item from WVS/EVS | Min | Max | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Religious belief (α = .79) | ||||||
A006 | Important in life: Religion | 462774 | 1 | 4 | 2.07 | 1.076 |
F028 | How often do you attend religious services | 479012 | 1 | 8 | 4.62 | 2.570 |
F028B | How often to you pray | 79469 | 1 | 8 | 3.79 | 2.717 |
F034 | Religious person | 465467 | 1 | 3 | 1.35 | 0.571 |
F063 | How important is God in your life | 476305 | 1 | 10 | 7.21 | 3.182 |
Trust in Government (α = .64) | ||||||
E069_07 | Confidence: Parliament | 462211 | 1 | 4 | 2.70 | 0.902 |
E069_11 | Confidence: The Government | 352850 | 1 | 4 | 2.62 | 0.935 |
E111 | Rate political system for governing country | 192918 | 1 | 10 | 4.67 | 2.337 |
Personal control | ||||||
A173 | How much freedom of choice and control | 481323 | 1 | 10 | 6.81 | 2.371 |
Age | ||||||
X003 | Age | 501451 | 13 | 108 | 42.13 | 16.710 |
Marital | ||||||
X007 | Marital status | 500488 | 1 | 7 | 2.69 | 2.184 |
Social class | ||||||
X045 | Social class (subjective) | 285180 | 1 | 5 | 3.32 | 0.989 |
Happy | ||||||
A008 | Feeling of happiness | 493770 | 1 | 4 | 1.95 | 0.737 |
Health | ||||||
A009 | State of health (subjective) | 453510 | 1 | 5 | 2.21 | 0.910 |
Satisfaction | ||||||
A170 | Satisfaction with your life | 499406 | 1 | 10 | 6.73 | 2.404 |
Zero-order correlations between variables taken from WVS/EVS are showed in
Main variable | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. Religious belief | – | ||||||||
2. Trust in government | .075** | – | |||||||
3. Personal control | .017** | .077** | – | ||||||
4. Age | .026** | .005** | -.042** | – | |||||
5. Marital | .045** | .042** | -.020** | .236** | – | ||||
6. Social class | -.028** | .026** | .138** | -.059** | .025** | – | |||
7. Happy | .058** | .121** | .245** | -.089** | .067** | .186** | – | ||
8. Health | -.001 | .069** | .192** | -.311** | -.044** | .178** | .378** | – | |
9. Satisfaction | .010** | .118** | .396** | -.023** | .031** | .224** | .492** | .311** | – |
**
When entered into the HLMs, all control variables showed noticeable independent effects on well-being outcomes. Consistent with past literature, being married is associated with greater happiness, health, and life satisfaction, while older ages showed the opposite effects. Women reported greater happiness and life satisfaction, but lower health. The more important control variable was social class as one’s status in society could have different meanings in different contexts, and thus an important third variable to account for. Therefore, by including social class into the model, we were able to tease out the variance in well-being, religious belief, trust in government, and personal control that is explained by the social class that an individual is ascribed to.
Also, there appear to be links between where people live relatively around the world with their levels of well-being, as evidenced in the differences between different continents. Overall, countries in Australia, North America, and South America reported greater happiness, health and life satisfaction than those in Europe. Compared to countries in Europe, those in Africa reported significantly lower life satisfaction (see
When observed at Level 2, analyses of within-country standardized GDP allowed us to observe whether fluctuation in each country’s economic growth over time would be associated with fluctuations in citizens’ well-being. The findings showed that during the time when a country’s GDP went up (compared to its general average), that country’s citizens also reported higher states of health, happiness, and life satisfaction. As a country’s income inequality rose, citizens’ life satisfaction decreased. Happiness and health did not show significant association with country’s income inequality. We did not find significant interactions of GDP and Gini on those outcomes.
Predictor | Happiness |
Health |
Life satisfaction |
||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ß | ß | ß | |||||||
Level-1 | |||||||||
Age | -.10 | -48.45 | < .001 | -.29 | -144.32 | < .001 | -.05 | -24.64 | < .001 |
Marital status | .21 | 51.57 | < .001 | .08 | 20.76 | < .001 | .12 | 31.01 | < .001 |
Gender | .03 | 8.03 | < .001 | -.10 | -29.56 | < .001 | .03 | 8.69 | < .001 |
Social class | .14 | 73.92 | < .001 | .13 | 69.50 | < .001 | .16 | 87.78 | < .001 |
Religious belief | .07 | 26.16 | < .001 | .00 | 1.67 | .094 | .06 | 24.16 | < .001 |
Trust in government | .07 | 36.33 | < .001 | .04 | 21.75 | < .001 | .07 | 39.51 | < .001 |
Personal control | .16 | 81.28 | < .001 | .11 | 59.12 | < .001 | .29 | 156.16 | < .001 |
Level-2 | |||||||||
GDP | .08 | 3.42 | < .001 | .09 | 5.97 | < .001 | .12 | 6.88 | < .001 |
GINI | -.04 | -1.58 | .115 | -.03 | -1.86 | .065 | -.05 | -2.42 | .016 |
GDP x GINI | .02 | 0.77 | .443 | .02 | 1.52 | .130 | .01 | 0.60 | .553 |
Level-3 | |||||||||
DUM 1 | .08 | 0.93 | .356 | .14 | 0.14 | .056 | -.32 | -4.06 | < .001 |
DUM 2 | .06 | 0.80 | .423 | -.03 | -0.03 | .644 | -.11 | -1.72 | .088 |
DUM 3 | .44 | 2.30 | .023 | .40 | 0.40 | .014 | .33 | 1.90 | .061 |
DUM 4 | .44 | 3.74 | < .001 | .18 | 0.18 | .059 | .35 | 3.35 | .001 |
DUM 5 | .34 | 3.07 | .003 | .11 | 0.11 | .208 | .29 | 2.98 | .004 |
Religious belief, trust in government, and personal control independently predicted greater happiness and life satisfaction. Citizens’ general state of health was also predicted by trust in government and personal control, but not by religious belief (see
Of this research’s main interest was the role of personal control in predicting citizens’ well-being outcomes at different levels of countries’ GDP and Gini. We particularly wanted to test whether personal control would
After the interaction terms were entered into the model, personal control was still positively associated with greater health, more happiness, and higher life satisfaction. Further, the strength of the association between personal control and well-being varied as country’s GDP and Gini fluctuated, and this was evidenced by a significant three-way interaction between personal control, country’s GDP and Gini (see
Predictor | Happiness |
Health |
Life satisfaction |
||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ß | ß | ß | |||||||
Level-1 | |||||||||
Age | -.09 | -45.04 | < .001 | -.29 | -149.10 | < .001 | -.04 | -20.12 | < .001 |
Marital status | .21 | 53.84 | < .001 | .08 | 21.53 | < .001 | .12 | 32.76 | < .001 |
Gender | .05 | 12.55 | < .001 | -.10 | -30.34 | < .001 | .05 | 13.72 | < .001 |
Social class | .15 | 76.31 | < .001 | .13 | 72.04 | < .001 | .16 | 90.99 | < .001 |
Personal control | .16 | 73.12 | < .001 | .11 | 52.43 | < .001 | .29 | 142.68 | < .001 |
Personal control x GDP | .03 | 9.91 | < .001 | .02 | 8.21 | < .001 | .00 | 0.73 | .467 |
Personal control x GINI | .01 | 3.26 | < .001 | .01 | 3.80 | < .001 | .00 | 1.17 | .243 |
Personal control x GDP x GINI | |||||||||
Level-2 | |||||||||
GDP | .08 | 3.64 | < .001 | .10 | 6.39 | < .001 | .12 | 6.79 | < .001 |
GINI | -.03 | -1.31 | .192 | -.02 | -1.15 | .250 | -.04 | -2.17 | .031 |
GDP x GINI | .02 | 0.62 | .541 | .02 | 0.89 | .373 | .01 | 0.54 | .589 |
Level-3 | |||||||||
DUM 1 | .19 | 2.13 | .035 | .12 | 1.69 | .095 | -.23 | -2.86 | .005 |
DUM 2 | .14 | 1.92 | .058 | -.01 | -0.16 | .874 | -.03 | -0.46 | .646 |
DUM 3 | .41 | 2.18 | .032 | .38 | 2.38 | .019 | .30 | 1.76 | .081 |
DUM 4 | .49 | 4.22 | < .001 | .18 | 1.86 | .066 | .39 | 3.80 | < .001 |
DUM 5 | .37 | 3.40 | < .001 | .10 | 1.06 | .292 | .34 | 3.56 | < .001 |
With GDP at 1 standard deviation above a country’s average, if Gini in that year is high, personal control correlates more strongly with happiness, health, and life satisfaction at ßs = .20, .14, .30 (
Put differently, as illustrated in
Generally, the graphs show that citizens experience greater happiness, health, and life satisfaction when country’s GDP is higher. More importantly, to the extent that people experience greater personal control in their life, it reduces the gap in well-being outcomes as created by income inequality when GDP is high and also when GDP is low.
The present paper aimed to test 2 hypotheses: 1) whether personal control remains a significant predictor for well-being above and beyond religious belief and trust in government, and 2) whether maintaining a sense of personal control will hold more importance for well-being in countries with less wealth and where wealth is not distributed equally.
Using data from 104 countries, we found that across all levels of GDP and Gini citizens who experience greater personal control are more likely to be healthy, happy, and have greater life satisfaction. Personal control is a significant predictor independent of religious belief and trust in government. While remaining significant, the link between personal control and well-being becomes stronger or weaker when it is considered at different levels of country’s GDP and Gini.
The important finding about the interaction of personal control and country’s GDP and Gini was that, for both cases when GDP is high or low, increase in personal control is associated with decrease in the well-being gap created by income inequality. More specifically, the links between personal control and well-being outcomes are stronger when GDP is high, and the strongest when income inequality is also high, whereas the strengths of the association when GDP is low are generally weaker and do not differ much for high and low Gini. Perhaps when growing economies allow for more opportunities, those with greater personal control are more likely to take advantage of those opportunities despite the fact that mobility might be challenging due to inequality. This might not be the case for poor economies because of limited opportunities, making it difficult for even those who have more personal control to overcome inequality.
Regardless, we found consistent evidence that across any levels of GDP, personal control yields strong positive associations with health, happiness, and life satisfaction. Further, the associations between personal control and well-being outcomes become stronger when income inequality rises. Aside from the interactions that our research found, personal control is important for benefiting individuals even after we accounted for different levels of economic growth and inequality. This suggests that having personal control is not simply a function of living in wealthy countries or countries where wealth is more equally distributed Although this is not central to this paper, we would like to note that in this study, we found a smaller main effect of Gini on citizens’ well-being outcomes compared to the main effects of GDP. In fact, the main effects of Gini are only notable for life satisfaction item across all multilevel models, which is consistent with the findings reported by
Because the WVS and EVS are lengthy surveys that aim to collect large samples and include many different measures, the use of single-item measures is a common and practical decision. In our study, personal control and well-being outcomes were measured with single items, which posed limitations to assess the reliability and validity of those measures. For example, it would be impossible to determine whether the item of personal control might touch onto other constructs related, but not identical, to personal control, such as self-efficacy (the ability to carry out behaviors that produce desired outcomes;
Despite the above-mentioned limitation, using the WVS and EVS data, we afforded great statistical power to investigate the relationships between religious belief, trust in government, and personal control. Due to the exhausted list of items available on WVS and EVS data base, we took the approach of deciding on those three variables of interest rather than testing all possible drivers of well-being. Religious belief and trust in government were decided because they were the two well-researched protective systems that have been linked to world citizens’ well-being. However, there are many other protective factors that can be studied. For example, previous research has showed that individuals’ identification with a social group can serve as a protective mechanism to bolster the perception of personal control (
An important take-home message from these findings is that, the experience of personal control comes from internal resources, and is not dependent or contingent upon external control-bolstering systems like religion or government. In this research, we demonstrated that the experience of personal control has the strongest positive relations to citizens’ wellness over and above reliance on God and government, regardless of countries’ economic growth or income inequality. Again, this research showed further evidence that the freedom to make decisions and having control over one’s life is a viable psychological resource, and one that people from any walk of life can rely on, even those living in poor conditions where life is difficult.
Anonymized data for this article is freely available on the Open Science Framework (see the
The following Supplementary Materials are available (for access see Index of
Via the OSF repository: Anonymized data for this article
Via the PsychArchives repository: Further results: We reported findings concerning the interactions between Religious belief and Trust in government with GDP and Gini. This helps addressing previous literature suggesting that these two variables could predict better happiness, health, and life satisfaction for those in countries with declining GDP or rising Gini.
The authors have no funding to report.
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
The authors have no support to report.